Jewish students sue Columbia University over ‘severe and pervasive’ antisemitism
Jewish students hit Columbia University with another lawsuit Wednesday over claims the prestigious school has allowed “rampant antisemitism” to flourish amid the ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict.
The suit — filed by five students and two nonprofits — alleges that Columbia has not substantially intervened as Jewish hate intensified on campus in the months since the Middle Eastern war broke out.
“Columbia, one of America’s leading universities, has for decades been one of the worst centers of academic antisemitism in the United States,” documents filed in Manhattan federal court states.
“Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people — including infants, children, and the elderly — antisemitism at Columbia has been particularly severe and pervasive.”
The Ivy League was accused of violating its Jewish students’ civil rights by remaining indifferent, therefore enabling, acts of antisemitism on campus — an argument that students have used in recent lawsuits lodged against other top schools, including Harvard University and New York University.
The inequality manifests in a “double standard” that avoids protections for Jewish students from harassment, while Columbia professors teach its student body that Jewish people are historically the “oppressor,” the documents state.
Over the past few months, school officials have allegedly stayed silent as anti-Israel demonstrators disrupted Jewish students’ lives and safety through “violent and exclusionary anti-Jewish rhetoric,” which the students claim has escalated since they returned to classes from their winter break.
Antisemitism controversy at Columbia University: Key events
- Columbia University President Minouche Shafik stepped down on Aug. 14 after facing backlash over the Ivy League’s anti-Israel protests.
- More than 280 anti-Israel demonstrators were cuffed at Columbia and the City of New York campuses in a “massive” NYPD operation a few months ago.
- Over 100 people were nabbed at the Ivy League campus after cops responded to Columbia’s request to help oust a destructive mob that had illegally taken over the Hamilton Hall academic building in April, NYC Mayor Eric Adams and police said.
- Hizzoner blamed the on-campus chaos on insurgents who have a “history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos” instead of protesting peacefully.
- More than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who support the “military action” by Hamas.
Even when the school does intervene, they refuse to punish instigators for breaking school policy rather than for spreading antisemitism, the students claimed.
One example included in the 114-page lawsuit detailed a November rally in which pro-Palestinian marchers shouted “death to Jews” and “f–k Israel” during the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 night Nazi soldiers killed almost 100 Jewish Germans.
Some ralliers even shouted at a rabbi who was trying to peacefully pray with students, according to the lawsuit.
The next day, the school temporarily suspended groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace “not for the groups’ antisemitic rhetoric, harassment, and calls for violence, but for their violations of campus event policies,” the filing states.
The lawsuit also mentioned the antisemitic flier depicting a skunk in the white and blue of the Israeli flag and a Star of David that recently surfaced on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, sparking outrage in the Jewish community.
More than 100 faculty members at Columbia — including 33 at Barnard — signed a letter defending Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre as a “military action.”
School administrators’ alleged silence on the rampant hate has created a vacuum that has since been filled with antisemitism.
“Columbia must now be compelled to implement institutional, far-reaching, and concrete remedial measures. Columbia must also pay damages to plaintiffs — who have been robbed of their college and graduate school experience — to compensate them for the hostility they have been forced to endure as a consequence of Columbia’s unlawful conduct,” the documents state.
Representatives from Columbia University declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The lawsuit is the second of its kind to be filed against the prestigious university this month — last week, a Jewish graduate student claimed the campus experienced an “explosion” of antisemitism since Oct. 7.
Both suits come on the heels of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce expanding its investigation of antisemitism in higher education to include Columbia and Barnard, along with Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights last November opened an investigation into antisemitism or Islamophobia at three New York Schools — Columbia, Cornell and Cooper Union.
Earlier this week, a pro-Jewish alumni group launched a social media ad campaign to pressure Columbia University to aggressively combat antisemitism at its uptown Manhattan campus.
Alums for Campus Fairness said the six-figure advocacy and awareness campaign also targets Columbia-affiliated Barnard College to do more to curb Jewish hatred.
