Dozens of Yale Students Arrested During Campus Protests

By Monday afternoon, more than 1,500 Yale alumni, students and parents had signed a letter supporting the demonstrators. It called for donations to the university to be withheld until the administration commits to divesting from companies helping to supply weapons to Israel.

“While Yale students put their bodies on the line to stand in solidarity with Gaza, the least we can do as alumni is pledge our support for their cause and urge Yale to accept its students’ demands,” wrote Ryan Gittler-Muñiz, a Jewish alumnus who signed the letter.

The Yale protests have largely been peaceful, but one student, Sahar Tartak, 20, said that she had been taunted by demonstrators on Saturday night, and that one of them had poked her in the eye with a Palestinian flag. She went to the hospital to seek treatment.

In recent months, Ms. Tartak, who describes herself as a “visibly observant Jew,” has been critical of pro-Palestinian activists at Yale on social media and in a column for The Wall Street Journal. The campus demonstrators, she said on Monday, were “creating spaces that are conducive to violence against Jewish students.”

Leaders of the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale sent a letter to the campus’s Jewish community Sunday night voicing concern about the “divisive” moment. The letter, signed by the center’s executive director, Uri Cohen, and Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, said there had also been “credible firsthand accounts” on Sunday “that respected Muslim members of the Yale community, and their sacred symbols, were treated with disrespect.”

“This is precisely the type and degree of conflict so many of us have worked so hard, for so many months, to prevent,” the letter said.

Erin Nolan contributed reporting from New Haven.