Ahead of Columbia President’s Capitol Hill Testimony, Students Demand School Reestablish ‘Trust’ With Jewish Community After Antisemitic Events

Ahead of a Congressional hearing Wednesday that will delve into accusations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Jewish students tell the Sun that members of their school’s leadership need to answer questions about why harassment of Jews has been allowed to occur so frequently and so brazenly, especially since the attack in Israel on October 7. Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, will be among the officials testifying at the hearing, “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” before the the House Education and Workforce Committee.The hearing comes as antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents at Columbia in the past six months have been well-documented in the press. While one student describes the university’s response to the incidents as “the occasional email,” the school has closed down two student groups tied to anti-Israel protests, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. In January, the Sun reported that the university was “failing to crack down on unauthorized pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas student protests that are disrupting its campus,” amid student and faculty concerns about the heated and divisive rhetoric at such events. Since then, the university reports that it is taking a sterner approach. In response to an unauthorized event on campus on March 24, described by the Columbia Spectator as “Resistance 101,” Ms. Shafik said that the school was conducting an investigation and had suspended several students.The event “featured speakers who are known to support terrorism and promote violence,” Ms. Shafik said in a statement, calling the incident “an abhorrent breach of our values.” She added that “actions like this on our campus must have consequences,” and that “it is absolutely unacceptable for any member of this community to promote the use of terror or violence.” Other unauthorized campus events have resulted in discipline for students, the Spectator reports.Ms. Shafik, and her handling of protest events and other incidents, will be under a national spotlight on Wednesday, as the Education and Workforce Committee has set the precedent of being a hotbed for discussions about antisemitism on college campuses.In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece previewing her remarks on Capitol Hill, Ms. Shafik explains that “antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university” and that while her “priority has been the safety and security of our community,” it “leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.”Ms. Shafik adds that October 7 changed the world, and Columbia is not immune from the discord. “It is hard to describe how difficult this has been, especially on a large, diverse urban campus with students from all over the world and a long tradition of political activism,” she says. “Not surprisingly, passions ran deep, demonstrations erupted, feelings were hurt, some members of our community were frightened and many more were concerned,” she continues, arguing that the protests have been mostly peaceful. “It is important to recognize that, by and large, we have not been dealing with two ‘warring camps’ in this debate,” Ms. Shafik writes. “Contrary to the depiction we have seen on social media,” she adds, most of those “protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism.”Yet a 21-year old undergraduate studying financial economics and Jewish thought at the School of General Studies and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Michael Lippman, tells the Sun that he has been verbally and physically harassed in recent months, as have his friends. Mr. Lippman will also be in attendance at Wednesday’s hearing, though not testifying. “It’s been extremely challenging. There have been frequent, frequent, frequent incidents of threats, of protests that … cross the line from free speech to hate speech. There have been a number of people that I’m close with, that I’m friends with, that I know have been attacked, assaulted, spit on,” he said. “I’ve been spit on myself. I’ve been called Judas.”Mr. Lippman is involved with Jewish organizations and causes on campus, including Chabad, Hillel, and Students Supporting Israel. “Everyone is looking over their shoulders at all times,” Mr. Lippman said, comparing his situation to that of the video game “Among Us,” where one player acts as a secret assassin and the rest of the players try to deduce who is the killer. Mr. Lippman says that he wants members of the Education and Workforce Committee to ask just one question of Columbia University’s leadership: “How do you define antisemitism?”“I wouldn’t ask them to try to trick her,” Mr. Lippman said in reference to the university’s president. “I think frankly that the biggest problem I see is that had it been any other group … this would not be allowed to go on if it were any group other than the Jewish people.”Ms. Shafik will be joined in testifying Wednesday by the co-chairwoman and co-chairman of the university’s board, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald. The dean emeritus of Columbia’s law school, David Schizer, will also testify. Another Columbia student, Nick Baum, says he does not want the school’s administration to be punished or made villains by Congress or in the press. Rather, he wants to see a plan of action for how to stop these antisemitic incidents going forward. Mr. Baum who, like Mr. Lippman, is a joint undergraduate student at the Columbia School of General Studies and the Jewish Theological Seminary, is only in his first year at the university. “Our only interaction with the administration,” Mr. Baum says, “has been through the sporadic email.” He says that with her Congressional testimony, Ms. Shafik “will actually be under the circumstances where she has to demonstrate her support for Columbia’s Jewish community.”Mr. Baum says that he no longer feels comfortable wearing a yarmulke or Star of David necklace on campus for fear of being harassed. “I just hope the Columbia administration can reestablish the trust of its Jewish population,” he says. “The administration has failed to keep us safe, has failed to keep us comfortable across a number of circumstances, so ideally if there’s anything I want to see from this testimony, it’s to gain that sense of reassurance.”Mr. Baum is also involved in Chabad and Hillel on campus, and has written pro-Israel articles for the student newspaper. In December, the head of the House Republican conference, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, asked the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology if antisemitic attacks violated their respective schools’ codes of conduct. They all said to some degree that it depended on the context. Shortly after that hearing, the president of Penn, Liz Magill, resigned under pressure. The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, stepped down in January amid criticism of her testimony and an unrelated investigation that uncovered concerns about plagiarism in her published work. Ms. Shafik had been invited to attend the December House committee hearing, but did not, reportedly due to a travel conflict.While noting that Ms. Shafik has already temporarily banned some anti-Israel groups from campus, like Students for Justice in Palestine, Mr. Lippman contends she has been “afraid” to confront anti-Israel and antisemitic students on campus. “I don’t even blame her. When you have such an uncomfortable situation immediately when you take leadership, I think you should be afraid. She has every right to have been,” Mr. Lippman said. “The answer is to confront that fear with courage, and to stand up,” he says. The Columbia administration referred the Sun to Ms. Shafik’s op-ed in response to a request for comment.

Ahead of Columbia President’s Capitol Hill Testimony, Students Demand School Reestablish ‘Trust’ With Jewish Community After Antisemitic Events

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