Itemoids

David

‘What About Six Years of Friendship and Fighting Together?’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › trump-travel-ban-afghanistan › 682066

Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face.  

As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.”

As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.”

On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them.

[David A. Graham: Biden’s ‘America First’ policy on Afghanistan]

“All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn Van Diver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of  organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.   

Van Diver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to Van Diver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump.

Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.”

One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2023, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.”

[George Packer: The betrayal]

Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.”

When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”

Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › columbia-antisemitism-israel-palestine-trump › 682054

This story seems to be about:

In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.”

Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society, addresses students at Columbia University in May 1968. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

And in an attempt to suppress political views it dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents to search two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fled to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus, and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration ostensibly wants to protect.

Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency.

On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia, such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students  on campus, would be universally regarded as unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it.

The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.

To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution.

Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish life. I became friends with red-diaper babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home in my identity.

I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended for his role; I was put on probation.

Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me.

Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.)

Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences: 13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12 admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away Star of David necklaces and hiding kippot under caps to avoid provoking the ire of fellow students.

To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions, but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction, have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country, called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea never hatched.)

In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints credible.)

Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its investigation, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote. Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned. After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned.

A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.

CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.

When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority country.

According to the task force, complaining about the alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote, “Zionists aren’t invited.”

I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbia way.

Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative arm.

During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism.

Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism, was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had convincingly illustrated how racism infected the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset.

To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled with Said protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian rallies.

Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because they were being massacred.

Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,” for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.”

Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility.

In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.”

In response, Massad denied ever meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia, viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia.

If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia, I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator published lab notes for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that instructed students: “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. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis.

This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion.

In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered “blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled “Architecture Against Apartheid.”

By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly.

Pro-Palestinian protesters march around Columbia in April 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

In September, the task force presented its findings to Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty, administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school.

No other university has a governance structure quite like Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two members of the rules committee were allegedly part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university. But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted.

Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures. And it acted swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom.

But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building, which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s library.

In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a demonstrator marching up Broadway punched a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a Palestinian girl, protesters filled the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement. Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of feces.

All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its sights obsessively locked on Israel.

That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought criticisms of Israel flourish.

The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.