Meanwhile, uptown, a psychology professor at Columbia Teachers College and some students head to her office.

As they entered her workspace, they passed a mezuza, a small box containing Hebrew religious texts, affixed to her doorpost.

But the sight that met them next made the professor and her students stop in their tracks.

Anti-Semitic graffiti had been spray-painted on the office walls of Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist and Holocaust scholar at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side of New York. The vandalism included swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur, “Yid,” painted in bright red on the white walls of her office foyer. The outer door had been closed but not locked, one student said.

“I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it,” Midlarsky said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I’m usually not a fearful person, but they got me. I’m afraid.”

Rya Inman/Columbia Daily Spectator

Last month was the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Of course she’s afraid.

Dark times.