Media Guidance
for Students
If the media has contacted you, we recommend using this media guide for rules of engagement and recommended messages.
Rules of Engagement
1. You do not need to say yes to an interview. If you don’t want to go on record, refer the reporter to a Hillel or campus professional.
2. If you do want to participate, remember that you represent your community. Speak with respect and care.
3. If you agree to be interviewed, you control the engagement. Agreeing to an interview does not mean you must answer every question or be drawn into anything that makes you uncomfortable. If you get asked a question you don’t want to answer, say you aren’t comfortable or simply answer the question you wish you got asked.
4. If you agree to be interviewed, pick three messages and stick to them. Be real, be vulnerable, be emotional.
Recommended Messages
- Almost every Jewish American student is connected to someone in Israel and directly impacted by loss.
- Israelis our age were at a music festival to celebrate life and were hunted down mercilessly, shot at close range, and taken hostage.
- We are in pain and need support in this moment.
- We need our campus community to show up for us right now.
- We need to know we are safe and that our university will protect us.
- We need our leaders to show solidarity with us as we process this trauma.
- Rallies celebrating horrific atrocities against Jews make us feel further targeted while we are mourning.
- These atrocities committed by Hamas are not acts of “resistance” — they are acts of evil. If you love humanity, the rape of any woman, the kidnapping of any family, the murder of any child, or the killing of any grandmother, is never okay.
- We expect our campus communities to do better.
Thanks for the invite, but….
- The last three weeks have been deeply personal for me and many other Jewish students…the killing of thousands of Jews awakens generational trauma
- We’re still in pain and mourning for the lives that have been lost, and that’s where my emotions still are
- Right now I’m still personally in need of support, not yet ready to provide it
- I care deeply about all the lives impacted — Jews killed in the terrorist attacks by Hamas, the 200 hostages kidnapped and held by Hamas in Gaza, and the Israeli and Palestinian civilians who have died in the aftermath of the attack. I’m still processing all of this trauma privately, and need a little more time before I can grieve publicly.