GUEST ROOM | How Hasan Piker’s Words Will Harm Jewish Cornellians

Rabbi Ari Weiss is the CEO of Grinspoon Hillel at Cornell. He can be reached at adw224@cornell.edu. 

Editor's note: This article discusses sexual assault and antisemitic violence.

I remember a Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. The vibrant Jewish community at Cornell was in a state of shock as we gathered at a vigil for the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, 750 of us on Ho Plaza.

We grieved. We recited the Mourner's Kaddish. Then a Hillel student leader told me, “Rabbi Ari, I can't believe it. But there's a resolution being brought to the Student Assembly tomorrow, blaming Israel for Hamas's atrocities of October 7th.”

As a rabbi, I thought of the story of Job, a biblical figure who has misfortune visited upon him through no fault of his own. Very quickly he loses his wealth, his children are killed and he himself is afflicted with illness.

Most of the Book of Job is a dialogue between Job's friends, who seemingly come to comfort him as a mourner but instead go on to accuse him, saying: Your suffering is your fault. Instead of comforting, they deepen his affliction.

Based on this dynamic, the rabbinic tradition derives a prohibition, ona’at devarim, harming people with words. The basic insight is that we do things with words. At our best, our words comfort, cheer, connect us to others. At our worst, words diminish, alienate, harm, incite and lead to violence. 

While the resolution did not leave the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, at the Student Assembly meeting the next day, students attempted to force the resolution back on the docket. While doing so, speaker after speaker blamed Israel, and not Hamas, for the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis. I watched the resolution titled Acknowledging Palestinian Suffering Under Israeli Apartheid, fail. But the gaslighting of Israel raised in the process still stung so many students at Cornell at a moment of deep vulnerability.

That was a harbinger of things to come. Just a few days later, a Cornell professor spoke at a rally in the Ithaca Commons saying that Hamas's attack left him “exhilarated.” At protests on campus in the days after Oct. 7, the speaker's rhetoric portrayed people who care deeply about Israel, (studies show the majority of American Jews do) and Israelis as moral monsters. Mind you, this was before substantial action had been taken in Gaza.  

And now, three years later, Hasan Piker will be speaking on campus. Piker is an influential force in progressive American politics in a moment of anti-establishment sentiment. While his transgressive statements against Americans, women and Jews might be exhilarating to some, so many in and outside of the Jewish community are harmed by his antisemitic and hateful words. He has falsely claimed that the well-documented sexual violence of Oct. 7 did not happen, dismissing the allegations as “rape fantasies;” and he has said that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than the Israeli state; Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the death of Jews, not only Israelis. 

The line between targeting Israelis, Zionists (which to be clear is never justified) and all Jews keeps proving to be porous and unstable. By uplifting Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups who target Jews, Piker’s rhetoric harms Jews as an entire community, not just simply people who hold a political position. Piker made this explicit when he called ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred” and dehumanized a Jewish viewer as a “bloodthirsty pig dog,” all traditional antisemitic tropes. 

Just as Jewish life at Cornell was returning to normal, the harmful rhetoric from after Oct. 7 is repeating, and Jewish students feel ostracized on their own campus.

But if only that were all. Because words do not only harm. Words incite.

We saw how words incite a month after Oct. 7, when a Cornell student posted death threats towards Jewish students. As the District Attorney wrote, the student “threatened to ‘shoot up’ the kosher dining hall, to ‘stab’ and ‘slit the throat’ of any Jewish man he saw, to rape Jewish women and throw them off a cliff, to behead Jewish babies.” Thankfully, that student was arrested and convicted. But, like Piker, by targeting Jews, this student elided the difference between Israelis, Zionist and Jews. Words incite and almost led to violence at Cornell. 

This pattern of attacking Jews for who they are has been playing out nationally and globally since Oct. 7. Whether it is attacking Jewish college students in Berlin on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, a Chanukah celebration in Australia where 15 people were murdered, ramming a vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan, assaulting an identifiably Jewish Cornell alumni in New York’s Upper West Side or one of the record number of antisemitic incidents in 2024: words incite violence. 

Piker's words have the potential to incite violence, too. He has said that if American Jews continue to support Israel, they invite violence upon themselves. 

The University is committed to free speech and Piker will be coming to campus. My ask to the organizations inviting him:

Do you know that Piker’s presence and words will harm your fellow classmates? Do you care that events like this have the potential to incite violence against students who walk the same pathways as you on the same days as you to the same buildings you learn in together? 

I understand that Piker has views that you may want to hear said aloud. Our community's well documented experience over the last three years show that words, though cheap to say, have costs to those who hear them. Piker’s views can be expressed without harming Jewish Cornellians. 

Regardless of what Piker might say on campus, my words for Cornell remain the same: We are proud to be Jews.

Correction, Sept. 24, 8:50 a.m.: Ari Weiss' biography has been updated to accurately reflect his position as CEO of Grinspoon Hillel at Cornell.

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