The Troubling Lines That Columbia Is Drawing

In 2005, a “working definition” of antisemitism was posted on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, a research institute founded by the European Union. It described antisemitism, somewhat vaguely, as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Even less precise were the eleven examples of antisemitism that followed, many of which focussed on Israel. Among them was “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

In the two decades since it was introduced, this definition has not been endorsed by most leading scholars of antisemitism, in part because critics believe that it blurs the line between hostility toward Jews and criticism of Israel. It has been a different story in the political arena, where the reception of the definition has been nothing short of astonishing. In 2016, a slightly altered version of the definition was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization. To date, more than forty governments have adopted it as well, notwithstanding the definition’s lack of precision. In his forthcoming book, “On Antisemitism,” the historian Mark Mazower argues that, to some of the definition’s promoters, its vagueness has been a virtue rather than a drawback. The definition emerged at a time when campaigning against antisemitism was becoming a growing priority—and a highly effective fund-raising tool—for organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. What increasingly concerned these groups was not classical antisemitism, which, by the end of the Cold War, appeared to be declining, but the “new antisemitism,” which manifested in what they saw as the demonization of Israel.

This development would have shocked Israel’s founders, many of whom assumed that the creation of a Jewish state would eliminate antisemitism. (“You still at it, saving Jews from the antisemites?” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, asked one of the A.D.L.’s leaders in 1970, implying that the problem could be solved if Jews simply made aliyah.) It also would have startled the organizers of an A.D.L. conference on antisemitism that took place in 1962 in New York, where the participants discussed right-wing extremism but made no mention of Israel. By the early two-thousands, the politics had changed, as major American Jewish groups joined forces with advocates such as Natan Sharansky, an Israeli minister who was appointed chairman of an Israeli body called the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, to mobilize around the issue—and to redraw the ideological battle lines. As Mazower observes in his book, antisemitism was severed from the broader struggle against other forms of discrimination and shifted from being associated with the political right to being linked to the left, where many of Israel’s most vocal critics could be found. For those looking to silence such critics, Mazower suggests, an expansive definition of antisemitism which could be applied to a broad range of expression was particularly useful.

No politician has made greater use of the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism than President Donald Trump. In 2019, Trump signed an executive order specifying that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars “forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism” and advising federal agencies to consider the I.H.R.A. definition when investigating complaints. More recently, the Trump Administration has threatened sixty universities with “potential enforcement actions” if they fail to protect Jewish students from discrimination. On July 23rd, Columbia reached a settlement with the Administration which required it to pay the government two hundred million dollars over the next three years and to broaden its “commitment to combating antisemitism,” in exchange for having hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants reinstated. Ten days earlier, Columbia had incorporated the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism into both its anti-discrimination policies and the work of its Office of Institutional Equity.

Mazower has taught at Columbia since 2004. Like most faculty members, he was not consulted about the decision to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition. Neither was Kenneth Stern—its lead author. In recent years, Stern, a lawyer who worked from 1985 to 2010 as an expert on antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, has expressed dismay that pro-Israel groups have invoked the definition to threaten universities with lawsuits for offering courses and programs on subjects such as Israel’s occupation, which he regards as a violation of academic freedom and a gross distortion of the definition’s purpose. In “The Conflict Over the Conflict,” a book about how the debate around Israel-Palestine is playing out in higher education, he maintains that the definition was originally created to help data collectors gather statistics on antisemitism, and that its use to suppress political speech “poses one of the most significant threats to the campus today.”

When demonstrations against the war in Gaza began to roil college campuses two years ago, numerous universities invited Stern to advise them on how to navigate the turmoil. One of these schools was Columbia, where he gave a presentation on the subject in Butler Library. At the talk, Stern told me recently, he emphasized the importance of safeguarding academic freedom. “I said, If you are going to make a decision, ask yourself this one question,” he recalled. “Will it help academic freedom, will it harm academic freedom, or will it be neutral? If it helps, it will get buy-in from faculty. If it harms academic freedom, it will backfire.” When Stern learned about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump Administration, he concluded that his advice had gone unheeded. “I see nothing good coming out of this,” he said of the agreement, which he believes will make it impossible “for faculty to do their jobs.”

Columbia has insisted that the settlement was crafted “to protect the values that define us.” In a recent article in the Columbia Spectator, Gil Eyal and Peter Bearman, two sociologists at the university, disagree, noting that scholars doing comparative research on genocide could find themselves accused of antisemitism for including the case of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza. Under the I.H.R.A. definition, “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is considered antisemitic. Without drawing such comparisons, it will be difficult even to discuss whether the war in Gaza constitutes genocide, they noted. A few days before their article’s publication, Rashid Khalidi, the author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” and a professor emeritus of modern Arab studies, published an open letter in The Guardian addressed to Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, in which he announced that he would not be teaching a lecture course on the Middle East this fall because of the school’s adoption of the I.H.R.A. definition. “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 I.H.R.A. definition,” Khalidi wrote. Marianne Hirsch, a genocide scholar and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has indicated that she is considering no longer teaching because she is unsure if she will be able to continue to assign texts such as “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a book by Hannah Arendt—a critic of Zionism and arguably the most influential Jewish thinker of the twentieth century.