Shortly after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,000 anti-Israel protesters gathered on campus at the University of California, Berkeley. Those assembled donned keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags, and chanted antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans.
A handful of Jewish students, including Simone Beilin, a senior at the state school who was draped in an Israeli flag, confronted them.
Protesters called her a “terrorist” and tried to force a keffiyeh on her. It got physical, but she stood her ground. “Not as a counter-protest but to send a message,” she told JNS.
“We are here. We’re Zionist. We’re proud, and you can’t scare us away,” she told JNS after she spoke on a panel titled “On the Front Lines” at Club Z’s 2025 National Teen Conference in San Francisco.
Beilin and three other Jewish students—Ami Lipkind, Shaya Keyvanfar and Dan Gotesdyner—and Anan Hasson, who is Druze and whose mother, Sawsan Natur-Hasson, is public diplomacy minister at the Israeli embassy in Washington, spoke on the panel to some 150 teens at the event.
“There’s nothing that can prepare you for thousands of people chanting for your death,” Lipkind told attendees.
Lipkind told JNS that “the Zionist presence at Berkeley is making a difference” and “the campus is used to seeing us.”
But on the panel, he said that apparent positive momentum shouldn’t lead to complacency. “Antisemitism is easy to avoid until it’s too late,” he told attendees. “Antisemitism is a virus.”
Masha Merkulova, founder and executive director of Club Z, told JNS that she is very proud of the student speakers.
“You can plant the seeds. You can pour your heart, but you never know which seeds will grow into beautiful, strong, Jewish children and give you everything that you could have possibly dreamt of,” she said. “These kids are just incredible.”
‘A battle I was prepared for’
Keyvanfar, who grew up in a household with immigrant Jewish parents from Iran, never took Israel for granted, she told JNS. But when the sophomore and senator in the Berkeley student government and a group of her friends heard from a Jewish high school that it was “crazy” to support Israel, she didn’t know how to respond.
“I knew that she was wrong, but I didn’t know why,” she said. “I was offered by one of my friends to join Club Z, and I said, ‘Yes I need to learn.’”
Keyvanfar, an active Zionist on campus, was the sole Jewish senator to vote against a resolution that the Berkeley student government passed boycotting the Jewish state. (The other Jewish senator abstained, she told attendees.)
She managed to convince another senator to vote against it, too. “If you can change one person’s mind, you are making a difference,” she said on the panel.
Gotesdyner, a sophomore at De Anza College, a public community college in Silicon Valley, told attendees that activists should face Jew-hatred head-on or risk it fading into the background.
“When antisemitism isn’t in your face, you can forget your own activism,” he said.
Gotesdyner told JNS that Club Z trained him to fight Jew-hatred on his campus. “I feel like I’m stepping into a battle I was prepared for,” he said.
