By Franklin Foer
Monday, March 17, 2025
In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to
Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If
calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside
Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester,
Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.
Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site
of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even
its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel
demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan
campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans
such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and
“Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by
sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed
Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then
battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of
spiraling chaos, the university canceled
its main commencement ceremony in May.
Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made
the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern
Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives
about his native country’s founding.
But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30
minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces
shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the
seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an
image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.
In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and
taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he
even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck
him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and
gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.
But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera
to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described
Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations
for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of
genocide.”
After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the
room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest,
the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video
of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should
too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class
because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.
***
Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life
has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the
world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad
swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators
could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university
into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership
with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters
attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic
victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.
Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue,
they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including
Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis
of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American
university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community
that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators
tended to choke on their own fears.
Many of the protesters followed university rules
governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal
administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By
failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they
signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors
who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and
even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.
It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam
of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred
the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university
became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the
prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies
control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for
damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of
Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts
and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as
preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching
steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a
plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle
Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.”
And in an attempt to suppress political views it
dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud
Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents
to search
two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, fled
to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s
war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus,
and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish
academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration
ostensibly wants to protect.
Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But
just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does
not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along
the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct
intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole
and accusations of moral deficiency.
On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia,
such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and
bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students on campus, would be universally regarded as
unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of
the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it.
***
The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the
history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when
entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from
Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely
40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the
children of New York’s old knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of
the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.
To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance,
university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern
college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and
a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New
York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota
limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard
Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac
Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on
making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low
Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan
institution.
Only after World War II, when America fought a war
against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended
Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a
Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish
life. I became friends with red-diaper
babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman
who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had
been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they
had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop
on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish
theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish
historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I
felt completely at home in my identity.
I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I
briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon
Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia
wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our
movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended
for his role; I was put on probation.
Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before
the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent
invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended
to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me.
Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses
after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was
especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was
arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who
was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney
found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed
the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.)
Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily
Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences:
13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12
admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away
Star of David necklaces and hiding kippot under caps to avoid provoking the ire
of fellow students.
To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new
president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of
Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions,
but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted
media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own
purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction,
have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik
appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s
anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped
to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a
Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country,
called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea
never hatched.)
In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members
heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent
to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating
incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health
counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had
filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never
heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task
force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints
credible.)
Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations
for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its
investigation, The
Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off
by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A
panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously
photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically
listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed
the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility
for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious
influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote.
Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake
of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned.
After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended
three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned.
A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the
task force published a damning
depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the
report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the
organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116
tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university
mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.
CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it
endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a
Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be
grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD
dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and
apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path
forward,” CUAD said
in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public
statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.
When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to
confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to
look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the
killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority
country.
According to the task force, complaining about the
alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student
being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team
questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the
organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president
of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because
of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an
LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote,
“Zionists aren’t invited.”
I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly
under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many
members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they
are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling
anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some
of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its
report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of
disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately,
that’s not the Columbia way.
***
Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted
and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue
on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution
and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic
celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor
of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation
Organization’s legislative arm.
During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling
cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in
the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on
Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism.
Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism,
was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in
the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed
professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had
convincingly illustrated how racism infected
the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship
paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently
political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset.
To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book
concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including
scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys
fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled with Said
protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they
were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction
about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian
rallies.
Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who
wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious
of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments
provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly
twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was
clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused
the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture
of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because
they were being massacred.
Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother
him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column
he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,”
for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with
the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of
euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s
invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human
toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In
fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.”
Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical
style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called
“Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote
in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of
the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On
the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with
dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility.
In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a
low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together
student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle
Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli
student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor
demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how
another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine
questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.”
In response, Massad denied ever
meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the
green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was
saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the
problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it
would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The
emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia,
viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the
professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and
gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and
gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the
university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting
opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points
of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s
legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia.
***
If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia,
I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator
published
lab notes
for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that
instructed students: “As we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important
to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military
occupation. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the
Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not
Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are
not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big
Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis.
This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over
the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in
disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students
and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is
uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion.
In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who
taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced
Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered
“blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial
determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example
of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years
ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a
class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled
“Architecture Against Apartheid.”
By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe
of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to
their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for
Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their
teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force
that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about
students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation
in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification
from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the
assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked
alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly.
***
In September, the task force presented its findings to
Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty,
administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its
creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session
about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to
attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on
discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody
else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph
Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The
hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how
a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from
acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school.
No other university has a governance structure quite like
Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid
endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to
join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist
bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two
members of the rules committee were allegedly
part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the
quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially
disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters
who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for
their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed
Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until
last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university.
But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted.
***
Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has
its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures.
And it acted
swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into
Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended
another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the
other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant
with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom.
But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s
hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums
and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course
of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending
him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building,
which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college
threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the
protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent,
because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s
library.
In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity
to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And
looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some
ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many
headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses
Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide
Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded
that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a
demonstrator marching up Broadway punched
a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a
Palestinian girl, protesters filled
the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement.
Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren
Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca
Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of
feces.
All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched
an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t
bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a
distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple
through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its
sights obsessively locked on Israel.
That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the
heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious
response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in
his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will
fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most
immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought
criticisms of Israel flourish.
The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling
may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged
there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from
“fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims
of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere,
Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse
on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory
treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its
biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that
it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a
better course.
No comments:
Post a Comment