Jewish Students Are Paying the Price of Columbia’s Failures

Within a few short days, the scenes at Columbia University, my alma mater, have escalated from meddlesome to downright hostile, threatening, and antisemitic. Despite the insistence of so-called activists that the members of the “Gaza Liberation Encampment,” as they’ve coined the zone of tents, signs, and keffiyehs in front of the campus library, are merely peaceful protesters, a steady stream of videos has emerged of Jewish students being targeted and harassed. Notable examples include mobs telling Jews to “go back to Poland” and “stop colonizing,” hordes marching towards “Zionists” trying to enter the encampment and chanting in unison that they will “push them out” so they don’t “destruct their community,” and a blonde-keffiyeh clad woman, identified as Isabella Giusti, the daughter of millionaires from Georgia, standing in front of a Jewish group with a sign reading “Al-Qassem’s Next Targets.”

The scenes are a deep moral stain on the university, which bears full responsibility for creating a culture in which such open antagonism can freely fester. This despicable culture didn’t happen overnight—it is the result of countless horrible decisions by university management, from the professors who freely spew antisemitic rhetoric to the trustees who accepted millions of dollars from Qatar. Their culpability is a lasting shame—and the greatest disgrace is the way Jewish students must pay the price of their failures with their on-campus safety. Far from rushing to rectify their self-made situation, the administration of Columbia University is still failing to act appropriately, leaving the students of the Gaza Liberation Encampment free to act unfettered while footage emerges nightly of their insane behavior and targeted antisemitic threats.

This despicable culture didn’t happen overnight—it is the result of countless horrible decisions by university management, from the professors who freely spew antisemitic rhetoric to the trustees who accepted millions of dollars from Qatar. 

One might ask, why has the NYPD not stepped in to help Jewish students and quell the campus unrest? After an initial wave of student arrests, the university now apparently refuses to allow the NYPD onto campus to remedy the situation, despite its well-documented escalation into antisemitic harassment. In his statement condemning the hate speech on campus, Mayor Eric Adams made clear note of the university’s unwillingness to call in the police to restore security—let alone make arrests—pointing out that Columbia is a “private institution on private property” and therefore that “the NYPD cannot have a presence on campus unless requested by senior university officials.”

Instead, the university’s plan for keeping Jewish students safe seems to be relying on the internal security force, who have proven lamely ineffective not only at lowering the intimidating tenor inside Columbia’s gates but also at enforcing the campus lockdown meant to keep bad actors out of the school in the first place. Just take the videos that emerged Saturday night of Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of Within Our Lifetime, a “pro-Palestinian” organization that routinely celebrates violence, antisemitism, and terror, leading a crowd in front of the school’s library in a chant of “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution.” Kiswani’s inflammatory presence on campus, when she is obviously not a student who holds a Columbia ID, underscores the administration’s clear inability to enforce even its own middling policies, leaving Jewish students vulnerable to the incursion of hostile figures from outside the school.

The university was happy to ban one “protester” from campus, however—the Jewish Israeli professor Shai Davidai, who has been tirelessly exposing the antisemitism at Columbia. Davidai’s ID was deactivated by campus officials, preventing him from walking through campus or entering any buildings beyond the business school where he still teaches class, with Columbia’s COO writing in an email that his presence was an “obvious risk to the safety of students. “Meanwhile, the same morning that Davidai was banned, the pro-terror professor Mohammed Abdou, who notoriously endorsed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad right after the October 7 attack, was still roaming the Liberation Encampment and freely engaging with students. And the same morning, signs still abounded across the tents with slogans like “Glory to He Who Makes the Occupier Taste Bitterness” and “A Message to the Scum of Nations and Pigs of the Earth,” a line taken from the manifesto of the Palestinian terrorist group Lion’s Den.

The Columbia administrators have clearly lost control. Their cowardice and inability to act has ceded the campus to the antisemitic mobs, who delight in making Jewish students feel unwelcome and unsafe. The university must end this situation now—ideally by first imposing their own disciplinary measures on students, expeling and immediately revoking campus access for those who do not cooperate, even if there are dozens, and then by sending in the NYPD or even the National Guard if they continually fail to comply. Once the encampment is dealt with, Columbia must then turn to the much more difficult challenge of fixing its culture of hate masked as progressivism. Hateful professors who stoke violence must be fired, students who violate policies must be appropriately disciplined, and Jewish students must receive the same protection and attention from university officials as they would extend to any other marginalized group, rather than the clear double standard of neglect that has so far been happening.

Just imagine if there was an angry mob calling for black students to “go back to Africa” because they “have no culture,” or if a white woman was standing in front of a group of black students with a sign reading “KKK’s next victims.” The university—and the student body—would go into overdrive remedying the problem and disciplining the bad actors, and for good reason. But there is no ideological consistency when it comes to slights against Jewish students, who are not only ignored but are also, to use the language of the left, gaslit by their peers and the broader university while they invalidate and minimize the impact of antisemitic harassment. The double standard between Columbia’s treatment of all other marginalized groups and the way it treats Jews is sickening, and remedying it through the equal application of discipline and morals is another good step in fixing its long-rotting problems.

But the double standard also comes from students leading the protests, who want to have it both ways—to espouse violent rhetoric and call for sophisticated political action like adults, and to escape consequences like children. Columbia University must tell them that this is no longer acceptable—despite the arts-and-crafts signs and call-and-response songs in the encampments, these students are adults, not overgrown children, and they must face full accountability for their actions. While it may take generations for the university to undo all the damage it has done, the project of enforcing rules, holding bad actors accountable, and making Jewish students safe can—and should—start today.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician whose family escaped to America from Iran. She stars in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Skin Decision: Before and After.“