A recent poll by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) reported that one in five British university students would refuse to share a house with a Jewish student. Half have witnessed the glorification of Hamas and Hezbollah on campus. Nearly half have seen the October 7 massacre, the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, openly justified. This is the documented reality of Jewish life at 170 universities across the United Kingdom in 2026.
The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) released its landmark Time for Change report this week, based on a poll of 1,000 students conducted by JL Partners between January 26 and February 4, 2026. The findings are a damning indictment of the failure of British higher education to protect its Jewish students, and a warning to the Jewish world about where institutional indifference leads.
Twenty-three percent of students polled have personally witnessed behavior targeting Jewish students because of their religion or ethnicity. Among students who regularly see Israel-Palestine protests on campus, nearly four in ten, 39 percent, have witnessed the frequent harassment of Jewish students. The report contains direct testimonies from Jewish students at universities including Oxford, UCL, Bristol, Glasgow, and Leeds, describing physical assault, social ostracization, and sustained intimidation.
The glorification of designated terrorist organizations has become widespread and even routine at British universities. Forty-nine percent of students have heard chants or slogans glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah, or other proscribed groups. Forty-seven percent have seen the October 7 attacks justified. Eighty-two percent of students agree that calls to “Globalize the intifada“, the Arabic word for “uprising,” used to describe campaigns of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians, constitute antisemitism. The students’ claim indicates that University administrators have simply chosen not to act on the visible threat to Jewish students.
UJS President Louis Danker put it plainly: “This report demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is not isolated, but normalised. No Jewish student should have to face social ostracisation, abusive language, or physical violence. There is a right to protest, but not to harass.”
The report, co-supported by Baroness Luciana Berger and Lord Daniel Finkelstein, lays out six concrete recommendations: accountability mechanisms for how universities handle hate crimes, better governance of students’ unions, a formal investigation into extremist student groups, and stepped-up coordination between government, universities, and police. UJS is emphatic that these measures are designed to ensure that harassment, intimidation, and the glorification of terrorism carry actual consequences.
What the UJS report documents is the normalization phase in real time, on campuses that position themselves as bastions of tolerance and intellectual freedom. Sixty-nine percent of students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, disapprove of protests that disrupt their learning. The silent majority is there. What is missing is leadership willing to act on what it sees.
