In a congressional hearing, lawmakers grill school officials over their response to anti-Semitism.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik said in a congressional hearing on April 17 that calling for the annihilation of Jews violates the Ivy League school’s code of conduct, as she came under fire over the university’s response to growing on-campus anti-Semitism since Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In the attack, Hamas killed and raped Israelis and took Israeli hostages, resulting in the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
At the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, in response to the question by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) of whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct,” Ms. Shafik—along with Columbia Law School professor David Schizer and Board of Trustees Co-Chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman—said, “Yes, it does.”
This was in contrast to a hearing held by that committee on Dec. 6, 2023, when then-University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth refused to unequivocally say that calling for the genocide of Jews is harassment or bullying, instead saying the issue is a “context-dependent decision.”
The question—whether calling for the genocide of Jews is harassment or bullying—came from House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
On April 16, Ms. Bonamici was one of 44 lawmakers to vote against a House resolution stating that the Palestinian rallying cry of “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is anti-Semitic and condemnable.
That slogan is a call for ”the eradication of the State of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea“ that ”seeks to deny Jewish people the right to self-determination and calls for the removal of the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland,” the resolution stated.
However, despite saying that calling for the genocide of Jews is harassment, Ms. Shafik sidestepped when asked whether mobs of people shouting “from the river to the sea” or “long live the Intifada” are being anti-Semitic. She said that she finds those phrases to be “upsetting” and that “it’s a difficult issue.”
