Jews and Israelis at Columbia University were excluded from student groups, humiliated in classrooms and subjected to verbal abuse when pro-Palestinian protests rocked the campus last year, and their complaints were often downplayed or ignored by school officials and faculty, the university’s task force on anti-Semitism said in a report released Friday.
Citing “serious and widespread” problems uncovered through nearly 500 student testimonies, the faculty task force recommended revamping anti-bias training for students and staff and a revised system for reporting complaints about anti-Semitism.
He said student groups should stop issuing political statements unrelated to their missions, and said Jewish students felt excluded from many clubs and organizations.
The task force also offered a definition of anti-Semitism that included discrimination or exclusion based on “actual or perceived ties to Israel” and “certain double standards applied to Israel.” Those double standards, the report said, include “calls to divest solely from Israel,” something that has been a key demand of pro-Palestinian groups as the death toll in the latest war between Israel and Hamas has soared.
The working group said its definition of antisemitism was intended to be used in training and education, not for disciplinary purposes or to limit freedom of expression.
“These recommendations were developed to preserve the right to protest, protect the right to speak, teach, research, and learn, and combat discrimination and harassment, including antisemitic harassment,” said Antisemitism Working Group co-chairs Ester Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer. “While our report focuses on antisemitism, we hope our recommendations will also strengthen efforts to combat Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and other forms of intolerance.”
The task force issued its report four days before the scheduled start of classes for Columbia’s fall semester.
Interim President Katrina Armstrong said the university has already taken steps to expand training and streamline the handling of harassment complaints in line with the new report’s recommendations.
“This is an opportunity to acknowledge the harm that has been done and commit to making the changes necessary to do better and rededicate ourselves, as university leaders, as individuals and as a community, to our core mission of teaching and research,” Armstrong said in a statement.
In a bulletin posted online, a coalition of student groups that has been demanding that the school divest from Israeli companies and cut academic ties with Israeli institutions said it would continue its protests.
“There may be new students and new classes, but some things remain the same,” the statement attributed to Columbia University Apartheid Divest states. It cites what it says is the university’s “refusal to divest from its genocidal investments” and its “ongoing repression of pro-Palestinian protesters.”
The task force’s report comes two weeks after the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, who faced intense scrutiny for her handling of protests and campus divisions over the war between Israel and Hamas at the Ivy League school.
Pro-Palestinian protesters first set up tent encampments on Columbia’s campus during Shafik’s testimony before Congress in mid-April, where he denounced anti-Semitism but faced criticism for how he had responded to complaints from faculty and students. The school sent police to evict the tents the next day, but the students returned and inspired a wave of similar protests on campuses across the country.
In its report, the task force cited incidents in which Jewish students had been threatened or pushed, or subjected to openly anti-Semitic symbols such as swastikas.
But he also described a broader pattern of Jewish students feeling excluded from classmates who had once been friends.
In one reported case, an Israeli student described feeling forced to quit a school dance team because she did not support her decision to join Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian Apartheid Divest coalition.
“We have heard of artists who hid their support for Israel in order to participate in theater productions and of writers who were fired from publications,” the task force report states. “Jewish students have also abandoned community service activities focused on vulnerable populations in New York because the groups issued statements blaming Israel for the brutal Hamas attacks on October 7.”
The task force said that in many cases, Jewish students decided to leave the groups because of an “uncomfortable” atmosphere, but in some cases they were told to leave.
The report is the second the task force has released in recent months. The first outlined standards for protests. The next report will focus on “academic issues related to exclusion in the classroom and bias in the curriculum,” according to the university.
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