In a new report from Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Task Force, a student described the situation on campus after the October 7 attacks in Israel.
“People you were in class with, people you had drinks with, people you had lunch with, people you had dinner with, the next day they say they hope your whole family dies,” the report said.
The testimony is just one example in a flood of testimonies collected as part of an overall report that included testimony from “hundreds” of Jewish and Israeli students. It led the task force to find what it called “a pattern of behavior toward Jewish and Israeli students that is disturbing and violates the standards of conduct and speech that are central to the values of our university.”
“These student stories are heartbreaking and make it clear that the university has a duty to take action,” the report said.
Students share their experiences
Another example cited by the task force concerned the period immediately after October 7.
“A student who moved into her dormitory in September told us that she had placed a mezuzah on her door, as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding that she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to leave the dormitory,” the report said.
In another instance, “One student described an altercation in which a woman was verbally attacked for holding a sign that said she was both Jewish and anti-Zionist. A Jewish student on the pro-Palestine side of the protests was called ‘Judenrat,’ ‘token Jew,’ ‘self-hating Jew,’ ‘disgrace,’ and more. Another recounted seeing a female student wearing both a Star of David and a keffiyeh being verbally attacked.”
In a classroom example, the report describes the testimony of an Israeli student who previously served in the Israeli army.
In this lesson, the IDF was portrayed as an “army of murderers.” The faculty member allegedly told the student that as a former IDF member, she should also be considered a murderer, the report said.
“Others described being denied membership or forced to leave student groups that were supposedly nonpolitical,” the report said. “One student said they were ‘de facto kicked out’ of student organizations based on the polarizing messages these organizations conveyed, and another said they felt like they had to ‘constantly qualify who we are’ in order to participate in organizations.”
Although Columbia received national attention for the camp-led protests in the spring of 2024, most of the experiences in the report occurred “before the camps were established.”
‘Don’t listen’
The second part of the report focused on the systems and processes through which students can report incidents of discrimination.
“Students consistently reported that both administrators and students did not listen or were quickly dismissed to minimize the opportunity for discussion or argument,” the report said.
For example, “We often heard during the listening sessions that when students pushed back against a claim they believed was anti-Semitic, they were told, ‘That is not our intention and the way it affects you is wrong.’ We heard anecdotes about students saying they did not mean ‘all Jews,’ in an attempt to downplay accusations of anti-Semitic generalizations,” the report said.
In other cases, when students complained about anti-Semitism, some school administrators tried to steer them toward mental health services, the report said. “While mental health services should be available to all who want or need them, administrators should not medicalize a student’s experience of discrimination instead of addressing it,” the report continued.
Based on the experiences of the students who testified and their reported inability to effectively communicate incidents of discrimination to administration, the report concluded that the “university is failing in its basic mission” to create an inclusive atmosphere in which everyone feels “that they are valued as full members of the community, that they truly belong.”
In a statement, interim President Katrina Armstrong said she was grateful for the Anti-Semitism Task Force, writing: “The painful and disturbing incidents of anti-Semitism detailed in this report are completely unacceptable. They are inconsistent with our values and run counter to the principles of open inquiry, tolerance and inclusivity that define us.”
Minouche Shafik, the previous university president who led the campus during the student-reported testimony period, resigned earlier in August, months after protests against the war between Israel and Hamas.
Still more work to do
Professor Ester Fuchs, co-chair of the anti-Semitism task force, told CNN that there were a lot of “strong opinions” about the report’s creation, but that “people have done a lot of work.”
“After reading this report, it becomes difficult to deny reality,” she said.
While the report was prepared by the anti-Semitism task force, Fuchs previously told CNN, “We hope that our recommendations will be relevant and will be used to address all students who feel unsafe or are discriminated against.”
“The president tried to create an Islamophobia task force and couldn’t find faculty to work on it,” she said. “We would have preferred to have an Islamophobia task force next to us doing the work with us, because this is a broader issue,” she added.
In response, a Columbia University official told CNN in June that they were not getting enough support from professors. “There was a will, but not a willingness from those asking,” the official wrote at the time.
However, Rashid Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies, told CNN: “After the administration lost the confidence of most faculty members due to their blatant partisanship, they belatedly tried to create an ‘Islamophobic’ fig leaf to pretend they were ‘balanced.'” The Faculty of Arts and Sciences later voted against a confidence vote in the president by a two-thirds majority.
Khalidi also told CNN that Islamophobia on campus was “a problem” during the past school year, but that the problem was more of an “acute bias by the administration from the beginning of the war against student activism in opposition to the war, activism that probably represented a majority of Columbia students, including many students who were Jewish, as well as students represented by dozens of student organizations.”
The report was the second from Columbia’s anti-Semitism task force. A “later report” is expected to analyze specific challenges in the classroom.
“We are under no illusion that a report from the anti-Semitism task force is enough if you are really asking for broad change,” but “we are not getting away from this table,” Fuchs told CNN on Friday.
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