Columbia University president Minouche Shafik told the House Education and Workforce Committee in a Wednesday hearing on campus antisemitism that a professor who glorified Hamas’s October 7 attack as “awesome” no longer runs a university committee.
Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), after a quick Google search, found that professor Joseph Massad of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department is still listed as the chair of Columbia’s Arts and Sciences Academic Review Committee.
Only one day after Hamas attacked Israel, Massad wrote an article on the Electronic Intifada website describing the massacres as “stunning,” “awesome,” remarkable,” and said the violence resulted in “jubilation and awe.” He wrote that Israelis “may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.”
Representative Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Shafik whether the university had disciplined Massad, who Walberg mentioned has also called Israelis “cruel and bloodthirsty colonizers” and Jews who move to Israel and serve in its military “baby-killing Zionist Jewish volunteers.” He pointed out that a 2005 internal Columbia investigation corroborated allegations from students that Massad yelled at Jewish students who questioned his views to get out of his classroom.
Shafik, after telling Walberg she condemns Massad’s description of October 7, said that “when faculty behave in any discriminatory fashion at Columbia, there are consequences. We take them out of the classroom if necessary.” When asked whether Massad had faced any action from the university as a result of his statements, she said he had been “talked to” but declined to tell the committee whether he had been removed from the classroom.
Clearly attempting to avoid the situation former Harvard University president Claudine Gay and former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill found themselves in after the December hearing on antisemitism on their campuses, Shafik told the committee that calls for the genocide of Jews do violate Columbia’s policies.
However, when Representative Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) asked whether the “long live the intifada” chant often heard at Columbia protests is antisemitic, Shafik did not answer the question, instead saying she personally finds them “very upsetting.”
David Schizer, chair of the university’s task force on antisemitism, answered the question directly, saying that the chant is indeed antisemitic.
Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who has a history of antisemitic remarks herself, characterized Columbia protesters who chanted slogans like “long live the intifada,” “there is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “from New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada” as “anti-war,” not antisemitic.
Shafik initially agreed with Omar’s assessment that there have been no anti-Jewish protests on Columbia’s campus, despite the chair of the university’s antisemitism task force describing those slogans as inherently antisemitic.
Schizer said, after Stefanik followed up on the question, that there have indeed been anti-Jewish, antisemitic events on campus. Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, the co-chairs of Columbia’s board of trustees, said the same. Upon being asked again, this time by Stefanik, whether those chants constitute “anti-Jewish protest,” Shafik said that, while students yelling “F the Jews” (though the students did not censor themselves like Stefanik did) and “death to the Zionist state” is anti-Jewish, she would not characterize the protests as anti-Jewish because the organizers did not labeled them as such.
