News items often seem to slip through the cracks at this point in the summer, and the media’s current focus on the Democratic Ticket has understandably dominated domestic headlines.
However, we shouldn’t lose track of a (yet another) troubling story out of Columbia University.
The school just suspended three deans over text messages that “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes,” according to Columbia President Nemat Shafik.
“Whether intended as such or not, these sentiments are unacceptable and deeply upsetting, conveying a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community,” wrote Shafik in an open letter to the campus community.
So, what’s the story here?
On May 31, as part of the school’s class reunions, several panel discussions were held.
One of those panels was on Jewish life at Columbia. It featured the university’s antisemitism task force co-chair David Schizer, Executive Director of Columbia’s Kraft Center for Jewish Life Brian Cohen, Dean of Religious Life Ian Rottenberg, and student journalist Rebecca Massel.
Several administrators were in the audience, including Columbia College Dean Josef Sorett, Columbia College Vice Dean Susan Chang-Kim, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life Cristen Kromm, and Associate Dean for Student and Family Support Matthew Patashnick.
An audience member took photos of Chang-Kim’s phone while she was sending private messages to the other administrators and ran to the right-wing Washington Free Beacon with them.
So, which texts touched upon antisemitic tropes exactly? Let’s go through them.
First, Chang-Kim texted Sorett, “This is difficult to listen to but I’m trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view.” Sorett replied, “Yup.” This was in response to the panel detailing the alleged perils of being a Zionist student on campus.
Next, Chang-Kim reacted to the mention of an op-ed on antisemitism from campus rabbi Yonah Hain with vomit emojis.
That op-ed claimed that the campus community had failed to stand up to antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th attack and asserted that the violence of that day could not be compared to Israel’s violence.
“Thankfully University President Minouche Shafik has been unequivocal in her denouncements of the terrorist attacks,” wrote Hain.
Much of the rest of the campus community—administrators, faculty and students—has lost its moral core. I know the pressure and legitimate struggle for people on all sides of this conflict. But we must differentiate between political concerns and moral imperatives; it is a moral obligation that any laudation of the indiscriminate atrocities Hamas has perpetrated against Israelis or minimization of our campus’ Jewish community’s suffering not be accepted as legitimate in this discourse. This cannot be glossed over in the name of bothsidesism.
Think whatever you want about these sentiments, but it’s unclear why vomit emojis constitute antisemitism.
In response to a claim that Jewish students had been barred from clubs, Chang-Kim wrote,
Did we really have students being kicked out of clubs for being Jewish?
We did not, so it’s unclear why the inquiry would be antisemitic.
Finally, we had Patashnick claim that one of the speakers was “taking full advantage of this moment” because it had “huge fundraising potential.”
It’s unclear who Patashnick was talking about, but this comment isn’t exactly out of left field. Pro-Israel donors rethinking their spending was a major story in the mainstream press as soon as the campus protests began.
It wasn’t long ago that many pundits decried the fact that “cancel culture” had allegedly permeated universities. Here we see administrators suspended over private text messages without any level of public debate and there’s total silence from that crew.
The move was heralded by pro-Israel groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “We hope that Columbia’s belated but decisive action will spur other elite schools to hold #AntiSemites and those who demonize #Israel and Zionists accountable for their hate. Jewish students only ask to be treated equally with everyone else,” they tweeted.
However, many criticized the decision across social media. Historian Alex Sayf Cummings shared a Washington Post article on the situation and wrote,
This story literally reads like a Stalinist purge being covered in Pravda. It’s f*cking scary how people are so enthusiastic about going on a zombified witch hunt.
“3 Columbia deans were just suspended after being accused of ‘antisemitism’ when photos of a groupchat were leaked,” tweeted media critic Sana Saeed.
Apparently discussing exploitation of a political moment for fundraising, using 🤮, ‘LMAO’, pointing out the influence of privilege and wealth within higher education are all antisemitic tropes.
Biden’s Bombs
There’s a lot of news about President Joe Biden these days, but rest assured that his health and questionable future on the ballot are not impacting the administration’s ability to support Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.
This week we saw yet another development that reads like dark satire. Biden has resumed sending Israel 500-pound bombs to Israel, but it’s holding back on sending the country 2,000-pound bombs over alleged concerns that they could be detonated over densely populated areas.
An anonymous U.S. official who could have been a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 told a reporter,
Our main concern had been and remains the potential use of 2,000-pound bombs in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza. Because our concern was not about the 500-pound bombs, those are moving forward as part of the usual process.
Speaking of bombings, there was a notable exchange between a reporter and State Department spokesman Matthew Miller during a recent briefing. The subject was Russia’s bombing of a Kyiv hospital:
QUESTION: Just to follow up on the comments you gave about the strike in Kyiv in the hospital, obviously this has happened very quick—very—only a few hours ago. Could you talk us through how you’re able to come to those kind of solid conclusions about—this is a Russian—this is a Russian attack. We’ve seen the—this pattern; we see it fits the pattern. In this case, what is the process for you to be able to sort of state with so much kind of confidence what’s happened?
MR MILLER: Well, so I could get into our ability to look at missiles that are launched. I could get into the Ukrainian military’s ability to look at missiles that are launched and talk about that with respect to any one strike. But—also, give me a break. There’s no one else lobbing missiles at Ukraine right now.
QUESTION: Right.
MR MILLER: There’s no one else launching attacks at Ukraine. So I think it’s pretty clear that it came from Russia.
QUESTION: Yeah. But you probably can guess what I’m getting at is in the other situation that we’re often talking about in Gaza, when there are strikes, there have been strikes that have hit hospitals, other facilities, universities—in those cases and often—and in some cases, U.S. weapons are actually involved in those strikes, but you’ve been pretty unable in a lot of those cases to say definitively what happened. Why the disparity there among—about your sort of information gathering?
MR MILLER: So the disparity is in the context of the events, and I’ll give you just a couple of examples when it comes to Gaza, what makes these types of assessments so hard. Oftentimes it is clear that a strike on any one target was an Israeli strike. If it’s an air strike, for example, it’s clear that was an Israeli strike; it’s not from anyone else. Sometimes there are other attacks where there’s an exchange of fire between Hamas and the IDF. And it’s clear—or it’s unclear, I should say, when one specific site was damaged, whether that damage was from IDF munitions, Hamas munitions, or both, which sometimes happens in a crossfire. That’s one way in which it’s difficult.
The other way in which it’s difficult is understanding what the actual target was, and so that’s one of the things that’s different when you look at Russia’s strikes on Ukraine. Ukrainian military doesn’t hide behind civilians. It’s not headquartering itself in hospitals, under hospitals, in other civilian sites, in apartment buildings. And that’s exactly what we see Hamas do. And so when you get to making assessments about strikes in Gaza, it’s not just always who conducted the strike, but whether the strike ultimately was after a legitimate military target or not. And it’s a much different assessment in Gaza where you have Hamas using civilians as human shields, which is not all the case in Ukraine.
QUESTION: Right. But you did—you did sort of say that it seems that this isn’t an accidental strike aimed at something else. That’s quite a—there’s quite a lot of information that you that you’re able to sort of pass on there. There have been cases where—I’m obviously not defending the Russian strikes. But there are cases where Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire has taken down a missile and it hit something, right. There are—there is complexity to that, but you’re able to a few hours later give a pretty detailed account of what happened. I’m not saying—I’ll give you a break on that. That’s your job.
But on the Israeli case, often we’re left with, after months, you haven’t got—come up with a real conclusion about what happened in a certain specific incident there. And these are U.S. weapons that are being used. You have the ability to sort of demand answers from the country involved. So I think people will watch this and think there’s a disparity here, and I’m wondering: Is there not a difference in the way that you’re approaching these and giving the benefit of the doubt to one side?
MR MILLER: There is no difference in how we are approaching these. There is a difference in the context; there’s a difference in the conflict. And that—that’s what lends itself—that’s what leads to our inability sometimes to give such definitive answers. I will also say that there is a difference in assessing responsibility for a strike, right, which is what I was getting into a moment ago, and assessing whether the strike was a legitimate military target. Those are two entirely separate things. Sometimes you can make an assessment about who carried out the strike, but you can’t know unless you were on the ground whether it’s a legitimate military target, and that’s especially the case where we often see conflicting claims in Gaza, which is not the case in Ukraine.
A new report from The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll from Israel’s assault could be more than 186,000. That is roughly 8% of Gaza’s population.