People Hate Dead Nazis

Last week, keffiyeh-clad “pro-Palestine” protesters at Columbia University stormed the university’s Butler Library — occupying it, defacing it, vandalizing the walls, and refusing to leave until police dragged them out in handcuffs.

By now, stories like this are familiar enough to be unremarkable, but one detail stands out. The students who “occupied” the Butler Library demanded that the name “Butler” be removed from the building, calling him a fascist who “dined with Nazis.”

I was skeptical when I heard this claim. After all, it doesn’t take much to get a dead white guy canceled in such circles. But after some cursory Googling, I discovered to my surprise that the claim is at least partially true. 

According to historian Stephen H. Norwood, the late Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) failed to “grasp the nature and implications of Nazism,” a fact attributed by some to his privately expressed antipathy towards Jews. 

The irony is hard to miss. Here is a protest movement that clutches its pearls over the fact that Columbia’s library is named after a Jew-hater and Nazi sympathizer from the early 20th century while actively celebrating those who kill Jews today.

I’m not exaggerating. After the death of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacres, anti-Israel Columbia student groups praised him, calling him a martyr and sharing digital copies of his book online and posting pictures of him alongside “inspiring” quotes attributed to the terrorist. 

So, again, to be clear, naming a library after a largely forgotten college president who privately sneered at Jews is an unforgivable breach, while celebrating the man who ordered the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust is kosher. Got it. 

Naming a library after a largely forgotten college president who privately sneered at Jews is an unforgivable breach, while celebrating the man who ordered the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust is kosher. Got it. 

Columbia activists have also embraced the red triangle symbol, used by Hamas to mark Jewish targets. Though people claim this is merely a “pro-Palestinian symbol,” it was only popularized when Hamas began using it to mark military targets in November of 2023, making the association with the terror group hard to dismiss. 

The symbol not only visually recalls the Nazis’ use of inverted triangles, but is used for similar ends — humiliation and intimidation. In the past year-and-a-half, it has been painted on Jewish homes and on the front doors of university administrators.

To his credit, Nicholas Murray Butler did eventually condemn Nazism, even if it took him a while to do so. The event which prompted this condemnation was Kristallnacht, when the violent implications of the Nazi movement could no longer be denied or covered over.

Oct. 7 — when Hamas raided Israel to slaughter young people dancing at a party, rape women as they murdered them, and kidnap hundreds of innocent people — should have been a similar wake-up call to all those who thought that Hamas’ movement was some sort of plucky anticolonial freedom fight instead of a bloody, bigoted war on Jewish existence.

But it wasn’t. In fact, for these protesters, Oct. 7 only fueled their enthusiasm for Hamas’ cause.

All of this calls to mind Dara Horn’s important book, “People Love Dead Jews,” about the tendency to afford sympathy to dead Jews like Anne Frank while withholding it from living Jews.

As Horn writes, “the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world — as opposed to those who knew and loved her — lay in her lack of a future.”

A follow-up to this book might be called “People Hate Dead Nazis.”

For whatever reason, these activists love to condemn the Jew-killers of the past while cheerleading and making excuses for the Jew-killers of today.

I’d point out to them that it’s possible to support the Palestinian people without championing Hamas, but I doubt they would listen. What’s more, I suspect that for many of these protesters, supporting Hamas is the whole point.

Which means that their claims about caring about human life, similar to their claims about opposing Nazis like Butler, should be dismissed as hypocritical posturing.

Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.