As a Jew, even as a non-observant Jew, I have been subject to antisemitic slurs and comments my entire life.
It hasn’t made me uncomfortable.
It has only served to make the fight for social justice even more personal.
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The Big Lie is that Jews are not safe on Columbia’s campus or on other university campuses across the country that are witnessing non-violent protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Palestine.
Nowhere do I feel more comfortable than when I march with my Palestinian sisters and brothers in the streets of Chicago calling for a ceasefire and and end to funding Israel.
Yesterday Speaker of the House and Christian nationalist Mike Johnson appeared before news reporters (to the boos of Columbia students) and called for the National Guard to be brought on campus.
If that were to happen, no student, Jew, Gentile or neither, can feel or will be safe.
For me and those of my generation, even the suggestion of bringing soldiers on to campus brings back the memories of Kent State and Jackson State where students who were protesting (and those who were not) were gunned down.
The National Guard at Kent State were ordered to shoot.
When the shooting stopped Allison Krause 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died on the scene, while William Knox Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital shortly afterward.
We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.
Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of “woke indoctrination.” Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions.
The prospect of Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of congress with a history of espousing white nationalist politics, calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater.
In the face of these coordinated attacks on higher education, universities must insist on their freedom to research and teach inconvenient truths. This includes historical injustices and the contemporary structures that perpetuate them, regardless of whether these facts are politically inexpedient for certain interest groups.
To be sure, antisemitism is a grave concern that should be scrutinized alongside racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. These hateful ideologies exist everywhere and we would be ignorant to believe that they don’t exist at Columbia. When antisemitism rears its head, it should be swiftly denounced, and its perpetrators held to account. However, it is absurd to claim that antisemitism—“discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” according to the Jerusalem Declaration’s definition—is rampant on Columbia’s campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.
Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understanding—and disingenuous misrepresentation—of Jewish history, identity, and politics. It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israel’s status as a Jewish nation-state. It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews who work, study, and live on our campus.
The political passions that arise from conflict in the Middle East may deeply unsettle students, faculty, and staff with opposing views. But feeling uncomfortable is not the same thing as being threatened or discriminated against. Free expression, which is fundamental to both academic inquiry and democracy, necessarily entails exposure to views that may be deeply disconcerting. We can support students who feel real and valid discomfort toward protests advocating for Palestinian liberation while also stating clearly and firmly that this discomfort is not an issue of safety.
As faculty, we dedicate ourselves and our classrooms to keeping every student safe from real harm, harassment, and discrimination. We commit to helping them learn to experience discomfort and even confrontation as part of the process of skill and knowledge acquisition—and to help them realize that ideas we oppose can be contested without being suppressed.
By exacting discipline, inviting police presence, and broadly surveilling its students for minor offenses, the University is betraying its educational mission. It has pursued drastic measures against students, including disciplinary proceedings and probation, for infractions like allegedly attending an unauthorized protest, or moving barricades to drape a flag on a statue. Real harassment and physical intimidation and violence on campus must be confronted seriously and its perpetrators held accountable. At the same time, the University should refrain whenever possible from using discipline and surveillance as means of addressing less serious harms, and should never use punitive measures to address conflicts over ideas and the feelings of discomfort that result. Where the University once embraced and defended students’ political expression, it nowsuppresses and disciplines it.
Columbia’s commitment to free inquiry and robust disagreement is what makes it a world-class institution. Limiting academic freedom when it comes to questions of Israel and Palestine paves the way for limitations on other contested topics, from climate science to the history of slavery. What’s more, students must have the freedom to dissent, to make mistakes, to offend without intent, and to learn to repair harm done if necessary. Free expression is not only crucial to student development and education outside the classroom; the tradition of student protest has also played a vital role in American democracy. Columbia should be proud of having participated in nationwide student organizing that helped secure civil rights and reproductive rights and helped bring an end to the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.
We express our support for the University and for higher education against the attacks likely to be leveled against them at the upcoming congressional hearing. We object to the weaponization of antisemitism. And we advocate for a campus where all students, Jewish, Palestinian, and all others, can learn and thrive in a climate of open, honest inquiry and rigorous debate.
Many members of our University community share our perspective, but they have not yet been heard. Columbia students, staff, alumni, and faculty can sign here to show your support for this letter’s message.
The 23 authors of this letter are Jewish faculty members of Barnard College and Columbia University. This letter derives from a much longer one by these same 23 faculty sent to President Shafik on April 5.
Fred Klonsky in Retirement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
In spite of the arrest of hundreds of students on a number of university campuses, the movement against Israel’s war on Palestinians, and the Biden administration’s support for it, continues to spread.
It makes me proud.
Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik said that the tensions at the university "have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas."
That’s pathetic.
She’s pathetic.
Fred Klonsky in Retirement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
How lame do you have to be to bring up that tired old “outside agitator” baloney?
She must have gone through Columbia University files from 1968 to dust that bull off.
It’s the same with the Anti Defamation League’s attempt to paint these protests as antisemitic.
On the contrary. The campus protests by students and faculty are America’s conscience.
The encampment was erected at Columbia last Wednesday, the same day that University President Shafik was hauled in to testify at a congressional hearing.
Following her appearance in Washington Shafik called in New York police to clear the encampment on Thursday and more than 100 students were arrested and charged with trespassing.
Trespassing on their own university?
Columbia said the students have been suspended.
How do you suspend somebody who is an outsider?
But the protest has continued, with some participants putting up tents on Columbia's green again over the weekend where they remain, joined by thousands of students and members of the faculty.
At Yale cops arrested pro-Palestinian protesters in an encampmentearly Monday.
Students had set up tents on Beinecke Plaza on Friday and protested over the weekend, urging Yale to end any investments in defense companies that do business with Israel.
New Haven police said they had assisted the Yale Police Department with arrests.
About 45 protesters were charged with criminal trespass on their own university.
Yale President Peter Salovey again used the “outside agitator” slur. Salovey said, "Some of the aggressors are believed to be members of the Yale community while others were outsiders.”
Was it “outside agitators” again protesting at NYU.
Arrests were made at NYU after an encampment set up by students grew to hundreds of protesters.
NYU spokesperson John Beckman said barriers were erected on the plaza outside its business school after about 50 protesters began demonstrating there "without notice to the University, and without authorization."
The university "was deeply disturbed," Beckman said in a statement, when "additional protesters, many of whom we believe were not affiliated with NYU, suddenly breached the barriers" to join others already on the plaza.
The arrests included members of the NYU faculty, CNN reported.
Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee said the university's administration has suspended the group.
It was ordered to "cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term" or risk permanent expulsion, The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported.
At MIT students have set up an encampment on the school's campus demanding it cut its research ties with the Israeli military.
Apparently MIT’s protest involved no outsiders or else none were detected.
Shreya Chowdhary, a graduate student, told the Michigan Daily that the encampment their was inspired by the events at other universities across the country.
"It is a national movement that we're participating in to demonstrate that students across the United States are not going to stand for our universities funding genocide and profiteering from genocide," Chowdhary said.
And it seems the movement continues to spread.
It is a national movement in which there are no outsiders.
When I was a kid in high school and was taught about the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment I was led to believe that free speech could only be limited by something like “shouting fire in a crowded theater”.
Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik has added an amendment to the amendment.
“If you are going to chant, it should only be in a certain place, so people who don’t want to hear it are protected from having to hear it,” said Shafik.
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Ironically, this echoes Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis who has been trying to ban the teaching of any history in schools that might make white kids “uncomfortable”.
The notion that protest and speech is only protected so long as it doesn’t make some people uncomfortable is a concept that might make Dr. Martin Luther King or Ghandi shake their heads.
According to Shafik and the Anti Defamation League any criticism of Israel and it’s genocidal war on Palestinians in ‘Gaza and the West Bank is anti-Semitism and should be cancelled as it causes discomfort among Jewish students.
Of course, not only is criticism of Israel and its current war not anti-Semitic, thousands of Jews, particularly young Jews, are a part of the movement opposing U.S. military support of Israel.
When Congresswoman Ilhan Omar asked Columbia president Shafik if she could name one Jewish organization that had been targeted, the only one she could name was Jewish Voice for Peace.
JVP is a leading organization demanding an end to the Israeli war and occupation.
The ADL has cheapened the fight against anti-Semitism by labeling as anti-Semitic actions that are clearly not.
In my own neighborhood on the north west side of Chicago, graffiti calling for “free Palestine” were reported as examples of anti-Semitism without ever saying what the graffiti actually said.
As I write this on Saturday morning the House is expected to pass a $95 billion package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
They might as well be called the forever war bills
Although Speaker Mike Johnson is catching heat from the far right of his Party and may be putting his job on the line, pressure to fund Israel’s war on Palestine, the collapsing Zielinsky government in Ukraine and continuing China provocations will carry the day.
Another bipartisan bill that includes a measure to ban TikTok is aimed at mollifying the Right.
Apparently the Right is consumed with fear of videos of people dancing to Texas Hold ‘Em.
Each of the funding bills for the three nations is expected to pass overwhelmingly. The Senate is expected to take up the legislation as soon as Tuesday and send it to President Biden’s desk.
The legislation includes $60 billion for Kyiv, $26 billion for Israel, $8 billion for the threatening China.
Some are claiming this as a win for bipartisanship.
Not me.
It’s a win for forever wars.
A second bill that some are also calling a win for bipartisanship is the extension of warrantless surveillance and spying.
The bill would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years and massively expand the federal government’s warrantless surveillance power by requiring a wide range of businesses and individuals to cooperate with spying efforts.
Passing these bills may be a win for bipartisanship.
However, in no way are they wins for peace and democracy.