Columbia University Admits Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism Pervasive on Campus 

Columbia University’s antisemitism task force released its final report on Tuesday, detailing significant cases in which Jewish and Israeli students were singled out, scapegoated or harassed in classrooms, and warning that the university’s academic structure in Middle East studies leaves no real ideological diversity.

The seventy-page document documents student accounts from across departments. It says the “most flagrant” incident was the disruption of a class taught by an Israeli professor at the start of the spring 2025 semester. Activists targeted the course specifically because it approached Zionism as an academic subject rather than condemning it. After those students were disciplined, protesters escalated by occupying a campus building and a library, disrupting additional classes.

Other episodes involved instructors directly confronting Jewish and Israeli students. One Israeli student was asked in front of the class, “How do you feel about settler colonialism?” Another was called an occupier. An IDF veteran said her class presented the army as “an army of murderers,” after which the instructor pointed at her and said she should be counted among them. A Jewish student was told, “It’s such a shame your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.” Several students said they avoided identifying as Jewish or Israeli to avoid being targeted.

The task force cites numerous cases of faculty inserting political messaging into unrelated coursework. An astronomy course opened with a discussion of “genocide” in Gaza. An Arabic class taught the sentence, “The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.” A public health instructor referred to major Jewish donors as “laundering blood money” and later dismissed complaints as coming from “privileged white students.” Some teachers encouraged students to join protests, canceled classes for demonstrations, or held office hours and sessions inside protest encampments where “Zionists” were not welcome.

The report also warns that Columbia has no tenure-line faculty in Middle East history, politics or political economy who are not explicitsfly anti-Zionist, leaving students with no alternative frameworks for studying the region. Some courses included factual inaccuracies, including claims that Theodor Herzl was an antisemite or that Eastern European Jews were not really Jewish.

The task force recommends new safeguards, including preventing classroom disruptions, avoiding the introduction of charged political content unrelated to the course, and setting boundaries on teachers encouraging protest participation. It also opposes academic boycotts of Israeli institutions, a central demand of anti-Israel activists.

Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman said the university is “in a better place today” but acknowledged that “there is more work to do.” The report follows two years of turmoil marked by protests, federal scrutiny and a temporary freeze of $400 million in government funding until the university implemented reforms.