Rabbi Ari Weiss says Hasan Piker’s upcoming campus appearance will do more than stir debate at Cornell. It will deepen the fear of Jewish Cornellians by amplifying rhetoric he says has already turned the campus into a place where antisemitism can feel socially acceptable.
Weiss is the CEO of Grinspoon Hillel at Cornell, and his warning lands because he has been living with the fallout since the days after Oct. 7, 2023. On Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023, 750 people gathered on Ho Plaza for a vigil after the massacre, and a Hillel student leader told Weiss that a resolution was being brought to the Student Assembly the next day blaming Israel for Hamas’s atrocities of October 7th.
The measure did not leave the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at the Student Assembly meeting the next day, but students tried to force it back onto the docket anyway. Speakers blamed Israel, and not Hamas, for the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis. The resolution titled Acknowledging Palestinian Suffering Under Israeli Apartheid failed, but the language around it helped define what Weiss saw as the campus mood: protests in the days after Oct. 7 portrayed people who care deeply about Israel and Israelis as moral monsters.
That matters now because Piker is not just any speaker being welcomed to campus. Weiss points to a record of comments in which Piker falsely claimed the sexual violence of Oct. 7 did not happen, dismissed the allegations as rape fantasies, said Hamas is a thousand times better than the Israeli state, called ultra-Orthodox Jews inbred and dehumanized a Jewish viewer as a bloodthirsty pig dog. Weiss argues that kind of rhetoric does not stay abstract on a college campus; it lands on students already trying to decide whether they can speak openly about being Jewish without being treated as a target.
There is also a harder contradiction at the center of this fight. Some of the language on campus has been aimed at Israel and Israelis as if they were moral monsters, yet it is also aimed at people who care deeply about Israel, including many American Jews. That is part of why the controversy has persisted well beyond the first wave of outrage after Oct. 7. A Cornell professor later spoke at a rally in the Ithaca Commons and said Hamas’s attack left him exhilarated, underscoring how quickly public rhetoric on and around campus hardened after the assault.
What comes next is less about whether Piker will speak than about what Cornell is willing to do with the anger already in motion. The university now faces a familiar test: whether it treats a campus appearance by someone with a record of attacking Jews and minimizing sexual violence as a routine event, or as another moment that widens the gap between Jewish students and the institution that is supposed to protect them.
