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How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect
JACKSON, Mississippi — Parishioners pass under large banners reading “Embrace Diversity” and “Serve Others” as they file into Sunday mass at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church just north of town.
The church is where Stephen Spencer Pittman, the 19-year-old arrested for starting a fire at Beth Israel Congregation, was confirmed and where his parents and younger brother still belong.
“Nobody had any idea what was going on or what would happen,” Monsignor Elvin Suds said during his sermon a week after the attack on Beth Israel. “He and his family were altar servers and very normal in all respects.”
That sentiment — that the arson against Jackson’s only synagogue came out of nowhere — has been prevalent among the city’s Jews, who say they’ve experienced little antisemitism and that the crime did not seem to fit neatly into the white supremacist violence that has historically afflicted Jews in Mississippi.
Sarah Thomas, a vice president at Beth Israel, said she was shaken by Pittman’s everyman appearance. “When I first saw his picture, I did start to cry because I was like, ‘This could be anyone,’” Thomas recalled as she stood outside the synagogue library where Pittman allegedly broke through a window with a hatchet. “People can be radicalized in so many ways — but knowing it could be anyone is really scary.”
Even as a team of investigators have pieced together Pittman’s drive from his home in a gated community in nearby Madison to a run-down gas station where he purchased the fuel and removed the license plate, the question of why someone would try to burn down the city’s lone synagogue has remained murkier.
That was the main question Rachel Myers’s Hebrew school students at Beth Israel had the day following the attack; she encouraged them to wait for more information.
The details that trickled out in the days that followed suggested Pittman was driven by antisemitism, telling police that Beth Israel was “the synagogue of Satan.”
But that didn’t explain how a white honor roll student from the local Catholic high school, who had just finished his first baseball season at one of the state’s historically Black colleges, had landed on the antisemitic slogan, decided to strike and found himself in federal court Tuesday clutching a Bible in his heavily bandaged hands after allegedly spilling gasoline on himself while starting the fire.
“Anybody who’s in this area will tell you that if he belonged to a Klan branch and did all that, then you got it, right?” Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has represented Jackson in Congress for the past 30 years, mused during a tour of the damaged synagogue. “But if he played baseball? Went to St. Joe’s? I mean for all intents and purposes that’s an all-American boy.”
A ‘spiritual psychosis’
Most perpetrators of major violence against Jews in recent years have been guided by at least a loose ideology. The shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 had long kept a shotgun by his front door that he trained to aim at the government jackboots he feared would bust down his door, before eventually embracing white supremacist views that blamed Jews for mass immigration. And the man who shot four people at a Chabad in southern California the next year had been radicalized more quickly, but his extremism began with visiting fringe online forums and setting a local mosque on fire after being inspired by the white nationalist who massacred Muslims in New Zealand.
Less is known about the perpetrators of last year’s deadly attacks in Colorado and Washington, D.C., but both suspects allegedly shouted anti-Zionist slogans during the incidents and the suspect charged in the Capital Jewish Museum shooting posted a manifesto justifying violence against supporters of the Israeli government.
Investigators have released little information about Pittman, and law enforcement did not respond to interview requests. But a review of Pittman’s social media presence and conversations with those who know him suggest an extremely rapid turn toward extremism sparked by a mental health crisis that had led him down an erratic online path that included attempts to sell a Bible-inspired fitness plan.
“It just seemed like he had started to go into spiritual psychosis,” said a friend who met Pittman during high school at St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy. “He was a really normal person until a few months ago.”
It’s a profile that defies the simplest political explanations offered by figures like Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar, who initially said the attack was “another step in the globalization of the intifada,” or Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president who said during a prayer vigil in Jackson after the attack that the White House had enabled Pittman’s violence by “other-izing our communities.”
Pittman, though, expressed little interest in politics, according to both his high school friend and his social media activity, which until recently was almost exclusively focused on baseball and hanging out with friends.
“He was actually a really great guy, very genuine, honest,” the high school friend said. “Guy you could talk to about anything and he would listen.”
But another friend told Mississippi Today that Pittman had started to change over the course of several years, beginning to post 10-15 times per day on social media, including images of him speeding down the highway in a Porsche and injecting steroids.
Pittman’s parents first noticed a change at the start of winter break in early December when he arrived home from community college and began behaving in “erratic” ways, according to interviews they gave to the FBI.
Tricia, Pittman’s mother, told police that her son had been scaring the family pets and that she and her husband, Steve, were considering starting to lock their bedroom door at night because they were afraid of their son.
But it wasn’t until around a week before the arson that Pittman began making antisemitic comments, according to FBI Special Agent Ariel Williams, who testified at a court hearing Tuesday during which Pittman pleaded not guilty to the arson.
One friend who worked out with Pittman at a local gym called police after seeing news of the fire at Beth Israel to say that Pittman had said he “wanted to burn down a synagogue” the day before the attack.
A new kind of violence
Shortly after Beth Israel opened a new synagogue building in 1967, with two long wings and an elevated roof at the center meant to evoke the Israelites’ tents, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan as part of a violent campaign against school integration.
As antisemitic violence in Mississippi mounted the following year, the Jewish community raised funds at the behest of the FBI to pay Klan informants, which ultimately helped successfully break up the ring of nighttime bombers.
The 1967 bombing, and a subsequent attack on the rabbi’s house, have become an integral part of Beth Israel’s history and are memorialized on a plaque outside the synagogue that describes Jewish support for the Civil Rights Movement.
But today Jews in Jackson say they experience little to no antisemitism and, at least locally, there’s no organized political movement aligned against them like there was in the 1960s, making the arson especially bewildering.
The members of Beth Israel are committed to rendering the arsonist’s attack irrelevant. The fire, fueled by five gallons of gasoline, destroyed the library and caused structural damage to one wing of the building. And yet W. Abram Orlansky, a former synagogue president, said that no services had been scheduled the Saturday when the fire took place and a local church quickly offered space to hold all of Beth Israel’s scheduled programming while repairs took place. “This guy succeeded at canceling literally zero planned events,” said Orlansky, who grew up in Jackson. “I’m pretty proud of that.”
Some have pondered what Pittman’s motives may have been, though, and they generally figure that whatever drove Pittman to violence must have come from elsewhere — and people had a good hunch as to where.
“It’s that damn phone,” said Vivienne Diaz, a teacher who belongs to Beth Israel.
Pittman certainly spent a lot of time on his phone. He was a prolific social media user with accounts on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. According to a Forward review of his public posts, he did not share any antisemitic content until hours before police say he started the fire at Beth Israel, when he reposted a meme of a cartoon character shoving a Jew into a swimming pool.
His high school friend said that Pittman had never discussed Jews or Judaism until the week leading up to his arrest.
But Pittman followed several Instagram accounts that promoted a forceful brand of Christianity, including The Christianity Pill, which declares “CHRIST IS KING” in its bio — Pittman told the judge “Jesus Christ is Lord” during his initial court hearing — and claims that “Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.”
He followed another account called The Final Stand that boasts it is “spreading what is labeled ‘misinformation’” and warns against a plot by an unnamed group seeking to wipe out Christians. “But we are HEALING,” the account posted in July. “We are waking up from this deep coma we’ve been in since WW2.”
(Pittman’s father told police that he “finally got them” after being confronted about the burns on his hands and ankles the morning after the fire.)
In court Tuesday, Pittman carried a jailhouse Bible and crossed himself several times during the proceeding and bit his nails.
In addition to the Christian content, Pittman engaged with accounts promoting conspiracy theories, like Conspiracy Theories, Inc. and Whispers of Truth, which shares claims that NASA faked the moon landing alongside a defense of Mel Gibson and critique of the World Trade Center’s Jewish owner.
It’s not clear exactly when Pittman began following these accounts or engaging with more overt antisemitic content, like the meme he shared shortly before the attack, but friends and acquaintances say the change appeared to happen sometime over the summer after his first year at college.
During that time, he created a new social media account focused on fitness that he populated with shirtless videos and pleas to help his followers “get shredded” and earn $7,000 per week. He abandoned the account a couple weeks later, around the time he started his second year at Coahoma Community College, a school in the Mississippi Delta where 92% of the students are Black.
On the last day of classes at Coahoma, he registered One Purpose, a website advertising “scripture-backed fitness” that mixed Hebrew terms with advice to limit your diet to “God-made fats.”
Pittman told police that around the same time he began earning money through day trading stocks, though his lawyer dispelled that this was generating any income for his client in court Tuesday: “There is no income.”
An unnamed family friend told a local radio station that Pittman had started struggling with mental health during his third semester at Coahoma this fall and was not planning to return after winter break, a break that his parents — who both work at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — hoped to use to get him psychiatric help.
“They condemn the terrible sin of this incident,” Suds, the priest, said in his sermon. “They’ve lost the son that they knew and loved.”
Pittman’s parents were not at Tuesday’s hearing and did not respond to a request for comment sent to the lawyers representing their son, who goes by Spencer, or to a call at the entrance to their gated community in Madison.
Pittman’s trial is set for Feb. 23. Until then, he was remanded to federal custody.
A difficult crime to prevent
Lone offenders, as investigators have described Pittman, are especially difficult to thwart. But other antisemitic perpetrators have left longer trails that offered the possibility of an earlier intervention. John T. Earnest’s 18-month timeline from his initial radicalization to the shooting at Poway Chabad appears to be common.
The Anti-Defamation League recently traced the radicalization of two school shooters and found that both had followed almost identical online paths leading up to the shooting. One took 18 months, the other 19 months.
Pittman appeared to move faster, although his attack on Beth Israel was limited to property damage.
“We thought it took 19 months,” Lindsay Baach Friedman, the ADL’s regional director covering Mississippi, said in an interview. “But it’s not a far cry to go from 19 months to three months.”
The contraction in time from when a perpetrator of violent extremism starts becoming radicalized to when they act has been shrinking for decades, which can make it harder for the network of organizations that seek to monitor antisemitic threats and prevent them.
“We need to move faster, and we need to be smarter about how we move,” said Michael Masterson, CEO of Secure Community Network. He said one of the most reliable ways to prevent attacks like the Beth Israel arson was for people to report friends or family making suspicious comments or threats, but that can be harder to do when a suspect attacks less than 24 hours after telling someone their plan — in Pittman’s case, telling a workout buddy that he wanted to burn a synagogue.
Masters added that there are growing attempts by online actors to encourage vulnerable people, especially those suffering from mental health issues, to commit violence. “The material we see online increasingly is designed to reach those individuals and motivate them to act,” he said.
Organized antisemitism in Mississippi is much lower than it was the last time Beth Israel was burned in the 1960s, when elements of the state’s powerful white supremacist movement of the era often blamed Jews for desegregation; the ADL tallied just a few dozen incidents in the state over the past few years, mostly stickers placed by a white nationalist organization.
The more diffuse path Pittman took toward allegedly striking the synagogue does not seem to have centered on the kinds of specific arguments about Jews that often animate antisemitic perpetrators — instead it drew more loosely on what Masters described as a “salad bar” of misinformation and conspiracy theories that often includes antisemitism but is much harder to pin down than the ideologies that motivate organized hate groups.
Orlansky, Beth Israel’s former president, said the synagogue had close ties with law enforcement and had been alerted in the past when the FBI noticed warning signs that might have signaled a threat to the congregation.
But Pittman, whose antisemitism only broke into the open in the days before the attack, never seemed to be on their radar.
“I think we did everything that a congregation can reasonably do,” said Orlansky, the former Beth Israel president. “Hate can come from anywhere — that’s my main takeaway.”
The post How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect appeared first on The Forward.
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California man gets 1 year in jail time for 2023 death of pro-Israel protester
(JTA) — A California man who pleaded guilty to the 2023 death of Jewish protester Paul Kessler was sentenced Tuesday to one year in county jail and two years of felony probation, the Ventura County District Attorney announced.
Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, 54, of Moorpark, California, pleaded guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury for the death of Kessler, as part of a plea deal that was sharply criticized by local Jewish leaders.
Alnaji admitted to striking Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish pro-Israel activist, in the head with a megaphone during dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations in a Los Angeles suburb in November 2023. Kessler later died of his injuries. His death became the first tied to U.S. demonstrations surrounding the war in Gaza.
“There are no words to describe the pain of losing a husband in such a sudden and violent way,” Kessler’s wife wrote in an impact statement prior to the sentencing. “The grief is relentless. The silence in our house, the absence of his voice, his companionship, his love and the future we had planned together are losses I carry with me every day.”
Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan said during the June 30 sentencing that he had received 132 emails from community members regarding the case, many of which advocated for a harsher sentence for Alnaji and called the case a murder or hate crime.
Malan said that while he understood that the Jewish community could see his sentence as a devaluing of human life, the case was not “a Jewish life versus a Muslim life,” according to the VC Star.
“When we try to equate a life with a number, we fail,” Malan said during the June 30 sentencing, according to the VC Star. “The rules do support a grant of probation in this case.”
The Anti-Defamation League of California decried the ruling in a post on Instagram, writing that it was “little more than a slap on the wrist and not in proportion with the enormity of this crime.”
“It’s especially concerning that the Court spent much of the sentencing hearing expressing dismay with the letters received from the Jewish community and asking the DA’s Office to correct the perceptions of those who expressed how this woefully inadequate sentence would impact the Jewish community,” the post continued.
Alnaji’s defense attorney, Ron Bamieh, told Malan that his client was a “good person,” and that the November 2023 incident was “isolated,” according to the VC Star. He also read aloud a letter Alnaji wrote to Malan.
“I never wanted to harm anyone,” Bamieh said, reading Alnaji’s letter. “The grief I carry from that day is something I will live with always.”
Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko objected to the sentencing of Alnaji in a statement Tuesday.
“Mr. Kessler lost his life in a violent attack that took him from his family and his wife of 43 years,” Nasarenko said. “Given the circumstances of this case and the death that resulted, we believe a state prison commitment was the appropriate and just sentence.”
Bamieh addressed the ruling in a post on Instagram Tuesday, writing that “Kessler’s death is a tragedy. Nothing about this case changes that, and Dr. Alnaji has never pretended otherwise.”
“The court was clear today: this was never a murder case —no intent to kill could be proven. It was never a hate crime — no evidence of hate,” Bamieh wrote. “It was a battery that led to an accidental, tragic death.”
Rabbi Noah Farkas, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, told JTA in a statement that the case was a “stark reminder that hateful rhetoric has tragic, real-world consequences.”
“While we had hoped for a sentence that more fully reflected the seriousness of the crime, we hope the outcome offers some comfort to Kessler’s family, friends, and the Jewish community,” Farkas said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California man gets 1 year in jail time for 2023 death of pro-Israel protester appeared first on The Forward.
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NY woman charged with attempting to send over $30,000 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad
(JTA) — A New York woman was arrested and charged with attempting to provide financial support to “Palestine Islamic Jihad,” a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.
Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, New York, allegedly sent more than $30,000 in cryptocurrency across 80 transactions to an individual who identified as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter in Gaza and claimed to have engaged in attacks against Israel, according to the Justice Department.
She was charged with attempting to provide material support and resources, namely currency, to a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
“As alleged in the complaint, this defendant, fueled by her self-described hate of Israel and Jewish people, went to great lengths to attempt to provide financial support to terrorist organizations that use violence to further their agendas, including the Palestine Islamic Jihad,” Michael DiGiacomo, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York, said in a statement.
Despite Washburn’s alleged attempts to “support violent extremism,” he added, she was “stopped.”
In February and March 2026, the FBI obtained alleged communications between Washburn and the Islamic Jihad fighter in which she told him that she wished “every day were October 7th.”
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group that attacked Israel alongside Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, during which its fighters abducted and killed Israeli citizens, including Dror Or, who was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri, and Oded Lifshitz, who was killed in captivity, and Gadi Mozes and Arbel Yehud, who were abducted by the group and released in January 2025.
“[I]f I lived in Gaza, I would fight alongside the resistance,” Washburn allegedly wrote, adding that she hated Jews “very much,” and that she wished Israel “would disappear.”
In one message, Washburn allegedly stated, “I feel excited every time I see news of the killing of an occupation soldier.”
Attempts to reach Washburn for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency were unsuccessful.
According to the criminal complaint, Washburn is a leader of the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, an extremist anti-Zionist group. The group, which operates in the United States and abroad, was launched last spring and engages in “direct action” to “protest, attack, destory [sic], sabotage and shut down Zionist and U.S infrastructures & business and all its affiliates,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
In August 2025, an affiliate of the group, Jermaiah Yusuf Sawaqed, 25, of Everett, Massachusetts, was charged with vandalizing the Massachusetts State House with paint.
Washburn made an initial appearance Tuesday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark W. Pedersen and was detained.
The post NY woman charged with attempting to send over $30,000 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad appeared first on The Forward.
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Columbia University pledged to revamp Mideast offerings. Students of the subject say fragmented courses fall short.
New president Jennifer Mnookin took the helm of Columbia University July 1, vowing to chart a steady course following a tumultuous Gaza War protest movement and Trump administration threats to pull funding that led the Ivy to make a controversial pledge for reforms.
The government also threatened a takeover of the department called Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department (MESAAS), which has long been associated with the Palestinian cause and known as a hub for scholarship critical of Israel.
Columbia’s July 2025 agreement, issued in response to allegations that the protests amounted to discrimination against Jews on campus, pledged to “conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting with the Middle East” to ensure offerings are “comprehensive and balanced.”
Nearly a year later, the department has been left untouched, according to its chair, Gil Hochberg.
“No requests, suggestions, recommendations, changes were made or enforced by the university on MESAAS as a department. Our academic autonomy has been respectfully preserved,” she said in an interview with the Forward. “The department itself has not been directly or indirectly affected.”
Columbia has made other moves to offer more courses that cover Israel. But undergraduates who study the region say that fragmentation makes pursuing a major challenging.
Orpaz Zamir, a Middle East Studies major at Columbia who hopes to pursue a career in Mideast policy, said courses focused on the conflict are limited. “If you want to study about Israel and Palestine, there are only two classes you can take,” referring to a sociology course taught by Professor Yinon Cohen and the course taught by Massad. He took both.
Massad, the only professor currently teaching about the conflict in MESAAS, has been the department’s chief lightning rod. His article a day after the Oct. 7 attacks, describing the Israeli victims as “colonists” and videos of the attacks as “awesome,” sparked a petition with 70,000 signatures to remove him from Columbia. Massad, who is tenured, has been teaching the course Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies for years. Among his students was Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former Columbia Gaza encampment leader who last week defeated a longtime New York congressman on an anti-Israel platform and drew criticism for her refusal to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks. As an undergrad, she called Massad her favorite professor.
In Spring 2024, a visiting professor, Mohamad Abdou, was fired amid the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism because of a social media post he made shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks that read: “I’m with the muqawamah [the resistance] be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”
Activist faculty made headlines but also spoke to a broader reality, as identified by an internal Columbia University antisemitism task force that found in its December 2025 report that “Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy, and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.”
The same report concluded: “Many Jewish and Israeli students reported that if they want to study the Middle East at Columbia, there currently are not enough options that don’t treat Zionism and Israel as fundamentally illegitimate.”
Exam questions
Students interviewed by the Forward describe experiences consistent with those findings. Zamir said he found Cohen’s course on Israel more balanced than Massad’s, though concluded the assigned readings disproportionately favored the Palestinian perspectives.
“To the Palestinian side, he would give entire chapters and long readings, and then for the pro-Israel side it would be mostly a few pages of an article,” said Zamir. “There’s one book that they did give to us that was a bit more pro-Israeli, but it was pro-Israeli in the bad sense, like it justified ethnic cleansing. It’s not the kind of thing that I would support.”
In Massad’s course, Zamir saw discussions of the conflict reflect a particular ideological viewpoint.
He recalled Massad questioning evidence of Hamas sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks and disputing claims that Hamas intentionally targets civilians. Zamir also found the questions on exams to be problematic. On one exam, Zamir said, two out of three questions had to do with how Zionism collaborated with the Nazis. On the final exam, one of three questions asked students whether Israel had the right to exist.
“Because he didn’t give any reason in class for why Israel should exist, it’s very hard to answer that question with anything other than ‘no,’” Zamir said. He said he drew on arguments he had learned outside the course to argue that Israel did have that right — and received full credit for the answer.
Zamir noted that despite their ideological differences, Massad made an effort to make him feel welcomed as the only Israeli in the class, even when fellow students didn’t.
Other students interested in the subject described similar difficulties finding courses they viewed as balanced.
“I was looking up every professor and looking pretty scrutinizingly through the description of every class,” said Zev Huneycutt, a rising senior majoring in Middle East studies, economics and political science.
“In the Middle East studies department, when I would look them up, and they’d have leveled this kind of crazy criticism of Israel, and it’s not stuff like, ‘I have some issues with current Israeli government policies,’ it’s stuff that goes a little farther than that. It’s delegitimizing, and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I’m not taking that professor then.’”
In February, as part of the agreement with the federal government, Columbia published an internal review committee’s recommendations and commitments from several academic departments to enhance Middle East-focused offerings — almost all of which are set to occur outside the MESAAS department.
Indeed, the first recommendation from the review committee reads: “Expand coursework on the Middle East … by developing offerings that complement — and are clearly differentiated from — courses offered by MESAAS.”
Hochberg concludes that this is because MESAAS is already fulfilling its mandate. She noted that the department was “rigorously reviewed” both internally and externally in 2024 during the standard review process that takes place for every department at Columbia every eight years.
“It would be very strange to have another, and the university would never do that,” she said, adding that the review done in 2024 generated a file of 20 pages of recommendations detailing the strengths and weaknesses of the department. According to Hochberg, none of the recommendations made in internal and external reviews had to do with how Israel is taught at MESAAS.
Hochberg, who was born in Israel and identifies as an anti-Zionist, has previously taught courses on Israeli culture. Serving as chair of MESAAS for the past six years, she said, administrative responsibilities have required her to step back from teaching those courses, contributing to what she acknowledges as a gap in the department’s offerings on Israel.
She contends much of the criticism of an anti-Israel bias within MESAAS has been overblown. “It’s a very vigorous department,” she said. “The picture of it as being like a propaganda machine, it’s just not fair.”
Arab Studies search
Though Columbia has left MESAAS largely untouched, it has made additions to other departments and institutes, including bringing on a visiting professor in the economics department to teach about the Middle East, and arranging a visiting appointment in the History Department to teach the history of modern Israel. Its School of International and Public Affairs has appointed a visiting professor, jointly with Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, to teach on the Jewish world and Middle East policy with courses beginning this fall.
The university also plans to hire a new Edward Said Professor in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, a tenured position that was vacated last August by Rashid Khalidi, a leading scholar of Palestinian history. Khalidi cited the university’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism as part of its agreement with the federal government — which equates denying Jews their right to self-determination in Israel with antisemitism — as his reason for resigning.
One potential candidate, Max Weiss, was active in Princeton’s pro-Palestinian movement, serving as a spokesperson when faculty occupied Princeton’s Clio Hall in April 2024 and 13 people were arrested. Another, Rosie Bsheer, was removed from her leadership post at Harvard after she organized a panel that former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers described as “very likely” antisemitic under the IHRA definition.
The university also plans to launch a new undergraduate major in Global Affairs and Public Policy, which it says will expand Middle East course offerings. But the proposal has drawn criticism. In a June 15 statement, the Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate, a body that sets campus policy, questioned “the role of the Global Affairs and Public Policy major in regard to the federal resolution agreement’s commitment to offer politically prescribed curricula on the Middle East.”
To help expose students to a range of analyses of the Middle East, the internal review committee encouraged cross-listing among the Jewish studies institute, MESAAS and the proposed new program.
But this upcoming school year, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is offering several courses that pertain to the Middle East, including a course on the history of modern Israel and a course on Jews living in North Africa, that are not cross-listed with MESAAS. (The Institute’s director declined to speak with the Forward, saying that she does not discuss Columbia in the media.)
The only Israel-focused course that MESAAS will cross-list for the upcoming year is the sociology course taught by Cohen.
According to Hochberg, “There are absolutely no political barriers to including courses offered by Jewish and Israel studies in the department, and there never have been.”
She said, “I don’t think it’s a hostile relationship between MESAAS and IIJS. There’s just no substantial relationship. But we do cross-list some courses.”
For Zamir, Columbia’s new reforms are unlikely to address what he views as the underlying problem.
“Adding some classes in the Israel Institute won’t change things, because no one will take a class in the Israel Institute unless they are pro-Israeli to begin with,” he said. “If it’s in the Middle East department, it’s like ‘okay, well, it sounds neutral,’ even though it’s definitely not.”
Lishi Baker, who graduated this spring with a major in history and a specialization in the Middle East, said he largely built his Middle East studies education outside the MESAAS department. He sees the university’s efforts to expand Middle East offerings in other departments as a welcome development.
“A lot of people do what I did, which is study the Middle East through other departments,” Baker said.
He pieced together courses from the History Department, political science, policy school and Jewish studies, ultimately earning a minor in Jewish studies because many of the courses he took related to Israel did not count toward his major.
“I think now, the best place to study the Middle East at Columbia is everywhere but the Middle East Studies Department,” said Baker.
The post Columbia University pledged to revamp Mideast offerings. Students of the subject say fragmented courses fall short. appeared first on The Forward.
