The three deans include Cristen Kromm, the former dean of undergraduate student life; Matthew Patashnick, the former associate dean for student and family support; and Susan Chang-Kim, the former vice dean and chief administrative officer.
The suspension of the deans is the latest example of how Ivy League schools have moved to squash any speech critical of Israel or simply challenging the view that students who express pro-Palestinian sentiment are inciting antisemitism.
Columbia has been the spotlight of the student protest movement in solidarity with Gaza over the past several months.
They’ve done a great job of making the word antisemitism become so utterly baseless that I no longer react negatively to hearing it.
As this article reaffirms, it’s now used to refer to anything supportive of Palestinian peoples or critical of Israel.
If I was Jewish I’d be furious with Israel and these lobbyists.
If Deans are being antisemitic, even privately, then the school should fire them. But reading the article, I didn’t see anything antisemitic. Is there additional subtext I’m missing?
Colombia University officially said they believe anti Zionism is antisemitism.
This is ironic because in the opinion piece by Rabbi Hain published in the Columbia student newspaper, he complains that
For years, Columbia’s Palestinian freedom movement has differentiated between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, affirming that one can be critical of Israel without being anti-Semitic. But by using the October 7 attacks as a rallying point for the movement, attendees of the campus rally can no longer argue that their activism differentiates between the two. They are now saying the quiet part out loud: Dead Jews don’t matter.
So here he’s trying to accuse pro-Palestine students for conflating Anti-Zionism and antisemitism, when in fact groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Israel Public Affairs Committee have been doing this exact same thing for years! And now even the US Congress is in on the action.
This is precisely why conflating to two is wrong: it dilutes the term “antisemitism” so much that people start to roll their eyes when they see it being weaponized to silence criticism of Israel, which then makes it harder to protect Jewish people from actual anti-semitic attacks.
