A new report from Columbia University’s antisemitism task force pinpoints a root cause of the Ivy League institution’s hostility toward Israel: its faculty.

The 70-page document, which marks the task force’s fourth and final report on antisemitism at Columbia, examines how anti-Jewish discrimination permeated the “classroom experience at Columbia.” Drawing from testimonies from hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students, the report paints a harrowing picture of the administration’s failure to balance an ideologically skewed academic environment and the faculty’s role in discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students.

Columbia, the report states, “lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.” It notes that many students struggle to find among Columbia’s course offerings an “academic perspective” that “treats Zionism as legitimate” rather than “a perspective that treats it as illegitimate.”

The task force concludes that the academic resources available for Jewish and Israeli subjects at Columbia are “insufficient,” particularly compared to those available for “other parts of the Middle East.”

Anti-Israel activism from professors emerged even in classes completely unrelated to the Middle East. In one introductory astronomy class, the professor created an opening unit entitled “Astronomy in Palestine,” which the syllabus framed as necessary because “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.”

In a large introductory course at Columbia’s School of Public Health, an instructor stated that three Jewish university donors were “laundering blood money” and referred to Israel as “so-called Israel.” The instructor later dismissed those who complained as “a handful of privileged, white students, who have probably never been confronted by a framework that challenges them to think critically about the benefits they derived from the system of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.”

The task force reported hearing similar accounts of professors sharing “harsh condemnations of Israel” in ways that “blindsided Jewish and Israeli students” in courses including “a class on photography, a class on architecture, a class on nonprofit management, a class on film, a music humanities class, and a Spanish class.”

The report also cites several disturbing accounts of instructors singling out Jewish or Israeli students because of their perceived ties to Israel, a practice that the task force notes violates guidance from the Department of Education. In one example, an Israeli student was told by a professor that the student “must know a lot about settler colonialism” before being asked: “How do you feel about that?” Another Israeli student said she was called an “occupier.”

Non-Israeli Jewish students reported being similarly targeted. One Jewish student reported being told, “It’s such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.” Another student who wrote an email to his professor outlining his objections to the instructor’s framing of the Middle East conflict “came to a subsequent class and heard his email, which he’d considered private, read aloud (without his permission) to the class by the teacher, who offered a line-by-line response in front of the other students.”

In a rare case when a visiting professor without an explicitly anti-Zionist perspective came to teach at Columbia, the class was disrupted by anti-Israel protesters who targeted the course “precisely because it was designed to study Zionism, rather than merely to condemn it” and because the professor was Israeli, the report states.

Those protesters handed out fliers to the class with pro-violence slogans like “The enemy will not see tomorrow” and “Burn Zionism to the ground.” One flier included an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David below the line “Crush Zionism.”

In light of these incidents, some students resorted to avoiding identifying themselves as Jewish or Israeli in classes “in order to avoid the possibility of being scapegoated,” the report concludes.

The report highlights concerns voiced by some of Columbia’s Jewish and Israeli students in the two-plus years since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack. At the height of the anti-Israel encampment movement, Columbia’s Jewish Alumni Association determined that a “staff overhaul” was necessary to address the school’s antisemitic climate.

On Tuesday, the same alumni group stated that the issue remains unresolved and noted that multiple faculty members involved in the “egregious” incidents have since been promoted.

“The antisemitic mayhem on campus may have been reined in—but the faculty who supported and encouraged it have not,” it wrote on X.