Columbia University’s Fraught Anti-Semitic History Explains Its Present Crisis

On the morning of April 17, pro-Hamas protesters seized Columbia University. The incident, featuring harassment of Jewish students and a Vietnam-style encampment, culminated in the violent occupation of a campus building and remained at the forefront of American political discourse for nearly three weeks. Months later, three campus administrators were suspended for sending anti-Semitic messages in a group chat, leaving Jewish Americans across the country both perplexed and disturbed. Why was an allegedly open-minded Ivy League university suddenly so hostile to its Jewish population?

As a two-time Columbia alum, I have been personally devastated by the faculty, student, and administrative response to Israel, yet I am not the least bit surprised. Anti-Semitism has been brewing in the academic mind since long before Oct. 7, yet Columbia’s responsibility for the rise of anti-Semitism across American college campuses is seldom discussed.

As an English major at Columbia, I experienced anti-Semitism firsthand in my department. Most notably, I cut ties with my undergraduate thesis adviser, Professor Bruce Robbins, for his radical views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Professor Robbins has claimed that calls for intifada on campus do not qualify as genocidal speech against Jewish students and has pushed extremist rhetoric in his classes on the backgrounds of literary criticism. He has praised Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous endorsement of political violence in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and routinely assigns far-left theorists whose central claim to fame lies in their disdain for the West.

Professor Robbins is no political outlier at Columbia. English professor Jack Halberstam, for instance, joined in on the Pro-Hamas encampment, lecturing students about the failings of their university president, and Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad infamously dubbed the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 “awesome” in an opinion piece. At Columbia, students enrolled in the introductory “History of The Modern Middle East” course receive a biased overview of the region from pro-Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi, who routinely peppers his assertions with a tinge of anti-Semitism. Columbia professors have been endorsing reductive pro-Palestinian viewpoints and alienating Jewish students since well before the attacks of Oct. 7, but why?

One potential answer lies in the work of Columbia professor Edward Said, the father of the postcolonial school of literary theory, who perhaps single-handedly inaugurated the Pro-Palestinian movement among literary scholars and intellectual elites in the 1970s.

Said’s postcolonial theory explains the world by borrowing a concept from postmodernism called binary opposition, which purports that members of “the West” have created an imaginary cultural concept of “the East,” which, in turn, allows the former to subjugate the latter. Said calls this Orientalism, and it is this dichotomy that has allowed the colonial Western man to oppress the Eastern “Other.” Most famously, he identifies a clear application of postcolonial theory to the Israel–Palestine conflict, arguing that the displacement of Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East was a direct result of the establishment of the Israeli state by colonialist powers and Western-style imperialism.

The anti-Semitism I experienced as an English major is thus unsurprising: Columbia’s English department itself is the birthplace of the theory that Israel is an oppressive, colonialist power. Over the next 40 years, postcolonial theory would become mainstream in the American academy, espoused by professors following in Said’s footsteps who now control much of the intellectual discourse surrounding Palestine on campus. It is no wonder that Jewish professors have been targets of anti-Semitic vandalism since long before Oct. 7: the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment among supposedly liberal, free-thinking academics has permeated Columbia’s academic curriculum, influencing campus politics and discourse. When this sort of rhetoric is being fed to Columbia freshmen for breakfast, it is not shocking that now, 20 years after the death of professor Edward Said, Jewish students no longer feel safe on campus.

Columbia might have a fraught history with anti-Semitism, yet we have the power to alter history. As a college counseling professional, I work with many Jewish clients who no longer wish to submit applications to Columbia, yet I see things differently. Without Jewish voices on campus, we only capitulate to the pro-Hamas mob and allow this behavior to continue. Anti-Semitism has always existed, and it will continue to exist unless we encourage more Jewish students to matriculate to elite colleges and fight back. As a Columbia alum, I have been disillusioned, yet I have also found a voice of hope for a better future through the Jewish community. The more Jewish students we have on American college campuses, the faster we can create a better tomorrow for the Jewish people.

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