“Context Matters”: Columbia Jewish Faculty Responds to Antisemitism Task Force’s Second Report
In a letter to the Columbia and Barnard administration, dozens of Jewish faculty raise concern over a report by the Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism.
Photography by Claire Cenovic/The Barnard Bulletin
September 14, 2024
On September 5, 2024, Jewish faculty at Columbia University and Barnard College delivered a ten-page letter to administration in response to the second report by the Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism.
The letter, signed by dozens of Jewish faculty, characterizes aspects of the report as “staggeringly obtuse,” claims that it “cherry-picks information,” and that it “is doing serious harm to Columbia’s reputation.”
Addressed to Columbia Interim President Katrina Armstrong, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury, Teacher’s College President Thomas Bailey, and Columbia Provost Angela Olinto, the letter characterizes the Task Force’s report as a “blunt instrument” with which the University will not be able to achieve the nuance, precision, intellectual honesty, and respect needed “to protect community members in a time of armed conflict.”
The Jewish faculty letter charges the report with “neglectful omissions of context and climate,” a research method “that conflates feelings with facts,” use of “conveniently slippery definitions,” sometimes “outright factual misrepresentations” of incidents or speech, and policy recommendations which “threaten to damage the fabric of our community.”
Columbia professor Marianne Hirsch, one of the signatories of the letter, told The Barnard Bulletin that “this task force has done more harm than good.”
Hirsch, the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, explained that the faculty group behind the letter “constituted itself through conversation and concern,” about the unprecedented attention on antisemitism at Columbia.
“It’s not just that we’ve only been talking among Jewish faculty,” said Hirsch. “It’s just that the way that antisemitism is being discussed concerns us, particularly as Jews.” That is why they “wrote specifically as a group of Jewish faculty, because what we wanted to contest is how Jewishness and antisemitism were being represented.”
In April, members of the group also wrote a letter to former Columbia President Shafik before her appearance in Congress “to caution her about the weaponization of antisemitism” on and around campus.
Hirsch called attention to the fact that “it's been widely reported in the press to show that there's rampant antisemitism at Columbia, and that it's a horrific place for Jews to be,” which led friends and family of hers to reach out with unnecessary concern that Hirsch thinks people would not have if they more closely read “the report, or the reports about the report.”
“People don't necessarily read a report like this critically to see how the evidence is gathered, how it's framed and how it's presented,” which, according to Hirsch, is why the faculty felt they needed to “show that not everything in this report should be taken at face value,” and why “it was important to see how the questions were framed and how the evidence was being presented.”
One of the first concerns the letter raises is the report’s “slippery definitions” of antisemitism, Zionism, and anti-Zionism.
As the letter states, “the Task Force equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” and “defines Zionism as ‘Israel’s right to exist’.” The letter argues that, in doing so, the report “utterly misses the pedagogical opportunity to explain that all these terms have been contested, notably among Jews,” and renders both definitions “skewed by their incompleteness.”
Hirsch believes the University must define “whether criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitic or not. That’s key.”
“It's not just what this person says or what that person says,” or the idea “I know it when I see it,” said Hirsch. “That's not valid for academic discussion in an academic context.”
If the University is going to accuse people on campus for being antisemitic, Hirsch explains, “we need to know exactly what these actions were, and do they qualify under and understood definition of antisemitism?”
One example Hirsch pointed out was chants at protests, asking, “are they necessarily antisemitic, or are they critical of a nation state?” Hirsch believes, “that’s very different from prejudice against a group of people who are a constituency on campus. The report doesn’t distinguish between these.”
For Hirsch, the pedagogical role the Task Force should have in defining these terms, at minimum, is “even to say that these are complicated, that there's controversy about these, that there’s academic discussion.”
Because of these “slippery definitions,” that have influenced media coverage of the University, the faculty find the report’s diagnoses of ”Columbia’s horrific campus climate, of rampant antisemitism and long-standing bias on the part of students and faculty, and of administrative failure to address this problem” to be “already doing serious harm to Columbia’s reputation.”
The “lack of context” in the report has consequences, say the faculty in the letter. By failing to distinguish between demonstrations on and off campus, the letter explains, those on-campus have been wrongfully characterized as containing violent rhetoric that was actually largely off-campus.
In the view of the faculty, the outside protesters “were drawn there in the first place by former President Shafik’s suspension of two pro-Palestine student groups” – Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in November 2023 – which “escalated the protests and made our campus a flashpoint, in many ways creating the atmosphere that the Task Force was charged with investigating.”
Not only does the report “detail incidents of alleged antisemitism,” some of which the letter states were “falsely reported” and “presented as fact without in any way being investigated or verified,” but “the Task Force is actually helping to build a case against our university.” The faculty further believe this case to be aligned “with a broader right-wing movement to weaponize charges of antisemitism in the interest of not only suppressing political speech critical of the state of Israel but also of undermining the legitimacy and autonomy of democratic institutions.”
The “fundamental deficiency” of the case the report builds, according to the letter, is not its aim against the University, but rather “its egregious failure to recognize [...] Israel’s decimation of Gaza.”
“While the report rightly addresses the heinous Hamas attack of October 7,” says the letter, “its failure to address Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of Gaza produces the impression that students protesting Israel are acting out of some preternatural Jew-hatred rather than responding to one of the most horrific humanitarian crises of their generation (albeit sometimes with rhetoric many of us find offensive). No communal trust can be rebuilt as long as anti-war protesters are treated as bad-faith, anti-Jewish troublemakers.”
Pursuing a fight against antisemitism, Hirsch does not think that “singling out one particular group and treating it very differently from the others is the way to go.”
“In the midst of a war that affects, very personally, so many members of this community, to single out, to say that some people's pain or some people's suffering as a result of how they're being treated in the midst of this war, and to single out this one group and say that their pain is more, that it needs to be taken more seriously than that of others, is not a way to move forward in rebuilding community here.” said Hirsch.
Instead of “singling out” one group, the faculty recommends “that the University target its programming not against ‘antisemitism’ but for ‘discourse and inclusion in a time of conflict.’”
To Hirsch, “the formation of the existence of the Task Force is signaling that we need to take care of Jews on this campus more than other groups, protect the safety of Jews more than other groups,” and because of that, Hirsch does not “think there’s a place for an Antisemitism Task Force on this campus” at all.
Faculty’s lack of faith in the Task Force is exacerbated by the fact that the membership of the Task Force is “one sided,” in Hirsch’s words, as it does not include equal representation of faculty with different perspectives on its issues of focus. This is why the group of faculty behind the letter had to write it in the first place—to give their interpretations of the issue a platform within the University.
According to Hirsch, only “a small minority of the membership are actually experts” on the matters the Task Force is meant to address. The letter states that “the report offers recommendations in an area in which no Task Force member has expertise.” The faculty acknowledge that they, too, are not experts in anti-bias pedagogy, but nonetheless “can observe the chauvinistic nature of some of the report’s suggestions and point to some alternatives.”
“As faculty members, we aspire to be not just custodians of this institution, but a resource for it,” reads the letter. This group of faculty have expertise in Jewish history and culture, politics, antisemitism, political movements and social phenomena, as well as “firsthand experience of the complex and diverse Jewish identities and experiences the Task Force so casually misrepresents and erases.” Accordingly, the faculty advises the University to “Please consider us at your disposal.”
Looking to the future, Hirsch and her fellow signatories fear that the Task Force “has the potential of doing even more harm” to the campus community, especially in the light of its announcement that the next report would cover academic issues and curriculum.
The Task force has already “really harmed the university's reputation by framing it as a place with rampant antisemitism,” and Hirsch worries that if it begins to make recommendations about the curriculum, there could be a “serious infringement on academic freedom and open inquiry.”
“I would personally hope to try to convince the president to start anew and not pursue this particular path toward rebuilding community on campus and maintain academic freedom and scholarly inquiry,” Hirsch expressed, again urging the University not to single out groups in discussions of discrimination that so intrinsically impact the campus community.
For Hirsch, the main takeaway of the faculty letter should be to “read the report, or the reports about the report, with a grain of salt, or with an examination of some of the assumptions on which it rests rather than at face value.”
President Armstrong’s office has, according to Hirsch, responded to the faculty’s request to meet with the administration, saying “they would look into scheduling such a meeting.”
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