Reclaiming Performativity - ritual and solidarity during the student encampments

This paper explores the role that public performance of ritual played in demonstrations of cross-cultural and interfaith solidarity, especially between antizionist Jewish students and Palestinians, during the 2024 student encampment uprising. Through stories taken from the authors' lived experiences and from direct interviews and conversations with student organizers at schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, University of California Los Angeles, and others, this paper argues that public performance of traditionally private ritual was a profoundly essential solidarity tactic to the success of the student movement, and in many cases actually served to deepen student's connections to their cultural and faith traditions at a moment of profound uncertainty. By so doing, the act of the performance of these rituals became not just a spiritual practice, but a compelling and necessary political tool.