A Tale of Three Israel Classes at Columbia University

It's the worst of times

A sample flyer distributed by student-terrorists at a History of Modern Israel class at Columbia in January 2025

If you’re a student at Columbia and wish to enroll in a course on Israel, here are your choices this semester:

• History of Modern Israel with Israeli historian Dr. Avi Shilon

• Zionism with Jewish studies scholar Dr. Benjamin Berman-Gladstone

• Zionism with Jordanian “October 7th was awesome” Dr. Joseph Massad

I have already written about why the latter choice is a major problem. Now, I wish to compare what I’ve witnessed with the three courses above as an alumna observing from afar, and let my readers decide what Columbia should do.

In the weeks preceding the Spring semester, the announcement of the Zionism class taught by a raging antisemite sparked quite a kerfuffle throughout the global Jewish community. Since I took Zionism as a student many years ago taught by a now-retried professor, I was curious to compare the course material for the new Spring 2025 courses—you know, “research.”

First I had to obtain the syllabi, a process that is actually relevant to the context of this article. I emailed both Dr. Massad and Dr. Berman-Gladstone separately saying that I was an alumna who had taken courses from their departments during my time there and was interested in their current material. In the message to Massad, I added the fib that my one regret during my tenure as a student there was not taking one of his courses and that I was interested in using the readings to start an anti-Zionist book club in my community.

Dr. Berman-Gladstone responded in minutes gladly offering me the syllabus. Dr. Massad did not respond at all. I didn’t give up there, however. I reached out to the administrative assistant for the Middle Eastern studies department, who informed me that the material was not available “unless the professor wishes to make it so.” I then contacted

Shai Davidai

, the current de facto quasi-spokesperson for Jews at Columbia, who replied that the syllabus information for the course was not listed on the university’s database. Finally, I asked Dr. Berman-Gladstone if he had access to it, figuring that sometimes professors teaching similar content share their course materials with each other (wishful thinking in this situation, I know).

I think it goes without saying that I was not able to get a copy of Massad’s syllabus. It doesn’t appear that any faculty or staff at Columbia other than Massad knows what he will be teaching this semester in his ‘Zionism’ course. His silence and his unwillingness to make his material public is a cowardly admission of guilt. What a pathetic way of being.

Since Dr. Berman-Gladstone did kindly send me his syllabus, I would like to acknowledge that his course covers exactly what I wish mine did “back in the day”: a variety of diverse Zionist voices from all over the world. In my Zionism class, we discussed writers like Vladmir Jabotinsky, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Mordecai Kaplan—all Ashkenazi men from the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Here is a partial list of the topics that Berman-Gladstone’s course covers:

• The Ottoman Empire and the Origins of Zionist Thought

• Zionism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Igbo contexts

• Zionist Thought in its Western and Central European Incarnations

• Iraq, Iran, and India: Diasporas, Diplomacy, and Zionist Undergrounds

Dr. Berman-Gladstone corrected that problem of Eurocentricity in discussions of modern Zionism. He is performing a public service because his content goes in direct opposition to this preposterous idea infecting the West that Israel and Zionism are dominated by “white oppressor” ideals.

Let’s fast-forward to the first day of the Spring 2025 semester. At the first class meeting for Dr. Shilon’s history course, this happened:

jewhatedb

A post shared by @jewhatedb

I want you to take note of how calm and polite Dr. Shilon remains when he confronts the student-terrorists. He first offers to talk to them outside, and then welcomes them to sit down and stay if they “want to learn.” What ever happened to “GTFO and don’t come back”? I suspected that part of the reason that the instructor acted this way was because he was afraid as a newly arrived visiting professor from northern Israel (“I escaped Hezbollah rockets to teach in the USA and all I got was this lousy antisemitism”) of being perceived as racist/aggressive/genocidal on the first day of class. Here is what he told the Times of Israel about it:

“I didn’t know how to react because if you would be aggressive they can claim that you pushed them or something, and if you’re going to be more calm they can continue, so I suggested to them to join the class and to learn about the conflict,” he says. “They just shouted ‘genocide,’ ‘criminals,’ and didn’t reply.”

One of the major problems as I see it is that these demonstrators are getting handled with kid gloves from basically every authority figure they encounter. Dr. Shilon was too patient in this scenario. From what I’m seeing, none of the “consequences” that these cretins have faced—if any—during the last 15 months have had the effect of changing their behavior. It’s why they exaggerate everything that happens to them. Fart spray is now a “chemical weapon.” A country at war is now “committing genocide.” Law enforcement doing the basics of their job is the “KKK.”

Disrupting a class on the basis of the ethnicity and national origin of the students and the instructor is a clear civil rights violation, and no student or family should be paying $90,000/year for that. None of these student-terrorists have ever had to face real consequences for anything they’ve ever done, and those people on the receiving end of their hate have not been aggressive enough in confronting them. Calling them out on social media only does so much. There’s no other way to say this: the Jews need to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with these people. Call me Machiavellian, but perhaps sometimes it’s better to be more feared than loved.

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