My friend and colleague Deborah Lipstadt recently announced that she turned down an invitation to teach at Columbia University, citing anti-Israel protests on campus and how the school has handled them.
I share Professor Lipstadt’s concerns. But I’ve made a different decision. I am continuing and planning on continuing to teach about genocide at Columbia Law School despite the antisemitism that has plagued the university for the past year and a half.
First, I must emphasize that I am not criticizing Professor Lipstadt’s decision in any way. She is the epitome of not just a woman of valor but an individual of the highest possible merit, accomplishments, and intellectual integrity. The academic’s academic, she defeated a notorious Hitler-loving Holocaust denier in a London court of law. An acclaimed author and professor, she served with great distinction as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the Biden administration.
Most importantly for me, she is a dear friend of long standing for whom I have nothing but the highest respect, affection, and admiration, and with whom I had the privilege to serve for many years on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I respect her decision-making in all regards and believe it is her absolute prerogative to turn down any role and to publicly explain why.
In fact, we all need to take seriously Professor Lipstadt’s arguments, which she laid out in The Free Press, that she does not believe the university’s administration is serious in its commitment not to tolerate continued instances of violent anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations and disruptions of the type that have plagued the Morningside campus since Oct. 7, 2023. Specifically, she maintains that Columbia’s “recent history regarding demonstrations suggests that it has far less than a firm commitment to the free exchange of ideas, or to preventing classroom disruptions or even condemning disrupters and their demonstrations.” She also fears that her presence at Columbia “would be used as a sop” to cover up the failure to fight antisemitism adequately, and that she and her students might not be safe.
But even as I cannot take issue with any of these points, I cannot and will not follow her lead. And I hope that other Columbia faculty members, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who have been appalled by the callously abhorrent behavior of radical activists, including some of their colleagues, will similarly stand their ground.
I hold two degrees from Columbia — a master’s in modern European history and a law degree — and I have been teaching a course on the law of genocide at Columbia Law School since 2011. I am also an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, where I teach about antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence. At the end of August 2023, I stepped down as general counsel and associate executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress.
I am neither unaware of nor insensitive to Columbia’s serious failings. Following the Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter of approximately 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, I was publicly critical of then-President Minouche Shafik’s refusal to condemn the Hamas perpetrators of that savagery by name. I have also taken the university’s alumni magazine sharply to task for ignoring the exploding antisemitism at Columbia. Like Professor Lipstadt, I am outraged by the Barnard administrators’ kowtowing behavior toward student protesters last week.
At the same time, I have watched with respect and appreciation as many senior members of the Columbia administration and faculty — including Interim President Katrina Armstrong, Dean Daniel Abebe, Dean Emeritus David M. Schizer of the law school and Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo of the School of International and Public Affairs — have demonstrated a strong and, I am convinced, utterly sincere commitment to have the back, as it were, of the thousands of Jewish students immersed in this crisis. (Cornell’s interim president, Michael I. Kotlikoff; President Emerita Martha Pollack; and law school dean Jens David Ohlin, incidentally, have been and are admirably steadfast in this respect as well.)
In the final analysis, this is why I continue to teach at Columbia: the students. And not only the Jewish students. The students in my class there this semester are Jewish, Christian, Sikh, and, in all likelihood, Muslim and Buddhist. They are American, Italian, French, Australian, Indian and from a number of other countries. They deserve to be taught that antisemitism was the malignant cause of the Holocaust just as anti-Muslim bigotry caused the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, and just as ethnic hatred caused the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.
They deserve to be taught that Hitler admired an American antisemite named Henry Ford and that the Nazis’ antisemitic jurisprudence was largely and directly cribbed from American Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws. They deserve to be taught that Zionism is not racism but a multifaceted response to centuries of antisemitic oppression and persecution, that Jews are as entitled to have a nation of their own like other peoples across the globe, and, yes, that the Palestinians are entitled to these very same rights as well.
The vast majority of Columbia’s student body is made up of decent individuals who are neither antisemitic nor pro-Hamas. The same holds true for the university’s faculty, administrators and staff. I do not want to abandon them at the very moment when they are most in need of support.
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