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I grew up in Israel. Like every Israeli child, I absorbed the narrative of Holocaust Remembrance Day as naturally as air: it happened. It was the darkest chapter in human history. And it will never happen again — because society has advanced. Because there is enlightenment. Because there are universities, laws, values of freedom, and human dignity. Because a liberal education built the firewall. That is what they told us.
Now let me tell you what I saw at Columbia University:
In the spring of 2024, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, an institution that carries the word enlightenment like a flag, Jewish students removed their Star of David necklaces before leaving their dorm rooms. They mapped their routes to class to avoid the mobs. They were spit on. Shoved. Screamed at. One student testified before Congress: “At Columbia University, the Jewish community is alone. We are ostracized, mocked, harassed, assaulted, and scapegoated, simply because of our identities.”
Students chanted in support of “10,000 October 7ths.” They marched with inverted red triangles, a Hamas symbol marking targets for elimination. They chanted “Death to the Zionist State” and “Globalize the Intifada.” A student leader recorded himself declaring that Zionists don’t deserve to live. His coalition issued a formal statement: “Violence is the only path forward.”
They doxxed Jewish students and circulated the lists. Protesters set up encampments and blocked access to campus for anyone they identified as a Zionist. They occupied buildings. They poured red paint on the Alma Mater statue. They flushed an Israeli flag down a toilet and posted it on TikTok. They held events called “Resistance 101,” during which speakers explained why October 7 was justified. An introductory astronomy class began with a lecture on the genocide in Gaza. An Arabic class taught students the sentence: “The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.” A professor pointed at an Israeli student in front of the entire class and said she should be considered a murderer.
An Israeli professor stood at the gates and demanded that his colleagues be protected. Shai Davidai, said, “This is 1938,” had his security card deactivated by the University, and was barred from campus. The university that allowed mobs to hunt Jews through its hallways decided that the man calling it out was the problem. He eventually resigned. Columbia closed the investigation the moment he was no longer their employee.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally found Columbia in violation of federal civil rights law, documenting over 19 months in which the university failed to protect Jewish students, failed to investigate complaints, and failed to stop the repeated drawing of swastikas in its own classrooms. Swastikas. In classrooms. In 2024. At Columbia University.
Columbia University should be stripped of its accreditation over its 'deliberate indifference' to the harassment of Jewish students on campus." — U.S. Department of Education AOL
We were told the Holocaust could never happen again. We were told the institutions of liberal democracy, especially the university, were the firewall. The place where reason overcame barbarism. Where the lessons of history were studied, absorbed, and passed on. I need to say this plainly, without apology: the Holocaust happened again, first in Germany, then again on October 7, the third time— the one nobody expected, the one that occurred inside the institution that cloaks itself in the flag of enlightenment and liberal values—happened at Columbia University.
To understand why Columbia carried the flag of hatred, violence, and dehumanization after October 7 more intensely than any other institution in the Western world, we have to go back. to the beginning. We have to face an uncomfortable truth: Columbia was not just any campus. It was the worst. Among all the universities that erupted after October 7, Columbia was the epicenter. The most documented. The most vicious. A place where a professor was barred from his own office for defending Jewish students. A place where swastikas appeared in classrooms. A place where a student leader looked into a camera and said Zionists don’t deserve to live, and his coalition responded by doubling down.
Why Columbia?
To understand what happened on that campus in 2024, you have to go back decades and look at who built this place intellectually, what ideas were planted there, tended there, and handed down from professor to student to activist to mayor. You have to look at the factory and what it was manufacturing all along.
The Butler Years: The Poison Was Always There 1919–1947
Columbia, like Harvard, watched Jewish students excel, and moved to limit them. In 1919, President Nicholas Murray Butler introduced the first formal Jewish quota at an American university, engineering the same character assessments and geographical diversity requirements that Harvard would later adopt. The Jewish student population collapsed from 40 percent to less than 15 percent within a decade. Richard Feynman was rejected. So was Jonas Salk. Both went elsewhere and changed the world.
In 1933. Six months after the Nazi book burnings. Six months after, Jewish faculty had been purged from German universities. Butler invited Hans Luther, Hitler’s ambassador to the United States, to speak at Columbia before an audience of 1,200 students and faculty. He demanded that Luther be accorded, in his own words, “the greatest courtesy and respect,” as a representative of “the government of a friendly people.” When students protested, Butler ignored them.
When a young art professor signed a petition against the invitation, Butler fired him. When a student participated in an anti-Nazi demonstration on campus, Butler expelled him. Columbia’s own student newspaper wrote that the university’s reputation was suffering from “the remarkable silence of its president” on the Hitler government. Butler’s response was silence. The following year, students stormed a Jewish Purim celebration in one of Columbia’s own halls, unfurled a swastika banner, and chanted “Down with the Jews.” The university did not expel them.
In 1936, Columbia sent an official delegate to the 550th anniversary celebrations of Heidelberg University — an event presided over by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Party leader for Greater Berlin. Every British university refused to attend. Columbia went. Butler maintained student exchange programs with Nazi Germany, repeatedly violated boycotts of German shipping, and remained silent as Jewish faculty were being purged from German universities, Jewish businesses were being burned, and Jews were being herded into camps.
Columbia University, December 1933: students protest outside as President Nicholas Murray Butler welcomes Nazi Germany's ambassador, Hans Luther. (Columbia University Archives)
Part Two: The Interlude (1947–1962)
Butler died in December 1947. Columbia didn’t mourn him, but it didn’t reckon with him either. No investigation. No accountability. No reckoning with what the institution had done and permitted. The university simply moved on, as institutions always do when the cost of honesty exceeds the cost of silence.
What Butler left behind was not just a record of antisemitism; it was a culture. A demonstrated institutional tolerance for hatred of Jews, dressed in the language of academic standards and university tradition. He had shown, over four decades, that Columbia would not protect its Jewish students, would not punish those who attacked them, would welcome their enemies, and would fire those who objected. None of that was reversed when he died. It was simply left in place, waiting.
The men who followed him, a parade of administrators more interested in endowments and expansion than in the institution's moral character, did nothing to dismantle what Butler had built. The quotas were quietly phased out under external legal pressure, not because Columbia had a change of heart. The antisemitic faculty culture was never addressed. The institutional reflex to protect the university’s reputation above the safety of its Jewish students remained intact.
It would take exactly one generation for that reflex to find a new ideological language. And in 1963, the man who would supply it walked through the gates and took his office.
Part Three: The Betrayal (1963–2024)
Every university that takes in a controversial thinker faces a test: do you teach the idea, or do you become it? Do you expose students to a framework so they can interrogate it, challenge it, compare it against competing evidence, or do you hand it to them as revealed truth and punish those who question it? Columbia failed that test. Not all at once. Gradually, departmentally, hiring decision by hiring decision, donation by donation, until the institution that was supposed to be the West’s great intellectual fortress had become its most sophisticated saboteur.
In 1963, Columbia University hired a young Palestinian-American literary scholar, Edward Said, and appointed him to a tenured post in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He would stay for forty years. In that time, he would transform not just Columbia, but the entire intellectual architecture of the Western university, and not in the way universities are supposed to transform things, through debate and evidence and the collision of competing ideas, but through indoctrination.
Said seemed brilliant, but he was also a fraud, and the two things are not mutually exclusive. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a wealthy Palestinian Christian family, Said spent almost none of his formative years in the Arab world. He was educated at Victoria College in Cairo, the most elite British school in the Middle East; he attended a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts; earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton; and earned his doctorate at Harvard. He lived, thought, wrote, and built his entire career inside the most privileged corridors of the Western academic establishment.
And then, from that position of absolute Western comfort, he wrote: Orientalism, a book that reframed power as the only lens worth using, and in doing so, erased culture, history, and moral accountability entirely. The irony is almost too perfect. The man who built his career accusing Western scholars of projecting a false, romanticized image of the Arab world was himself an Arab who had constructed a romanticized image of Palestinian suffering from the inside of Harvard’s library. He sold the West a story about the misunderstood Oriental, the voiceless victim of colonial representation, and the West, drowning in post-colonial guilt, bought it completely. Not because it was true. Because it felt true. Because it gave Western academics exactly what they needed: a sophisticated framework for self-flagellation that also happened to conveniently exempt one specific group, Palestinians, from any moral scrutiny whatsoever.
The argument was seductive in its simplicity: every Western attempt to study, understand, or describe the Arab and Muslim world was not scholarship. It was domination. Western knowledge about the East was a power structure, a colonial tool built to construct the Arab as inferior, irrational, exotic, and in need of Western control. Western moral judgment about the Middle East was therefore illegitimate. It was imperialism dressed as objectivity. This was not, in itself, an unreasonable provocation. Power does shape knowledge; every intellectual tradition deserves scrutiny. These are real questions worth asking — and in a healthy university, they would have been asked, tested, challenged, refined, and placed alongside competing frameworks.
But Columbia did not teach students how to critique Said’s argument. It taught them to accept it. The theory became an ideology. The provocation became dogma. Within a generation, the idea that Western judgment of the Middle East was inherently suspect had spread from one man’s argument to the core assumption of entire departments across American academia, including history, political science, law, journalism, and education. If you questioned the framework, you were not practicing critical thinking. You were simply confirming Said’s point, demonstrating your own colonial bias, and showing your complicity in empire.
When Said died in 2003, the university did not pause to examine what had been built in his name. It accelerated. It created the Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies and filled it with Rashid Khalidi, a man who had served as an advisor to the PLO, who spent his career framing Israel as a colonial project with no legitimate right to exist, and who co-founded Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies. The funding for the chair came from anonymous donors. Columbia refused to disclose their identities, even as Khalidi simultaneously oversaw nearly a million dollars in federal funds. The Saudi-affiliated Olayan Charitable Trust was later identified as one donor. A law firm previously registered as an agent of the Palestinian Authority was another. The university that claimed to stand for academic integrity was being partially financed by parties with a direct financial and political stake in the curriculum’s conclusions.
This was not a coincidence. It was a pipeline.
And there was Joseph Massad, Said’s student. He earned his PhD at Columbia in 1998, joined the faculty, and spent the next quarter century teaching modern Arab politics in the same department his mentor had built. He called Israel “a racist state.” He compared Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On October 8, 2023 — one day after Hamas murdered 1,200 people, raped women, burned families alive, and took children hostage — Massad published an essay describing the attack as “astounding,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” A petition demanding his removal gathered nearly 80,000 signatures. Columbia reprimanded him quietly and then assigned him to teach a course on Zionism.
Then there is Mahmood Mamdani — the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, father of New York City’s current mayor — who wrote in 2004 that suicide bombers should be recognized as “a category of soldier” and that their attacks should not be “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” After October 7, he described the massacre as “the birth of the third intifada against settler colonialism.” He was filmed physically blocking Jewish students from entering a campus building. He sat on the advisory council of the Gaza Tribunal alongside Jeremy Corbyn. His son, who has described his father as the primary intellectual influence on his life, is now the Mayor of New York City. The ideology built inside Columbia’s walls had reached City Hall.
Mohamed Abdou was hired as a visiting professor in January 2024, three months after October 7. Before joining the faculty, he had posted publicly: “I’m with the muqawamah - be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.” He said this four days after the massacre. Columbia hired him anyway. Congress forced the issue. He was eventually fired, but his hiring in the first place told you everything about what the institution had become.
And running beneath all of it, like groundwater: the money. Qatar, the country that has given Hamas $1.8 billion since 2007, which hosts Hamas leadership in Doha while Gazans live in rubble, and which, on October 7, issued a statement blaming Israel alone for the massacre, has donated nearly $6 billion to 61 American universities. Congress demanded Columbia produce all records of Qatari funding. The university had not disclosed it as required by law. The institution that trained generations of students to see Israel as the world’s original crime had been doing so, for years, with money from the government most responsible for financing the organization that carried out the October 7.
This is what betrayal looks like at institutional scale.
If you want to understand why the third catastrophe happened at Columbia University, why this campus, of all places, became the site of hunting lists and death chants and blocked doorways and students celebrating the rape and murder of Jewish families, the answer is not complicated. It is a century-long.
Columbia did not fail. It chose.
It chose to take a theory and turn it into an ideology. It chose to stop teaching students how to think and start teaching them what to think. It stole from its students the most precious things a university can offer — curiosity, doubt, the hunger for truth — and replaced them with a catechism. One approved narrative. One permanent villain. One person whose suffering was always, by definition, a consequence rather than a crime.
Columbia betrayed the West, the tradition of free inquiry, of competing ideas, of truth tested against evidence, that universities were built to protect. It betrayed liberalism, the set of values that says every human being has dignity and no ideology is exempt from scrutiny.
It betrayed every student who walked through its gates believing they were entering a place of honest education, and stole from them the most precious thing a university can offer: the capacity to doubt, to question, to think.
It betrayed its Jewish students, not for the first time, not by accident, but systematically, over six decades, with endowed chairs and Qatari money and tenured professors who looked at the burned bodies of Israeli children and called it a stunning victory.
This matters not as campus politics, not as a culture-war talking point, but as a historical fact with consequences that will outlast every press release and congressional hearing. In the worst places in history, dehumanization never arrived naked. It always came dressed in the language of justice. It always had an ideology. It always had intellectuals who provided the framework that made ordinary people feel righteous about what they were doing to their neighbors.
Columbia set that framework — postcolonial theory as a permission structure, settler colonialism as a moral blank check, resistance as a word that meant whatever the killers needed it to mean. What they did to Jews in 2024 is what ideologues have always done to their targets: turned them into a category rather than a people, a symbol rather than human beings, a political problem to be solved rather than children, parents, and grandparents to be mourned.
Columbia University — you are a traitor. To the West, to learning, to truth, to your own stated mission. And history will remember you as exactly that, or as something worse: as the institution that made the intellectual case for the third catastrophe, and is still making it. Mahmood Mamdani still holds his chair. Joseph Massad still teaches. The Edward Said Chair is being filled again, quietly, with another voice from the same tradition. The factory is still running.
The only thing that has changed is the $400 million you are now being forced to pay for your crimes against humanity. And even that is not enough.
Columbia University — we will never forget your betrayal.
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Sources & Further Reading
Butler / Jewish quotas: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen (2005) · Hans Luther invitation 1933: Columbia University Archives · Heidelberg 1936: Stephen Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (2009) · Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) · Rashid Khalidi / PLO advisory role: Congressional Record, House Committee on Education (2024) · Olayan Charitable Trust / PA law firm donations: Middle East Forum investigative reports · Joseph Massad “astounding” essay: Electronic Intifada, Oct. 8, 2023 · Mahmood Mamdani, “suicide bombers as soldiers”: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004) · Mohamed Abdou hiring / firing: Congressional hearing testimony, 2024 · Qatar / $1.8B to Hamas: Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2023) · Qatar / $6B to U.S. universities: National Association of Scholars report (2023) · HHS civil rights violation finding: U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, formal determination (2024) · DOE / accreditation warning: U.S. Dept. of Education statement (2024) · Shai Davidai security card revoked: New York Post, April 2024 · Student testimony before Congress: House Committee on Education & the Workforce hearing, May 2024 · ADL antisemitism data: ADL Audit 2023–2024 · $400M federal funding cut: White House announcement, March 2025
