Columbia’s Final Antisemitism Report: Widespread Targeting Of Jewish Students, Faculty on Mideast Studies Anti-Zionist

Columbia University’s antisemitism task force released its fourth and final report this week, concluding that Jewish and Israeli students were routinely singled out and scapegoated in classrooms, and that the school’s Middle East studies department contained very few faculty members who were not openly anti-Zionist.

The task force interviewed Jewish and Israeli students and documented numerous “disturbing incidents,” particularly in academic settings. The report emphasized the need to uphold free speech and academic freedom while also addressing discrimination against Jews.

“We urge the University to protect freedom of expression to the maximum extent possible while also complying with antidiscrimination laws. Censorship has no place at Columbia. Neither does discrimination,” the report said.

The Task Force on Antisemitism, created during the campus upheaval following the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel and the Gaza war that followed, is composed of faculty tasked with investigating these concerns.

The 70-page report identified the “most flagrant” episode as the disruption of a course taught by an Israeli professor at the start of the spring 2025 semester. The class was one of the few options for students “who did not want to study the Middle East only from an anti-Zionist perspective,” and activists targeted it because it was “designed to study Zionism, rather than merely condemn it.”

University officials condemned the disruption and disciplined the participating students. In response, activists staged further demonstrations, occupying a campus building and a library and forcing classes to be disrupted or canceled. At least one professor canceled class to allow students to join the protest, the report noted.

The task force also found that some instructors directly targeted Jewish and Israeli students for “personal scapegoating,” behavior that violates Department of Education guidelines.

One instructor told an Israeli student, “You must know a lot about settler colonialism. How do you feel about that?” Another was labeled an occupier. An Israeli IDF veteran described a class in which the IDF was portrayed as an “army of murderers,” and the instructor pointed at her and said she should be considered one of them.

Another Jewish student, who was not Israeli, was told, “It’s such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.” Many students said they concealed their identities to avoid harassment.

In a mandatory course at the Mailman School of Public Health with more than 400 students, a teacher accused three Jewish donors of “laundering blood money” and referred to Israel as “so-called Israel,” later dismissing concerns as coming from “privileged white students.”

Some instructors encouraged students to attend anti-Israel protests during class time, canceled class for demonstrations, moved sessions off campus for “political organizing,” and even held classes inside the protest encampment, where “Zionists” were barred.

Students said teachers routinely inserted moral denunciations of Israel into unrelated subjects. An astronomy class opened with discussion of the “genocide” in Gaza. In an introductory Arabic class, students learned the sentence, “The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.” Another instructor told a class on advocacy that reports of Hamas abuse were exaggerated or fabricated.

Graduate students encouraged one another to “teach for Palestine” across all disciplines, and anti-Zionist narratives became standard in courses on women’s studies, architecture, photography, music, and nonprofit management.

Middle East–focused classes were described as dominated by anti-Israel rhetoric and outright falsity. One instructor claimed Theodor Herzl was an antisemite and that Eastern European Jews were not actually Jewish.

Jewish and Israeli students said they could not pursue Middle East studies meaningfully because most courses treated Zionism and Israel as inherently illegitimate. The report said, “Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist,” urging the university to broaden its academic diversity.

In another case, a student who privately emailed a professor regarding a course’s framing of the conflict later found the message read aloud in class without permission, with the instructor arguing against its contents.

The task force underscored that Jews are a protected class under federal law and that labeling Jews or Israelis as “Zionists” does not diminish discriminatory behavior.

The report called for new classroom protections, including preventing disruptions, stopping harassment, avoiding coercion to participate in protests, eliminating stereotypes, and keeping contentious political issues out of unrelated courses.

It also condemned the academic boycott of Israeli universities, a key demand of anti-Zionist activists, who have pressed Columbia to cut ties with Tel Aviv University.

Emphasizing the importance of free expression, the report cautioned faculty about making public statements in media or on social platforms “on which they are not academic experts.” Students were angered by comments from faculty that appeared to “condone (or even celebrate) terrorist atrocities, deploy antisemitic tropes, and peddle bigoted stereotypes.”

Jewish student Elisha Baker wrote in the Columbia Spectator that he appreciated the university’s steps to address antisemitism but said faculty who “supported, affiliated with, and physically enforced the exclusionary [protest] encampment” faced no consequences.

“The unresolved question of faculty responsibility remains an open wound,” he wrote. “The University’s silence on the issue of faculty behavior suggests that it is still treating it as a delicate matter at best. That instinct is understandable given the backlash that would likely follow any faculty sanctions, but it is not morally defensible.”

Earlier reports from the task force addressed protest policies, the documented antisemitism faced by Jewish students, and the overall campus environment.

“While we know there is more work to do, we’re very grateful to be in a new and much better place today,” acting president Claire Shipman said in a statement on Tuesday, praising the committee’s efforts and the changes implemented over the past two years.