How a Jewish student at Columbia became an icon of a movement
She started speaking out a few weeks after Oct. 7 and hasn’t stopped since
Photo-illustration by top-center photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for the Anti-Defamation League; bottom-center photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images. Others from social media and screenshots. Collage by Samuel Eli Shepherd via Canva.
By Jodi Rudoren November 22, 2024
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Over the last 13 months, Noa Fay has met Matisyahu, Valerie Jarrett, Tiffany Haddish, the entertainment mogul Scooter Braun and the marketing guru Scott Galloway. She’s chatted on the phone with second gentleman Doug Emhoff, attended a dinner in the White House Rose Garden, spoken at the United Nations and a Senate hearing. She’s appeared on Fox News and CNN, won awards from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, been featured in a documentary and recruited by the United Talent Agency.
Noa Fay is 23 years old. Her whirlwind celebrity is rooted in her experience as a Jewish student at Columbia University in the aftermath of Oct. 7. A few weeks after the attack, she spoke out at a news conference in defense of Israel and against the antisemitism she saw on campus. She has not stopped since.
“I’ve started keeping a little bit of a list because I’ve been meeting some really cool people,” Fay told me when we met this week over Zoom. “There are a lot of students who feel very strongly about this, but there aren’t a lot who feel comfortable speaking to the press. I kind of just see myself as a conduit, a megaphone, but for all of us.”
I’d seen some of Fay’s social media posts and speeches throughout the year, but was particularly taken by her when I attended a screening last week of the new documentary October H8TE. Fay is one of four pro-Israel college student activists profiled in the film, which is directed by Wendy Sachs and also features Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport.
The film, like so much anti-antisemitism work, is rather one-sided, and exaggerates the extent to which anti-Zionist activism traffics in antisemitism. I reached out to Fay because I wanted to know what it was like to have become an icon of this movement — and, especially, how her world had changed since she graduated from Columbia’s Barnard College in May.
Noa Fay delivers remarks after receiving the Sharon Greene Award for Campus Advocacy earlier this year.
Fay was planning to start a master’s degree in international relations at Columbia this fall, but decided to take a semester off to focus on what she described as “advocating for Jewish civil rights.” She originally thought that might involve writing a book about her experiences on campus, but so far it’s been juggling expenses-paid invites to speak at synagogues and schools around the country, and being feted at fancy events like ADL’s “In Concert Against Hate” at the Kennedy Center last week, where she won a Defender of Democracy award.
“Even though it has been a lot, I’ve just been scheduling things myself — I get inquiries and stuff, if I can do it, then I do it,” Fay told me. “It seems to be standard, wherever I am going to speak, the people asking me to go, they cover the airfare, they put me up in a hotel.”
The agency, she added, “would like to build me as a personality of someone who is paid to speak,” but that has not happened yet. “It feels weird to be paid for this,” Fay said. “I was surprised to start thinking about it in that way.”
Fay grew up in the heavily Jewish suburbs of Brookline and Lexington, Massachusetts, the daughter of a surgeon and a former news anchor, with a kosher kitchen, shul on Shabbat and Jewish camp in summer. She and her mother are Black, Jewish, Native American and French, and she embraces all those identities. After high school, Noa wanted to become a lone soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, but her parents nixed that idea, so she spent a gap year in Paris doing a genealogy project.
She attended the Women’s March protesting President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and Black Lives Matter rallies in 2020. “When I was in high school, people thought I was the most liberal person they’d ever met,” Fay said. But because of her support for Israel, “when I went to Barnard, people thought I was Republican, which is crazy.”
Until Oct. 7, Fay said, she did not experience antisemitism at the school (“This was a fringe community, before,” she said of the anti-Zionist activists). She also did not get as involved in Black spaces as she had been in high school because, she said, “it was clear they peddle in antisemitism and certainly anti-Israel sentiment.”
“Just being mixed, in general, creates some tension,” Fay said. “The Black space hasn’t always been super inviting to me.”
She did head the Columbia Jews of Color Caucus; wrote about pop culture for the feminist publication Her Campus; and contributed opinion essays and poetry to The Blue and White, Columbia’s undergraduate magazine, and the Columbia Political Review. She studied abroad at the University of Oslo, volunteered with the pro-Israel group Zioness, and interned at the Knesset.
It was on the Wednesday after Oct. 7, while waiting in line to attend Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Columbia course “Inside the Situation Room,” that Fay was galvanized into action around campus antisemitism. She told me she overheard one student say, “I don’t want to say that all Jews are white supremacist colonial settlers,” and then another interrupt to say, “No, every single one of them is.” Given her racial background, she found this particularly offensive — but also kind of silly.
“I was just sure that there was a miscommunication or lack of understanding,” Fay recalled. “I didn’t think I was going to solve the whole thing. But I thought, at least for my Barnard peers, if people just hear from someone who looks like me …
“As we’ve seen, obviously, that didn’t work at all.”
Fay made her debut as a spokesperson against antisemitism at an Oct. 30 news conference of Columbia students. She was on Fox News that very night. A week later, she spoke at the United Nations, and a week after that, in front of 300,000 people at the pro-Israel March on Washington.
That’s where she met Matisyahu — “very cool; I grew up with his music at summer camp” — as well as numerous members of Congress and the CNN commentator Van Jones, who she has stayed in contact with. “He’s very passionate about using the Black-Jewish alliance as a way to fix this,” Fay said, “which I totally agree with.”
I asked Fay if she ever worried that Jewish groups were particularly interested in promoting her because she defies stereotypes including that of the “white settler colonialist.”
“I think about it semi-frequently,” she said. When organizers of the Washington march were reviewing her speech drafts, Fay said, “it was clear they wanted me to emphasize that more” and “it was coming off as a bit of tokenization.”
“I was clear with them, this is something that I will share in my own way and my own time,” she told me. “I don’t bring up my racial background or any identity of mine if I don’t want to.”
“There are a lot of students who feel very strongly about this, but there aren’t a lot who feel comfortable speaking to the press. I kind of just see myself as a conduit, a megaphone.”Noa FayBarnard Class of 2024
I also asked whether she had ever felt unsafe — as opposed to uncomfortable — on campus because of her Jewishness. She told me about a friend who had a Magen David pendant ripped from her neck while walking down the street. She also recalled walking to Chabad on Passover, wearing a yarmulke and a hostage dog-tag necklace, and “people were really looking at me like I was the scum of the Earth.”
Fay was a resident adviser last year, and the location of her dorm room was posted on Sidechat, Columbia’s anonymous social-media sphere. She told me her bulletin boards and whiteboards “were vandalized consistently” and “people were banging on my door in the middle of the night.”
Friends told her to stay somewhere else for a few days. But “by that time, I was honestly a little bit delusional,” Fay said. “I did start to get into a place of, like, well, this is just effing ridiculous, and I’m not intimidated by this.”
Finally, I asked Fay if she’d lost any friends over the war. She paused, then said: “I basically don’t have non-Jewish friends at school.”
“I learned in high school to screen ahead of time,” she continued. “The Israel thing is a deal-breaker issue for me. If you cannot say for yourself, ‘Yes, I understand that Israel needs to exist and I support the Jewish people having a state of their own — if someone can’t say those fundamentals, that’s a problem for me.”
Of course, many Jewish students at Columbia would not meet those criteria.
“The first friend I had at Barnard, she’s an American-Israeli, and she ended up in one of the encampments — I was shocked,” Fay told me. “I told her pretty immediately, I am not hostile, I value our friendship, I want to hear what you’re thinking, I want to stay friends.
“We did speak about it, and things were fine, but since we’ve graduated … she’s friends with people who are saying things like ‘Israel is committing genocide,’” Fay continued. “She doesn’t really talk to me any more.”
This, of course, made me terribly sad.
I’d been relieved that Fay’s approach to the conflict seemed more nuanced than the strident film where she was featured and many of the histrionic groups promoting her. I’d especially appreciated her honest matter-of-factness about her trajectory and avoidance of PR talking points. She is smart, poised, thoughtful and articulate.
And if she and Jewish friends on the other side can’t keep having conversations, we’re doomed.
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