by Rashid Khalidi

Dear Acting President Shipman,

I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.

Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.

Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.

The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings. However, 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 IHRA definition of antisemitism.

It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination – which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide. Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.

You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism. It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.

The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.

I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course – as many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades – of the chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall. Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

– Rashid Khalidi

• Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times

Opinion by Michelle Goldberg, printed in The New York Times

on April 28, 2025

About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights. This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into American politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by the Islamist Omar Mateen. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said. A month later he unveiled his proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants, which would exclude anyone who failed to “embrace a tolerant American society.”

It should have been clear at the time that Trump’s putative concern for the safety of sexual minorities was simply a convenient wedge to try to divide the Democratic coalition. During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections. Last year he used a growing backlash to trans rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “L.G.B.T.” in it.

Trump’s treatment of L.G.B.T. people should have been a lesson to anyone tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously, when it is screamingly obvious that it’s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions. Trump and his allies, after all, have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree. Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X. (My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, once said the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank. Just last month Leo Terrell, the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force, shared a social media post by a prominent neo-Nazi gloating that Trump had the power to take away Senator Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card.” Trump himself, of course, dined with the Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Yet I’ve been astonished to learn that some people believe that when the administration attacks academia for its purported antisemitism, it’s acting in good faith. Speaking on CNBC last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, cheered Trump’s attempt to exercise political control over Harvard, saying, “It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in.” In a shocking interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism under Joe Biden, praised Trump’s assaults on academia and its attempts to deport some pro-Palestinian activists. While in some cases she thinks the administration has gone overboard, she suggested that those who don’t give the president credit for standing up for Jews suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.”

It seems to me that there’s another sort of derangement at play here, rooted in the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism. There have certainly been incidents of crude anti-Jewish bigotry in the protests that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But too many backers of Israel can’t seem to imagine a reason besides antisemitic animus for impassioned opposition to Israel’s merciless war on Gaza. This leads them to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and, in turn, to rationalize away Trump’s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive redoubts.

As I write this, Israel has been blocking food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza for more than 50 days. The U.N. World Food Program has delivered its last stocks of food to Gaza’s soup kitchens, which will shortly run out of supplies. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” Secretary General António Guterres said this month. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”

There are a couple of ways to interpret his words. One is that they’re true. The other is that, as a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign minister said, Guterres is “spreading slander against Israel,” just like all the protesters, many of them Jewish, now being punished at the administration’s behest. In this view, escalating opposition to Israel can be understood only as the product of a kind of antisemitic conspiracy, one so vast and entrenched that extreme measures might be needed to thwart it. Many Jews, said Lipstadt, “disappointed by how universities have behaved since Oct. 7,” are relieved to see “a strong — to use Passover terminology — a strong hand being used.” In the Exodus narrative, the “strong hand” belongs to God. In Lipstadt’s analogy, then, Trump is an agent of the divine.

It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking. But even Jews who continue to delight in Trump’s animosity toward the Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they’re making. In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads, gutter antisemitism is often considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging. Holocaust denial has started cropping up on major podcasts like Tucker Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s. A decade ago, it served Trump to align himself with gay rights; now his administration either bans or discourages the mere use of the word “gay” or the abbreviation “L.G.B.T.” I’m not sure why anyone, let alone a scholar of the Holocaust, thinks Jews will fare better.

The irony of the exploitation of Jewish fear

By Daniel Weiner
Special to The Seattle Times

God created the world with the words, “Let there be light.” And we Jews haven’t stopped reading, writing and talking ever since. And so, the study and creative interpretation of texts, and the serious debate over the meaning of words, have been essential to Jewish morality and behavior. The sanctity of speech and centrality of education have sustained the Jewish people through millennia of trial and tumult. And the freedoms associated with words and learning have come to define our humanity and to reflect the spark of God within us.

For the last few centuries, Jews have flourished in the acceptance and prosperity afforded by liberal democracy. And the hallmarks of that value system emerged from a vigilant defense of the rights to speak, to learn, to teach and to believe. And so, with the current rise of a new brand of American authoritarianism, unprecedented attacks on these civil liberties pose unique threats to Jews as citizens of this nation and as members of a faith community.

In the few years before Oct. 7, antisemitism was a mutating and metastasizing menace that percolated through the fissures of our culture at a time of increased tribalism and polarization. Since Oct. 7, a generation of Jews who have only known relative quiet and acceptance were shocked out of complacency into a state of hypervigilance and justified concern. But those genuine fears are being manipulated for a troubling agenda.

The attempted deportation of student-activist Mahmoud Khalil without due process, and the embargoing of $400 million in federal funds against Columbia University for its failures, are a canary-in-the-coal mine moment for lovers of liberty. It is clear that Khalil’s activism was a noxious attack on the state of Israel that most likely crossed the line into antisemitism. And it is equally clear that among the many universities that failed to protect Jews after Oct. 7, Columbia was negligent to the point of institutional malpractice.

But the current attacks on Khalil and Columbia strike at the heart of the democratic system that has sustained American Jews for centuries. Speech and opinions alone cannot be punished without careening down the slippery slope of censorship. And a haphazard cutting off of government funding to universities will most likely eviscerate the least ideologically driven science departments — the engines of our medical research — while little affecting the crisis within the humanities.

But the bitterest irony is the way this assault on civil rights has been justified in the name of fighting antisemitism. Jewish fear is being exploited and leveraged to undermine the Constitution and the rule of law. And too many Jews are willing to sacrifice systematic freedoms for a fleeting sense of momentary comfort. This cloaking of authoritarianism in the guise of religious freedom is dividing the Jewish community and alienating it from the larger society in which we live. If the abuse of accusations of racism and transphobia are the cudgels of the illiberal left in imposing its ideological purity, the same is true with the misuse of claims of antisemitism from the right.