Open Letter to President Claire Shipman from Professor Marianne Hirsch
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is the author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, among many other works.
Dear Claire,
I have been following the very difficult decisions you have had to make in the last months with sympathy for the many considerations you have had to balance as you have been entrusted with the future of the institution. I am writing to you personally, with appreciation for the support you have offered our projects at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, because I have been public about my disappointment and serious worry about the course on which Columbia finds itself. I hope you don’t mind my sharing these with you directly.
I write as a Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a scholar of the Holocaust and genocide. I also write as someone who grew up in communist Romania in a small minority of Jews who, as a child, personally experienced antisemitism (that is, anti-Jewish prejudice, discrimination and hatred). Along with my lifelong feminism, this deeply ingrained background has made me especially attuned to how prejudice and discrimination work and how easily they can be stirred up and nurtured.
I’m afraid that the actions Columbia has taken, hypocritically encouraged by truly antisemitic U.S. government officials, will have the effect of fomenting anti-Jewish prejudice on a large scale. Scholars of racism and antisemitism will tell you that it is extremely dangerous to single out one group for preferential treatment over others. Columbia has singled out Jews on campus, bending over backwards to respond to their experiences since October 2023, while ignoring the concerns of other groups. This is especially true of the large group of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim members of our community who, among a diverse group of students and faculty protesting a brutal war, have been persecuted, vilified and cruelly silenced by the university.
While the agreement with the Trump administration stipulates that Columbia cannot provide special benefits to any group, the university has agreed to do the opposite for Jews. The University has announced that it will appoint faculty in Israel and Jewish Studies (presumably Jews). It will support Jewish life with a special new administrator. It will further elevate the Antisemitism Task Force. It agreed to issue a large pay-out to Jewish students and staff to settle EEOC complaints. It will proceed with mandatory antisemitism training by partisan pro-Israel non-academic organizations. And it has adopted the utterly restrictive IHRA definition of antisemitism that, you have written, will guide disciplinary procedures with “zero tolerance” – contrary to its drafter’s advice and the judgement of over a thousand scholars of antisemitism.
Besides being blatantly contradictory to the basic “non-discrimination”—or, more accurately, anti-DEI – principles Columbia signed on to, this is just the kind of special treatment, or perceived special treatment, that has historically served to foment resentment, prejudice and racialized persecution. Clearly, this is what we are seeing across the country in relation what the right wing is disingenuously describing as preferential treatment of women, queer and trans people, disadvantaged minority groups and immigrants. In singling out Jews in this way, Columbia is amplifying antisemitic tropes about Jewish power rather than combatting anti-Jewish sentiment.
A group of my Jewish colleagues and I have tried over the many months to argue some of these points to Columbia’s administrations to no avail. We now see that the university only recognizes one way of being Jewish in this world: loyal to Israel no matter what—to the point of explicitly denying its crimes against humanity and genocide. It makes us feel unseen and excluded for the different forms of Jewishness we live and espouse. Though we have very different relationships to Israel, we share a commitment to social justice and “never again for all.” We are ready to fight for everyone’s freedom to express opinions and disagreements on Columbia’s campus. And we are horrified by a genocide that is being perpetrated in Gaza through policies of murder, ethnic cleansing and mass starvation that are all too reminiscent of the catastrophic histories of our own people.
I hope you will consider the frightening effects of Columbia’s agreement as you proceed with it. There are several concrete steps that could minimize the harm and I urge you to consider them. First, I don’t believe that the adoption of the IHRA definition is written into the agreement. My colleagues and I have demonstrated how the definition’s uses will affect our teaching. Columbia has already lost important courses as a consequence of your announcement. I think there is still time to reconsider this announcement, and to use the Jerusalem Declaration that a number of Columbia faculty have signed instead. Second, to be in any way credible in a university, any mandatory training must be vetted by experts in the field of antisemitism and of such trainings. Please do appoint such a committee and assure the campus that at least some of the implementation of the agreement will have some scholarly oversight.
In a broader sense, Columbia does not have to be in the position in which we find ourselves. Our university could accept political protest as part of the practice of democratic world citizenship. It could encourage solidarity, rather than enmity, among the diverse members of our community. It could allow us all to express our views freely, to learn and to change our minds without being policed and punished. It could express its care for all those who are, right now, experiencing fear and despair. Columbia could still be on the right side of history.
Sincerely,
Marianne
Professor Hirsch,
As a Holocaust scholar and child of Holocaust survivors, your words carry weight, which makes your letter all the more disturbing.
There is a fundamental difference between fighting for peace and justifying terrorism. Conflating the two reveals a failure of both moral clarity and analytical reasoning. In your letter, you collapse the distinction between peaceful protest and terrorist propaganda. Instigators of campus unrest and violence, CUAD and others, have openly justified the most barbaric acts imaginable: rape, the beheading of babies, the murder of civilians. Not only by denying these atrocities, but worse, by rationalizing them as “resistance” and calling for a globalized genocide against Jews. They repeat and amplify Hamas propaganda, dressing atrocity in the language of liberation and presenting terror as a political tool. By echoing this rhetoric (whether knowingly or not) you become its conduit. You are not defending justice. You are defending the indefensible.
We must be able to distinguish peaceful protest from terrorist propaganda. If we are to have any hope of peace, we must condemn all forms of hate and refuse to justify terrorism in the name of liberation. We must begin with the courage to say: this is wrong.
You invoke “never again for all,” as if specificity excludes others. But just as Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean other lives don’t, Never Again for the Jewish people does not exclude anyone. It reflects the unique horror of a genocide aimed at erasing Jews from the earth and the moral imperative to recognize and prevent that hatred when it resurfaces. Diluting that history doesn’t universalize it. It erases it.
You describe Columbia’s implementation of legally mandated reforms following verified Title VI and Title VII violations, as “preferential treatment” for Jews. In reality, those reforms are a long-overdue response to the university’s repeated, systemic failure to protect Jewish students and faculty amid escalating antisemitism. Calling this “special treatment” is not scholarship. It is victim-blaming cloaked in the misappropriated language of justice, used to excuse bigotry rather than confront it. What you call “persecution” is, in fact, the university finally enforcing its own rules against harassment, hate speech, and disruption. To suggest that Jewish safety comes at the expense of others is to pit communities against one another, a classic tactic of bad-faith ideology masquerading as equity.
You dismiss the federal agreement as a product of the “Trump administration,” but its President Biden’s administration laid the entire foundation for serious federal action against antisemitism. His team launched the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, mobilizing over 100 concrete actions across government, funding a new Holocaust education center, and allocating $400 million to secure Jewish institutions. His Department of Education clarified that Title VI protects Jewish students, issued specific enforcement guidance, and opened dozens of investigations, including against Columbia. His Executive Order 13899 ordered agencies to identify civil and criminal tools to address campus antisemitism. Far from a partisan invention, the agreement reflects the very framework Biden established. Trump’s appointees may have signed it, but Biden’s administration made it necessary. Denouncing the agreement as a partisan conspiracy is not only false, it erases the lived experience of the very Jews you claim to speak for. Columbia’s agreement does not silence criticism of Israel. It does not elevate Jews above others. It simply ensures that Jews, like Black, Muslim, LGBTQ+, and all others, are not harassed, marginalized, or punished for their identity or beliefs.
Your broader argument rests on the same dangerous logic that underpins this dismissal. You demand academic freedom while calling for the censorship of Israel-related instruction that doesn’t align with your political views. You claim that protecting Jewish students may inflame antisemitism. In doing so, you echo the oldest antisemitic trope of all: that Jews are responsible for the hatred directed at them. You equate Israel’s existential fight for survival with genocide: precisely the kind of distortion the IHRA definition of antisemitism was created to identify.
You are entitled to your views. But you are not entitled to redefine antisemitism to fit an ideological framework that excuses hatred and targets Jews for exclusion. Your letter is not a defense of academic freedom. It is a manifesto of ideological conformity that punishes dissenting Jewish voices, a moral inversion that blames victims for their own persecution, and a form of internalized antisemitism.
I invite you to join in the hard but necessary work of defending every group from hatred, including Jews. That work begins with moral clarity and the courage to name hatred when we see it.
Hi, everyone. I'm going to turn off comments to this post now. I think everyone's had their say. I'll have mine and that'll be that.
Professor Genkin: Thank you for engaging with the post. It was helpful to see you lay out your thinking. It seems to me that you genuinely believe all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, including when it comes from Jews (I, too, am Jewish). You ask why so many people are critical of Israel but not Iran or Hamas. For people in the U.S., including at Columbia, the answer is very simple: Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization; Iran is subject to massive U.S. sanctions and occasional military attack (we bombed them just last month, if I recall correctly). Israel, on the other hand, is a very close U.S. ally who receives billions in military aid, no questions asked, and whose Prime Minister regularly addresses sessions of Congress. We, as Americans, have an extremely close relationship with Israel, and potentially a lot of leverage; we do not have a similarly close relationship with Hamas.
You urge us to speak with the supposedly peaceful protesters at Columbia and find out what they really think. Many of us has been doing so for the last year and a half. These are our students. Some of them are young and intemperate; sometimes they use language and imagery that we think crosses the line, and we have said so. (See this letter from Jewish faculty about the disruption of Prof. Avraham Shilon's class last year: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025/01/22/letter-to-the-editor-faculty-denounce-class-disruption-and-hate-speech-at-recent-protest/) But overall we have found the students to be deeply passionate, idealistic, thoughtful, and, yes, peaceful.
Our own antisemitism task force last year commissioned a survey of student experiences over the last year. I urge you to read the results. (https://www.columbia.edu/content/sites/default/files/content/Documents/Columbia-Student-Survey-Report-June-2025.pdf) In question after question, Jewish students *and* Muslim students reported similar levels of discomfort and exclusion, with some slight variations. Clearly, many Israeli and Jewish students are traumatized by Hamas's actions on October 7, 2023; just as clearly, many Muslim students (as well as a healthy minority of Jewish students, of whom I am very proud) have been horrified by the Israeli assault on Gaza in response. Both sets of students--and at a far greater rate than their peers--have been having a tough time over the last year and a half. And yet, in communications from the President's office, over and over, antisemitism has been highlighted, and the experience of Muslim and Palestinian students has been ignored. When the Trump administration cut off funding to the school, they did so with the claim that Columbia had not done enough to address antisemitism--a claim bolstered by the letter from Columbia faculty that you participated in.
Either our students (and faculty) have a right to speak--including to say things that we don't like or agree with--or they do not. If they have that right, let's defend it. If they don't, then we are going to continue living in a world where our students are arrested, threatened with deportation, suspended for *years* for protesting in Butler; and on and on. That's not a world I want to live in.