‘Baffling’: Columbia Students React as President Fails to Describe Campus Protests as Antisemitic

Columbia University president Minouche Shafik, testifying during a Wednesday House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on campus antisemitism, declined to say whether protests featuring antisemitic slogans are antisemitic in themselves.

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) asked Shafik during the hearing whether she had seen anti-Jewish protests on Columbia’s campus, to which the university president responded that she had not.

This line of questioning came after David Schizer, a professor and a co-chairman of the university’s task force on antisemitism, detailed the distinctly antisemitic harassment Jewish Columbia students have faced in his opening remarks and after the committee played a video of Columbia students chanting slogans like “long live the intifada,” “there is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “from New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada.”

Shafik went on to agree with Omar’s assessment that the conflict on campus is between “pro-war and anti-war protesters” rather than one surrounding antisemitism.

While Shafik, Schizer, and the two other witnesses present — board of trustees co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman — all agreed that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s policies, Shafik would not answer Representative Lisa McClain’s (R., Mich.) question about whether chants like “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” are antisemitic.

Upon being asked the same question, Greenwald, Schizer, and Shipman all told McClain that those chants are indeed antisemitic.

Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) — who, at the December hearing featuring the former presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the current president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their schools’ policies — followed up on the exchange in a later round of questioning.

Stefanik, noting that some protests on Columbia’s campus featured chants like “death to Zionists” and utterances of “F— the Jews” and “Jews out,” asked how Shafik could say the protests are not “anti-Jewish.”

Shafik initially responded with a defense of her earlier statement, saying the protests in question were “not labeled as anti-Jewish protest” and therefore were not anti-Jewish despite antisemitic sloganeering, before seemingly amending her testimony and admitting that the protests have been rife with antisemitism.

It was this moment that most caught the attention of several Jewish Columbia students who spoke with National Review.

Yola Ashkenazie, a senior at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College and the president of Columbia’s Chabad chapter, told NR that the anti-Jewish nature of the protests should be apparent to any observer.

“If there is a large majority of students [at a protest] chanting for the complete eradication of Israel and all of the nine million people in it, if there is a large majority of people at a protest saying Zionists are not welcome on this campus, that they don’t want two states but that they want all of it, if they’re calling for an intifada, then — no matter how the protest is advertised — it is wildly anti-Jewish,” Ashkenazie said, adding that she feels “frightened and unwelcome on campus” as a result of these rallies.

Noa Fay, another Barnard senior concurrently pursuing a master’s degree at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, said it is “very obvious” that the protests have been anti-Jewish.

“We’ve been told to understand [the protesters] as a pro-Palestinian movement. This is not what they are. Every single demonstration is advocating for the destruction of Israel, not the erection of a Palestinian state. I think [Shafik] was being very particular in that case, and I don’t know why,” Fay told NR. “Every single demonstration has been an anti-Jewish demonstration.”

Fay also told NR that she does not understand why Shafik had trouble saying that a demonstration where protesters chant antisemitic slogans is an antisemitic demonstration.

“It’s baffling to me that she could not say that herself, and hopefully she gets to a point where she can understand that,” Fay said. “The trustee members clearly did.”

Eden Yadegar, the president of the Students Supporting Israel organization at Columbia, pointed out a moment in the exchange immediately before Shafik said there had not been anti-Jewish demonstrations. Omar asked whether there had been anti-Muslim protests, and Shafik responded by saying that there had been “pro-Israel protests.”

Yadegar told NR she thinks Shafik grouped the pro-Israel movement together with Islamophobia during the exchange, which Yadegar believes to be unnecessarily inflammatory.

“I frankly found it appalling that, when asked if there were anti-Muslim or anti-Arab protests, President Shafik answered that there were pro-Israel protests,” Yadegar said. “We’re talking about bringing down the heat and the tension on campus. We’re talking about creating an environment in which everyone can feel safe and welcome. To further conflate anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment with the pro-Israel movement is not only inaccurate but completely dangerous to all parties involved.”

Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who chairs the committee, told NR she was similarly confused by Shafik’s initial refusal to characterize the protests as anti-Jewish.

“I just went, ‘What!?'” Foxx said of her immediate reaction. “I sat there, and I thought, ‘Okay, what is antisemitism? It is anti-Jewish.’ I don’t know why she couldn’t say that and understand that.”

Another noteworthy moment in the hearing, also spurred by Omar, came when the Minnesota congresswoman mentioned Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who has become a leading voice against antisemitism on his campus. Davidai, as National Review has previously reported, is under investigation by the university for social-media posts he’d made chronicling anti-Israel protests, a probe he believes is politically motivated.

Davidai maintains that he has not targeted “any individual Columbia student” and would never “target any person or group on the basis of their national origin, race, religion, or any other protected characteristic,” but that did not stop Omar from accusing him of having “attacked students online” and mentioning his vocal criticism of Shafik’s leadership.

“As president, I’m used to being attacked,” Shafik said, “but attacking our students is unacceptable. And in that case, we’ve had more than 50 complaints against that professor, and he’s currently under investigation for harassment.”

Davidai described Omar’s jab as “a badge of honor” in an interview with NR, but he said his main concern is “the Jewish and Israeli community’s safety.” He described what he saw in Congress on Wednesday as “despicable.”

“I hold the truth to be a sacred thing,” he told NR. “What we saw today was President Shafik lying again and again and again,” referring to, among other moments, Shafik’s claim that Joseph Massad, a professor who celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attack as “stunning,” “remarkable,” and awesome,” had been removed from his position as chairman of the university’s Arts and Science Academic Review Committee.

As Stefanik pointed out, Massad is still listed as the chairman on the committee’s website.

In a statement following the hearing, Stefanik said that Shafik’s testimony “epitomize[d] the failed leadership on ‘elite’ college campuses to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish students,” citing the Columbia president “astonishingly stating that there have been no ‘anti-Jewish’ protests on campus only to then acknowledge that ‘F— the Jews’ and ‘Death to the Jews’ is in fact anti-Jewish when she was pressed.”

Stefanik mentioned that, during a break in the hearing, committee members could overhear the witnesses discussing “how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.”

“This arrogance,” Stefanik said, “is eerily reminiscent of the previous three university presidents who believed walking out of their hearing that their testimony was acceptable. . . . No amount of over-lawyered, over-prepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”

Foxx struck a similar tone in describing why, from her perspective, Columbia’s Shafik may have been so reluctant to say the protests have been antisemitic.

“I think she did spend a lot of time preparing for that hearing, and she was trying very hard not to say something she would regret,” Foxx told NR. “In doing that, she said something to regret.”