A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.
Competing factions on campus and beyond are pushing for two different definitions. The first, favored by the U.S. State Department and many supporters of Israel, says “targeting of the state of Israel” could be antisemitic, a definition that could label much of the pro-Palestinian activism sweeping campus as antisemitic.
The second is narrower. It distinguishes between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and could lead to criticism that the school is not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
The debate over the definitions has become a lightning rod for the Columbia task force and for other universities around the country. The task force is charged with “understanding how antisemitism manifests on campus” and improving the climate for Jewish faculty and students. But the refusal to pick a definition has also been met with harsh criticism on both sides.
“If you don’t diagnose the problem, you don’t have to deal with it,” said Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor who is Israeli and favors the stricter definition. He added, “Saying we don’t want to define it so we don’t have a problem, that’s copping out.”
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist faculty and students, quite a few of whom are Jewish, fear that without a definition, the antisemitism task force could be too sweeping in the speech and activity it seeks to regulate.
Columbia’s dilemma illustrates the broad challenge universities are facing as they attempt to walk a line between protecting free speech and avoiding discrimination lawsuits from Jewish students.
Universities are also facing enormous outside pressure. Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and the co-chairs of its board of directors have been called to testify at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on April 17. Ms. Shafik did not attend the contentious December hearing where the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania struggled to answer questions about whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate school policies.
Columbia has already been sued in a federal civil rights lawsuit, filed by more than a dozen Jewish students, which describes the university as an institution where “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty march by the hundreds shouting vile antisemitic slogans, including calls to genocide.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators dispute that chants like “By any means necessary” and “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution” are antisemitic calls to genocide.
For the task force, the university chose three Jewish professors as co-chairs because they are seasoned senior faculty who know how Columbia works. They are not academic experts in antisemitism research, however.
The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable.
“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”
“Our job is not to define antisemitism,” he said, adding, “Our job is to listen to them, make them feel that somebody at Columbia cares about them, and to try to figure out what is causing this great discomfort and distress, and whether anything can be done to ameliorate it that’s consistent with the values of the university.”
Pro-Israel Jewish advocacy groups have been pushing for years for organizations and governments to adopt the more sweeping definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which wraps in anti-Zionist speech. Since 2016, it has been endorsed by more than 40 countries, including Israel.
There is no dispute about the core of the definition — antisemitism, it states, is a “certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred” toward them. But its examples about Israel can be broadly interpreted, in ways that critics say would unfairly silence political criticism.
For example, the definition says that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” could be antisemitic.
Left-wing Jews often support the newer, Jerusalem Declaration definition, which takes a more tolerant approach toward criticism of Israel, including toward boycotts and sanctions of the Jewish state. Another definition, known as the Nexus Document, stands in the uneasy middle.
At Harvard and Stanford, antisemitism task force members have faced harsh criticism for not supporting the more sweeping definition; that tension was one reason the co-chair of the task force at Stanford decided to resign.
At Columbia, the task force chairs are trying to avoid falling into a similar trap. But fighting something without defining it could prove difficult.
“If you want to understand any issue and any problem, you need to have an understanding of what it is,” said Dov Waxman, an expert on antisemitism at UCLA. “You can’t count something if you’re not able to understand what it is.”
He recommended that the Columbia task force refer to more than one definition, as the Biden administration did last year in outlining its antisemitism strategy. The task force has not ruled out such a step, Mr. Lemann said.
Some of the Columbia task-force listening sessions on campus have become tense. At a March 1 session with graduate students, for example, several anti-Zionist Jews demanded to know what the definition of antisemitism would be and whether their views would be included in it.
Ester Fuchs, an urban studies professor and task force co-chair, interrupted them and became hostile, four students charged in a subsequent letter to Ms. Shafik and other administrators in which they called on Professor Fuchs to be replaced on the task force by an anti-Zionist.
Caitlin Liss, a Jewish graduate student who signed the letter, said she is part of a “long Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism” that includes many students at the school. But, she said, “you would never know that on campus from the way that the administration talks about it, from the way that the task force talks about it.”
Professor Fuchs said the students “attempted to disrupt the session and ignore its purpose — to listen to students’ concerns and experiences with antisemitism on campus.”
Joseph Howley, a Jewish classics professor and supporter of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement, was invited to attend a listening session, but didn’t go. “I have no reason to believe I’ll be taken seriously,” he said. In the end, only a few of the roughly 40 faculty members who had been invited to a listening session intended for critics of Israel attended.
In another session, Amy Werman, a professor at the School of Social Work who supports Israel, brought up a question about whether the task force might just be window dressing to appease Congress.
“Ester, oh, boy, she did not take to that kindly,” she said, referring to Professor Fuchs. “I would almost say I felt like she was attacking me.”
Professor Fuchs disputed that and said she had replied: “You obviously don’t know us. We have never been window dressing, and we don’t intend to be now.”
Still, at least some Jewish students who have felt ostracized or unsafe on campus have found the listening sessions helpful, said Rebecca Massel, a sophomore who covers antisemitism for The Columbia Spectator.
“It’s been an outlet for students to raise concerns,” she said.
The task force is now hiring a research director to develop a study on antisemitism at Columbia and recommend training materials for the university.
Earlier this month, it issued its first report. The 24-page document called for additional limits on protests and better enforcement of existing rules, to address a key complaint of Jewish students who say the environment at Columbia has become intolerable.
Protests were the first focus, Professor Fuchs said, because they are the “most overtly disruptive to life on campus and make people feel like they’re unsafe, like they’re unwelcome and they should find another place to go to school.”
As for whether some common anti-Israel protest chants like “Death to the Zionist State” could amount to discriminatory harassment of Jewish or Israeli students, the report largely punted, saying that was ultimately a question for lawyers.
“We urge the university to provide more guidance on the meaning of ‘discriminatory harassment,’ including antisemitic harassment,” the report said.
