Former CNN star and ex-Meta executive Campbell Brown sparked confusion this week by saying she was going to Israel, where it would be safer for her Jewish children than her native Upper West Side, amid ongoing pro-Palestinian protests against the war in Gaza.
Brown’s husband Dan Senor, the former Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq chief spokesman and Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser, reacted to his wife’s X post with an emoji-filled tweet expressing solidarity with Israel.
While Brown’s tweet (and her husband’s reaction) seemingly suggested they are uprooting her family for a move to Israel, a source familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that the ex-CNN anchor was merely traveling there to celebrate the Jewish high holiday of Passover and is not permanently moving there.
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In recent days, the campus of Columbia University has been rocked by anti-war demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas War, which has resulted in the deaths of over 34,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 75 percent of the Gazan population. The protests led to the arrests of more than a hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators last week, prompting tensions to rise even further as students created an encampment on campus with signs that read “Welcome to the People’s University of Palestine.”
While pro-Palestinian students demand the university divest from Israel and back a ceasefire in Gaza, some Jewish students have claimed that they’ve been the target of antisemitic threats and harassment amid the ongoing protests. Just ahead of Passover, a prominent rabbi at the university urged the school’s Jewish students to “return home as soon as possible” and stay away from campus until the demonstrations have been shut down.
Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, who is under intense fire from conservatives and pro-Israeli activists to shut down the demonstrations amid claims of antisemitism, has responded by suspending dozens of participants and holding classes virtually on Monday. “We need a reset,” she said in a statement, calling it a “crisis.” Meanwhile, solidarity protests have flooded other college campuses across the nation, leading to 45 arrests on the Yale campus on Monday.
As the demonstrations have only grown more fiery, the White House and New York City leaders have denounced any threats made to Jewish students. “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews,” President Joe Biden said over the weekend. “This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”
Amid this backdrop, Brown took to social media on Sunday to claim that the uber-pricey corner of Manhattan where Columbia is located has now become more dangerous for Jewish residents than the center of an escalating regional war in the Middle East that was just attacked by Iran.
“I’m on my way to Israel where my two sons will be safer and feel more welcomed than they would be today on the Upper West Side,” Brown tweeted, punctuated by the hashtag, “#AmYisraelChai,” the Hebrew phrase meaning “The people of Israel live.”
Senor, meanwhile, quickly followed suit by quoting his spouse’s post with a tweet featuring three finger-pointing emojis alongside an Israeli flag and a flexed bicep emoji. Senor has long been an outspoken advocate for the Israeli government, recently co-authoring The Genius of Israel and making the cable news rounds supporting the country’s military response to the Hamas terror attacks on October 7.
The lack of clarity in Brown’s tweet, along with Senor’s promotion of it, led many social-media users to believe that she was outright stating that their family was permanently relocating to Israel.
During a conversation on Monday with a Jewish Columbia student expressing fear over the protests, Fox News anchor Dana Perino even referenced Brown’s tweet. “And I felt terrible for her and wondered about that feeling of being insecure,” Perino stated.
It was Brown’s assertion that Israel was a “safer” place than New York for her children, however, that really came under both criticism and confusion, especially considering that it was just six months ago that Hamas militants invaded Israel and left over 1,200 mostly Jewish citizens dead while taking hundreds more hostage.
“An insane post. Israel right now is safer for Jews than New York, apparently,” Zeteo founder and progressive ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan noted. “People have lost the plot. In this case, a former senior Meta executive and ex CNN anchor who is married to Bush’s former Iraq occupation spokesman.”
Leftist anti-war podcaster Katie Halper, who claimed in 2022 that she was canceled by The Hill’s Rising program for criticizing Israel, snarkily added: “It’s true. Hamas has tunnels under Zabar’s.”
Author and former Jewish Currents editor David Klion also sarcastically noted that “1200 Jews were murdered in Israel 6 months ago but on the UWS your sons might hear a wrecker say ‘go back to Poland’ if they’re really unlucky.”
“This is bananas. In October, Hamas murdered 1,100 Israelis. Last week, Iran launched 170 drones and 150 missiles at Israel,” former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman reacted. “In New York, students are protesting genocide. Some people said anti-Zionist, even anti-semitic, things. And she's convinced herself Israel is safer.”
