Columbia Task Force Finally Weighs In: Yes, Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism (2024)

On Sunday, some current faculty members at Columbia University learned through a news article that all new students and faculty at the school will be mandated to go through an orientation on antisemitism. The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university.

Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a story about the university’s task force on antisemitism.

Formed last November as political pressure mounted against criticism of Israel on campuses, the task force set out to examine specific notions of bigotry at the university, which has become a flashpoint of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza — often followed by violent police crackdowns.

The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university. Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Numerous participants in the antisemitism task force, including its three co-chairs — Columbia faculty members, many of whom are outspoken Israel supporters — openly discussed the not-yet published report with the newspaper before any such information was shared with the university’s community, or even their colleagues.

The antisemitism task force will release a report in the coming weeks detailing accounts from students who submitted written testimony or participated in “listening sessions,” according to Haaretz. All the anecdotes, equally, were shared without any attribution except that they were anonymously gathered by the task force — a body with pro-Israel leadership that has been controversial since its inception last November.

The article also revealed that a mandatory antisemitism orientation would be developed. The trainings will include expressions of anti-Zionism as examples of possible antisemitism, touching on a controversy that has enveloped the protests, crackdowns, and larger national conversation about Israel–Palestine.

Anecdotes that the task force shared with Haaretz include disturbing examples of antisemitism, like a professor reportedly telling a class “to avoid reading mainstream media, declaring that ‘it is owned by Jews.’”

Examples like these have been widely reported, but they are fewer and further between than the explicit and tacit conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that pervade task force members’ comments — a conflation that has helped lead to dire consequences, including arrests, for thousands of students protesting Israel’s war.

A Dangerous Conflation

Up until this point, the chairs and participants in the antisemitism task force have demurred from offering a working definition of antisemitism. Now, with the new orientation planned, task force members now said that a definition of antisemitism will be put forward — and it will include anti-Zionism.

According to the Haaretz article, the task force’s antisemitism definition “is expected to determine that statements calling for the destruction and death of Israel and Zionism can be considered antisemitic, while criticism of the Israeli government cannot.” It mirrors, then, the contested and nationalist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, definition, which has been championed by Republicans and other conservative Zionists, including President Joe Biden.

“This definition is designed to inform faculty and students about what can offend Jewish people and which types of statements can cause pain and discomfort,” Haaretz reported. “An educational definition will not infringe upon freedom of speech on campus or prohibit potentially antisemitic phrases.”

Given that aggressive police raids at Columbia and Barnard, its women’s college, that saw student protesters arrested and the shutdown of the entire campus, the claim that free speech on campus will not be repressed beggars belief. Even if the only use of the definition is during mandatory orientations on antisemitism, its deployment inscribes the dangerous antisemitism/anti-Zionism conflation into campus culture. Views of Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and the many others in the community who express criticism of Israel are bound to be delegitimized.

Even in their own telling to Haaretz, task force members make clear that their interest involved validating pro-Israel students’ discomfort as examples of widespread antisemitism. “We heard from students who feel their identity, values and very existence on campus have been under attack,” said task force co-chair and political science professor Ester Fuchs.

There can be no doubt, as I’ve previously noted, that students for whom Israel is central to their Jewish identity have felt immense discomfort in the months of protests against Israel’s violence. This discomfort is not, however, proof of real threat. Nor is it grounds to continue to uphold the dangerous claim that criticism of Israel, even criticism of Israel as an ethno-state, is an attack against Jewish people.

All professors at universities nationwide should be committed to all of our students’ safety and well-being; this does not mean we must accept all feelings of fear and discomfort as legitimately grounded in persecution and oppression.

A definition of antisemitism, even for purely educational purposes, that insists on defending Israel as an ethno-state will only serve to further silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, while rendering real cases of antisemitism — Jewish people targeted for being Jewish — harder to target and fight.

We would not, for instance, validate the fears of a white student brought up to see Black people as a threat — an important counterfactual, given a particularly striking comment by task force member Gil Zussman, an Israeli electrical engineering professor, about the Black Lives Matter movement.

“If, for example, a student group were to use an abhorrent chant such as ‘We don’t want BLM supporters here,’ there would be immediate consequences,” Zussman told Haaretz. “However, chants such as ‘We don’t want Zionists here’ have been normalized and currently have no consequences. These double standards are unacceptable and will eventually fracture the university.”

The idea that the standards should be the same — that support for an ethno-state should be as protected as efforts to end anti-Black racism — reveals exactly the problem with the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism: a troubling conflation of nation-state ideology with racial identity.

A Controversial Task Force

Since its formation last year, numerous students and faculty members expressed concerns about the antisemitism task force’s makeup, methodology, and purview.

“Ever since the task force was announced, we feared it would equate Zionism and Jewishness,” wrote four Jewish graduate students, all critical of Zionism, in an op-ed for the Columbia Spectator last week. “All three co-chairs of the task force — Ester R. Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer — are members of the Academic Engagement Network, a Zionist advocacy organization, and the three of them penned a statement supporting Columbia’s ties to Israel.”

Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, writing in The Nation in April, noted that the task force is “chaired by among the most ardent Zionist faculty members on our campus” and that “none of its members has any academic expertise in the study of antisemitism, or in how antidiscrimination laws apply in an academic setting.” (Franke was among the five Columbia faculty members maligned by university President Minouche Shafik in Congress for their Israel-critical positions.)

The antisemitism task force itself published an op-ed in the Spectator under a shared byline last month. The text was riddled with claims indicating the body’s readiness to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. “Zionism literally means the venerable movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland,” the task force wrote, “but in many settings on campus it has become a less well-defined general-purpose accusation.”

Zionism — literally, practically, and historically — is by no means reducible to this rosy abstraction. While the group for months refused to give a clear definition of antisemitism, it was willing to offer a simple and reductive definition of Zionism — one that ignores that political, nation-state ideology’s unbroken history of Palestinian exile, oppression, and occupation.

In February, LitHub published an email exchange between task force co-chair Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism and film, and the celebrated filmmaker James Schamus. Schamus continuously urges Lemann to be transparent about the task force’s working definition of antisemitism, expressing concern over the task force’s pro-Israel bias.

Demands like Schamus’s for the task force to give a definition of antisemitism don’t presume a clear and simple definition of antisemitism. Instead, they ask for recognition that discrimination and bigotry are context-dependent and that definitions can’t be relied upon in every case.

The concern is that, all too often, anti-Zionism is treated as antisemitism.

Unacceptable on Campus

In remarks to the Israeli paper, task force members themselves the task force members seemed to acknowledge that felt experiences of antisemitism related to opposition to the ideology of Zionism.

“The concept of Zionism has become unacceptable in some circles at Columbia,” Lemann, the co-chair, told Haaretz. “People are asked to promise that they’re not Zionist.”

For many Jewish people, including the many thousands of us worldwide who have taken part in Palestine solidarity protests and campus encampments, the growing opposition to Zionism is not an attack on Jewish people but an overdue challenge to an oppressive, nationalist worldview.

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic.

“Zionism is a political ideology — not an ethnic or religious identity,” wrote the Jewish graduate students in their Columbia Spectator open letter to the task force. “We can attest to that fact: Some of us believed in Zionism when we were younger, and even wanted to enlist in the Israeli military. Some of us grew up feeling like Zionism and Jewishness were inseparable, but our study of the history of Zionism led us to reject it.”

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic. It is, in short, a trap.

When it comes to views deemed “unacceptable” on campus, meanwhile, it was Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — two pro-Palestine organizations — that Columbia banned from campus last November. Over 100 students engaging in peaceful Palestine solidarity protests were arrested in April, with many suspended and, in the case of Barnard students, kicked out of their campus housing. It was Palestinian students and their supporters who were sprayed with noxious chemicals by two former members of the Israeli military on campus.

It was also, as I witnessed firsthand, young Palestinian and other Arab women students who were met at their campus gates by a crowd of middle-aged men and women wrapped in Israeli flags, screaming that the students should “go get raped” in Gaza. It is professors who have criticized Israel and supported Palestinians who were then smeared in Congress. Yet it is only in service of a perverted definition of antisemitism that there will be mandatory orientations.

“To be Muslim at Columbia is to be racially profiled and doxxed, beg for administrative resources and support, and still receive none,” wrote Noreen Mayat, a recent Barnard graduate and former president of the school’s Muslim Students Association, in the Columbia Spectator in May. “To be Muslim at Columbia is to face Islamophobia on campus — to be spat on and called ‘terrorists’ — and receive no University acknowledgment or recognition.”

In the Haaretz article, the antisemitism task force’s apparent prioritization of pro-Israel student experiences shields itself from critique by calling for a space of open discussion, when only one line of discourse will be institutionally sanctioned.

“Part of what a great university does is introduce us to people with different opinions,” David Schizer, Columbia law school professor and task force co-chair, said.

It’s a rich comment from the self-identifying conservative who went out of his way to see pro-Palestine colleagues censured and peaceful protests shuttered. It was in this very vein that the task force has operated from the jump: exploratory, but with only one possible focus and thus one possible conclusion.

“The priority has always been the comfort of students other than us,” Mayat, the Barnard graduate, wrote. “The priority has always been the safety of others, at the expense of ours.”