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THE TROUBLING LINES THAT COLUMBIA IS DRAWING  
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Eyal Press
August 18, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ By adopting an overly broad and controversial definition of
antisemitism, the university is putting both academic freedom and its
Jewish students at risk. _

A man hoists an Israeli flag at Columbia University, in New York.,
Jeenah Moon / NYT / Redux

 

In 2005, a “working definition” of antisemitism was posted on the
website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, a
research institute founded by the European Union. It described
antisemitism, somewhat vaguely, as “a certain perception of Jews,
which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Even less precise
were the eleven examples of antisemitism that followed, many of which
focussed on Israel. Among them was “denying the Jewish people their
right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a
State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “applying double
standards by requiring of behavior not expected or demanded of any
other democratic nation.”

In the two decades since it was introduced, this definition has not
been endorsed by most leading scholars of antisemitism, in part
because critics believe that it blurs the line between hostility
toward Jews and criticism of Israel. It has been a different story in
the political arena, where the reception of the definition has been
nothing short of astonishing. In 2016, a slightly altered version of
the definition was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization. To date, more
than forty governments have adopted it as well, notwithstanding the
definition’s lack of precision. In his forthcoming book, “On
Antisemitism
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the historian Mark Mazower argues that, to some of the definition’s
promoters, its vagueness has been a virtue rather than a drawback. The
definition emerged at a time when campaigning against antisemitism was
becoming a growing priority—and a highly effective fund-raising
tool—for organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the
Anti-Defamation League. What increasingly concerned these groups was
not classical antisemitism, which, by the end of the Cold War,
appeared to be declining, but the “new antisemitism,” which
manifested in what they saw as the demonization of Israel.

This development would have shocked Israel’s founders, many of whom
assumed that the creation of a Jewish state would eliminate
antisemitism. (“You still at it, saving Jews from the
antisemites?” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister,
asked one of the A.D.L.’s leaders in 1970, implying that the problem
could be solved if Jews simply made _aliyah_.) It also would have
startled the organizers of an A.D.L. conference on antisemitism that
took place in 1962 in New York, where the participants discussed
right-wing extremism but made no mention of Israel. By the early
two-thousands, the politics had changed, as major American Jewish
groups joined forces with advocates such as Natan Sharansky, an
Israeli minister who was appointed chairman of an Israeli body called
the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, to mobilize around
the issue—and to redraw the ideological battle lines. As Mazower
observes in his book, antisemitism was severed from the broader
struggle against other forms of discrimination and shifted from being
associated with the political right to being linked to the left, where
many of Israel’s most vocal critics could be found. For those
looking to silence such critics, Mazower suggests, an expansive
definition of antisemitism which could be applied to a broad range of
expression was particularly useful.

No politician has made greater use of the I.H.R.A. definition of
antisemitism than President Donald Trump. In 2019, Trump signed an
executive order specifying that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
bars “forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism” and
advising federal agencies to consider the I.H.R.A. definition when
investigating complaints. More recently, the Trump Administration has
threatened
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sixty universities with “potential enforcement actions” if they
fail to protect Jewish students from discrimination. On July 23rd,
Columbia reached a settlement with the Administration which required
it to pay the government two hundred million dollars over the next
three years and to broaden its “commitment to combating
antisemitism,” in exchange for having hundreds of millions of
dollars in federal grants reinstated. Ten days earlier, Columbia had
incorporated the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism into both its
anti-discrimination policies and the work of its Office of
Institutional Equity.

 
Mazower has taught at Columbia since 2004. Like most faculty members,
he was not consulted about the decision to adopt the I.H.R.A.
definition. Neither was Kenneth Stern—its lead author. In recent
years, Stern, a lawyer who worked from 1989 to 2014 as an expert on
antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, has expressed dismay
that pro-Israel groups have invoked the definition to threaten
universities with lawsuits for offering courses and programs on
subjects such as Israel’s occupation, which he regards as a
violation of academic freedom and a gross distortion of the
definition’s purpose. In “The Conflict Over the Conflict
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a book about how the debate around Israel-Palestine is playing out in
higher education, he maintains that the definition was originally
created to help data collectors gather statistics on antisemitism, and
that its use to suppress political speech “poses one of the most
significant threats to the campus today.”
When demonstrations against the war in Gaza began to roil college
campuses two years ago, numerous universities invited Stern to advise
them on how to navigate the turmoil. One of these schools was
Columbia, where he gave a presentation on the subject in Butler
Library. At the talk, Stern told me recently, he emphasized the
importance of safeguarding academic freedom. “I said, If you are
going to make a decision, ask yourself this one question,” he
recalled. “Will it help academic freedom, will it harm academic
freedom, or will it be neutral? If it helps, it will get buy-in from
faculty. If it harms academic freedom, it will backfire.” When Stern
learned about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump Administration,
he concluded that his advice had gone unheeded. “I see nothing good
coming out of this,” he said of the agreement, which he believes
will make it impossible “for faculty to do their jobs.”

Columbia has insisted that the settlement was crafted “to protect
the values that define us.” In a recent _article_
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in the _Columbia Spectator_, Gil Eyal and Peter Bearman, two
sociologists at the university, disagree, noting that scholars doing
comparative research on genocide could find themselves accused of
antisemitism for including the case of Israel’s current campaign in
Gaza. Under the I.H.R.A. definition, “drawing comparisons of
contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is considered
antisemitic. Without drawing such comparisons, it will be difficult
even to discuss whether the war in Gaza constitutes genocide, they
noted. A few days before their article’s publication, Rashid
Khalidi, the author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
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and a professor emeritus of modern Arab studies, published an open
_letter_
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in _The Guardian_ addressed to Columbia’s acting president, Claire
Shipman, in which he announced that he would not be teaching a lecture
course on the Middle East this fall because of the school’s adoption
of the I.H.R.A. definition. “A simple description of the
discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law – which
states that only the Jewish people have the right of
self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian
– or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of
Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years
would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the I.H.R.A.
definition,” Khalidi wrote. Marianne Hirsch, a genocide scholar and
the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has _indicated_
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that she is considering no longer teaching because she is unsure if
she will be able to continue to assign texts such as “Eichmann in
Jerusalem [[link removed]],” a book by Hannah
Arendt—a critic of Zionism and arguably the most influential Jewish
thinker of the twentieth century.

The text of the I.H.R.A. definition does contain some qualifications,
emphasizing that the examples it lists “could, taking into account
the overall context” qualify as antisemitism, as opposed to
asserting that they automatically do. But, in a climate of growing
fear and suspicion, how comforted are faculty members likely to feel
by this, particularly as they watch university leaders cede their
autonomy to an Administration that has tried to deport students for
writing op-eds critical of Israel and has made its disdain for
academic freedom clear? Under its settlement with the Trump
Administration, Columbia agreed to provide the government with access
to all “staff, employees, facilities, documents and data relating to
the Agreement.” It also granted authority to an outside monitor to
review whether the university was adhering to the agreement’s terms,
and permitted “any member of the Columbia community” to report
“allegations of noncompliance.” In an assessment of these
provisions published on August 4th, the leaders of Columbia’s Knight
First Amendment Institute, which was established to safeguard free
expression in the digital age, warned that their cumulative effect
will be to establish a “regime of intense surveillance” that
“will inevitably deter faculty and students in their exercise of
constitutionally protected freedoms.” Jameel Jaffer, the executive
director of the institute, told me, “The settlement effectively
requires Columbia to shut down speech that is indisputably
constitutionally protected.” He added that he regards the use of the
I.H.R.A. definition as “one piece of a larger effort to suppress
speech critical of Israel that fits into an even larger effort to
subjugate the universities.”

The ability to threaten and extort universities is surely one of the
reasons that the Trump Administration has embraced the I.H.R.A.
definition. Another is the definition’s usefulness in framing
antisemitism as primarily a problem of the left, flourishing on
campuses teeming with young people who have been indoctrinated by
radical Israel-hating professors. You would never know from reading
the headlines in recent months that the evidence does not support this
picture. In 2022, the political scientists Eitan Hersh and Laura
Royden published a study of antisemitic attitudes across the
ideological spectrum. They found evidence that anti-Jewish prejudice
is indeed more prevalent among young Americans than it is among older
adults. But they also found that antisemitic beliefs—that Jews are
disloyal, that they have too much power—are “far more common” on
the right than on the left. At one point in “On Antisemitism,”
Mazower cites this study and others that have reached similar
conclusions. Such work underscores the need to elucidate the
relationship between bigotry towards Jews and political speech about
Israel “with discrimination, care, and impartiality,” he argues,
and to avoid being fooled by politicians “who wish to use
antisemitism to clobber dissent and assail civil liberties.” This
is, of course, the real goal of the Trump Administration, which has
not only failed to denounce antisemitism on the right but actively
stoked it. In Munich earlier this year, Vice-President J. D. Vance
alarmed many German Jews by meeting with the leader of the far-right
party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and chiding European leaders for
shunning the group. Trump has referred to the white supremacists who,
in 2017, chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville,
Virginia, as “very fine people,” and has dined with Holocaust
deniers at Mar-a-Lago.

The flagrant hypocrisy may not matter to those who believe that
criticism of Zionism and Israel too often masks antisemitism and that
the safety of Jewish students on college campuses is at stake. This is
the reason that organizations such as the A.D.L. and figures such as
Deborah Lipstadt, a historian who served as the State Department’s
special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism under former
President Joe Biden, have praised the Trump Administration’s
crackdown on universities. But will this approach enhance the safety
of Jewish students? It could well have the opposite effect, Stern
fears, not least by creating the perception that Jews are accorded
special privileges. Even as the Administration has threatened to cut
off funding to schools that designate “safe spaces” for students
of a specific race or ethnicity—part of Trump’s assault on
diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—it is mandating that they
bolster protections for Jewish students. The settlement with Columbia,
for example, includes a provision requiring the school to assign
someone to liaise with Jewish students about antisemitism and make
recommendations to university leaders “to further support Jewish
life and the wellbeing of Jewish students.” A similar pattern played
out in the Administration’s recent settlement with Brown University,
prompting Arno Rosenfeld, a reporter at _The Forward_, to publish a
_story_
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titled, “How Trump is Banning DEI at Universities – Except for
Jews.”

The curtailment of academic freedom, the deportation of foreign
students, the banning of protests: all of this is being done under the
pretext of protecting Jews, who alone are entitled to protections that
other groups apparently don’t merit. It is hard to imagine a more
effective way to breed anti-Jewish animus. And there is another
danger, one the historian Tony Judt identified in an essay
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published nearly two decades ago, around the time when the I.H.R.A.
definition first appeared. “The habit of tarring any foreign
criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism,” Judt observed,
reinforced the idea that if you didn’t like something the Israeli
government was doing—violating international law, building illegal
settlements—it was not because of your values or your politics but
because “you don’t like Jews.” Constantly affirming this
conception risked turning it into “a self-fulfilling assertion,”
transforming the “Israeli occupation” into a “Jewish
occupation” and thus encouraging others “to look upon Jews
everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel’s misbehavior.”
There are, in fact, plenty of Jews who have come to view the Zionism
of Israel’s current right-wing government as a racist endeavor, and
who criticize Israel in ways that might run afoul of the I.H.R.A.
definition, as evidenced by the large number of Jewish students who
have participated in the protests against the Gaza war at schools such
as Columbia. To equate the expression of such views with antisemitism
is not only wrong; as Judt warned, it also risks putting Jewish
students in greater danger. ♦

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Eyal Press [[link removed]] has
been writing for _The New Yorker_ since 2014 and became a contributing
writer in 2023. He is a Puffin Foundation Fellow at the Type Media
Center.

 

 

 
 
 

 

* Israel; Columbia; Anti-Semitism; Palestine; Free Speech;
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