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Behind the ADL’s effort to get beyond shouting statistics about antisemitism in America

Asaf Elia-Shalev reports from Los Angeles for JTA

When Matt Williams founded a research centre for the Anti-Defamation League in 2022, he vowed to “ruthlessly and systematically test” what the organization does. Antisemitism was on the rise, and he wanted the Center for Antisemitism Research to scientifically study what could work to stop it.

The creation of the centre, he believed, represented an admission that one of the world’s most prominent voices against antisemitism had been operating with little evidence.

“I would go a step further and say the ADL wants to be a serious nonprofit, measured on our social return on investment, but by a lot of measures, we’ve not been doing well,” Williams said in an interview, citing spiking antisemitism, rising extremism and the erosion of democratic norms around the world. 

The ADL established the new centre amid mounting pressure from funders and trustees, he added. “The level of tolerance for having no solutions is low right now,” Williams said. “Our Board of Trustees is very serious about ruthlessly holding us accountable to whether or not we’re solving the problems that we set out to solve.”

Here’s how the person recently elected as ADL’s board chair put it: “Flagging and monitoring and measuring antisemitism is important, but by itself will not reverse trends towards extremism, bias and radicalism in American or global society,” Nicole Mutchnik said in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

Now, with a staff of nine and about 70 affiliated researchers at universities around the country, the research program overseen by Williams is starting to flex its scholarly might. It recently unveiled, for example, the first scientific study in decades that focuses on anti-Jewish discrimination in hiring.  

Previous studies by the centre showed that antisemitic attitudes are more strongly correlated with conspiratorial beliefs than any other factor. So, now, it has partnered with a team of university researchers to examine whether correcting misinformation can make a difference.

“We’ve found that we have a better shot at reducing antisemitism by teaching people how to deal with misinformation and disinformation than we have with much of the anti-bias work that we’ve done previously,” Williams said. “Thinking of antisemitism as a digital literacy problem as opposed to a civil rights problem is a big change for ADL.” 

Alarm about antisemitism in recent years has driven a doubling of donations to the ADL, topping $100 million in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available. It has also sparked the creation of dozens of new organizations and initiatives, including some that are directly critical of the ADL’s approach or are trying to fill perceived gaps.

Many, including Bari Weiss, author of How to Fight Antisemitism, prescribe embracing Judaism and Jewish pride. Others are looking to tech for solutions. At least one group focuses on naming and shaming alleged antisemites online. Author Dara Horn says the answer lies in deemphasizing the Holocaust and educating the public about living Jews and their culture. Jewish communal organizations have also poured millions of dollars into physical security measures at schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

The Biden administration in 2023 published a plan featuring hundreds of detailed recommendations, many of which are modeled on ADL’s platform. The plan proposes, for example, streamlined hate crime reporting at all levels of law enforcement and more accommodation for Jewish religious observance in the workplace. 

On the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther proposes a government crackdown on anti-Israel groups once Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Meanwhile, left-wing groups like Diaspora Alliance and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice say that effectively responding to antisemitism requires building solidarity with Palestinians and other groups they view as oppressed.

Even as viewpoints and tactics vary, there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that fighting antisemitism must mean more than sounding the alarm about the issue. As a result, the search for evidence-based solutions, grounded in social science research, is starting to gain traction. 

“We need to be moving more research resources into what’s working and what’s not working,” Holly Huffnagle, the U.S. director for combating antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “Many of us in the Jewish world are talking about this.”

Huffnagle said the AJC, considered a peer to the ADL in terms of size and legacy, doesn’t currently sponsor academic, peer-reviewed research, but that such a program could transform the work of her organization.  

“If we find that our interventions aren’t working we need to be comfortable and competent to move away from what we were doing in the past,” she said. “Do we have information about what’s actually changing hearts and minds?”

To help answer that question, a pair of political scientists specializing in a field they call “deep canvassing” are using a grant from the ADL to research what kinds of narratives about Jews, when presented to people, can be effective at reducing prejudice. The researchers, David Broockman from the University of California, Berkeley and Josh Kalla from Yale University, have previously demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in the context of bias against transgender people. 

For their new study, the researchers made two-minute video clips featuring eight types of narratives about Jews and showed them over the internet to an audience of about 23,000 survey respondents. 

Watching all eight narrative types led to a drop in prejudice, but some had a much stronger effect than others. For example, bipartisanship—a video showing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden condemning antisemitism—proved more impactful than a video depicting a fictional Jewish character suffering, but far less impactful than a video that presented the suffering as the result of discrimination.

Another sign of the awakening underway is the spate of new university programs focused on the study of antisemitism. Gratz College, a Jewish institution for higher education in Philadelphia, now offers a master’s degree in the topic. New York University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto have all made recent investments in the field of “antisemitism studies.”

Ayal Feinberg, a political scientist and the creator of the antisemitism master’s degree at Gratz, believes that many more such programs should have been in place long ago. What made the need suddenly apparent to many more people, he said, was the wave of anti-Israel protests and the spike in antisemitism in the United States after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

“Post 10/7, many people in this space were caught with their pants down, and they’re rushing to invest in meaningful interventions that reduce antisemitism,” Feinberg said in an interview. “But those interventions don’t really exist because there hasn’t been a field that has been systematically devoted to developing them.”

As Feinberg, whose quantitative research is sponsored by the ADL’s new centre, builds out the field through a dedicated discipline, there’s also a crop of professors from established academic areas such as economics, political science, and sociology who are newly interested in studying antisemitism.

The number of scholars has sharply increased and so has their caliber, according to Williams.  He gave the example of Dean Karlan, a prominent economics professor at Northwestern University and former chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. 

“That’s the quality of research we’re getting as a partner nowadays, which frankly, is not what it would have been five or 10 years ago,” Williams said. 

The ADL’s sponsorship of individual academics comes amid a contentious time for the group’s relationship with institutions of higher education. As college campuses have become the epicenter of the activist movement seeking to end U.S. military aid to Israel and cast Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide, the ADL has assertively involved itself in hot-button debates about where to draw the line on free speech. The group says it wants to protect Jewish students from harassment and threatening behavior from pro-Palestinian protests. As part of that mission, it’s been adversarial with universities, accusing administrators of failing to stand up to antisemitism and putting out a contentious “report card” grading schools on their response to it.

But through Williams and his team, the organization has also been trying to better understand what exactly is happening on campuses and why the situation there seems worse than in other contexts. An ADL-sponsored study by a University of California, Irvine professor concluded that increased antisemitism on campus is found where there are fewer allies on campus—and not necessarily where there are more antisemites or where there’s a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.  

“There’s more tacit allowance for antisemitism in public because there are fewer bystanders who are willing or disposed to intervene,” Williams said. “The perceived social cost of it is much lower than elsewhere and that’s more predictive for us than the presence of an SJP on campus.”

Any perceived gaps between ADL’s messaging and its research findings can leave Williams’ program—and scholars it partners with—vulnerable to questioning and criticism. That’s partly the reason that many observers are viewing what he’s doing as daring and risky, even if they are supportive. 

“There is a risk of blurring the line between advocacy and scholarship in a moment in which institutional credibility is low and society is very polarized and everything politicized,” said James Loeffler, a historian and the director of the Jewish studies program at Johns Hopkins University. “And then the research won’t be accepted—it will be seen as advancing a political point of view.”

Williams’ own career as a scholar might have gone in a different direction if he weren’t convinced of the pressing danger of recent antisemitism. 

He completed his doctoral training as a behavioural social scientist at Stanford University in 2012, and after working on various research projects he ended up at the Orthodox Union. As the largest kosher certification agency in the world, the Orthodox Union generates millions of dollars in revenue, most of which is allocated to charitable causes. Williams crafted a data-driven research program to help the organization spend those funds more impactfully.

He had also long maintained an interest in the study of prejudice, which Williams traces in part to his uncommon family background: His paternal grandfather, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, married a Sephardic Jewish woman from Morocco. 

In 2019 Williams, who grew up in an observant Jewish family in Atlanta and had always been aware of how his background set him apart, encountered data showing that Americans were becoming less tolerant of difference. Two recent events underscored this finding: neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed by the deadly attack the following year on Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

After each of those events, the ADL sprung into action, tapping its roster of experts to explain the outbursts of violent antisemitism to the public. But in private conversations Williams was having with the group, one of the world’s most prominent organizations fighting hate and extremism was coming to a realization that would have been awkward to publicly acknowledge: It didn’t understand antisemitism or how to combat it nearly well enough. A new paradigm was needed. 

“We were under-resourced when it came to actually thinking about antisemitism,” Williams said. “The ADL had sort of become more of a civil rights organization, and we started, especially after Charlottesville, realizing we need more resources on antisemitism. And the person who hired me was sort of like, ‘It’s bizarre that we don’t have this.’”

That person was Adam Neufeld, ADL’s chief operating officer, who “saw the need to develop new theories of change and test them empirically,” Williams said.

When the Center for Antisemitism Research was launched about two-and-half years ago, the name alone was enough to pique the attention of historians who study antisemitism and American Jewish history. In the initial decades after World War II, American Jewish groups, including the ADL, invested heavily in academic research into the sources of antisemitism. 

“There was a sense back then that social science would be able to improve people’s lives — that humanity could be perfected by applying scientific research models to social problems,” said Pamela Nadell, a historian at American University and the author of the forthcoming book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.”

With the help of grants from Jewish groups, social psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars investigated how antisemitism was connected to totalitarianism, religion and other forms of racial and ethnic stereotyping. It was an organized attempt to understand the psyche of antisemites. 

To that end, the ADL commissioned public opinion research hoping to understand the nature of bias—whether it was correlated, for example, to age or education. 

Historians don’t really know why or when exactly the investment in such research ended, in part because the ADL has not yet made its archives especially accessible to scholars, at least compared to groups like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith International, which have either handed off materials to a library or created their own open repository, in some cases even digitizing large parts of their collections.

According to Williams, the ADL’s research program petered out by the 1980s because the threat of antisemitism was seen as declining. “Most people generally had positive attitudes about Jews, incident rates were—by most accounts—much lower, the clamouring for real, tangible solutions was less,” he said.

At the time in the United States, the older the average person, the more likely they were to have antisemitic attitudes. There was no stronger demographic correlation than that of age and antisemitism, and a 1992 ADL study noted “the steady influx of younger, more tolerant Americans into the adult population” as the main factor driving declining antisemitism since 1964. It almost seemed like the country was aging out of the problem.

By 2014, in Williams’ telling, the kind of intense antisemitism that was thought to belong to the past was rearing its head once again and, eventually, accelerating so much that the ADL needed to revisit its old strategy around social science research.

“I would say that the major distinction is that we’re working on interventions more than describing the phenomenon,” Williams said, comparing his generation to the researchers of the post-World War II boom. “But, also, you can’t really do one without the other. We do stand on their shoulders.”

In responding to a press inquiry from JTA, the head of the ADL rejected the idea that the ADL founded the Center for Antisemitism Research out of a new or reawakened commitment. 

“At ADL, we always have sought to ground our work in evidence and to shape our approaches based on research,” the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a written response to a series of questions. “We have been tracking antisemitism for decades, measuring attitudes and tracking incidents, and the insights gleaned from this work has helped to inform and shape policies and programs.”

But Greenblatt also acknowledged that recent events are forcing deep changes in the ADL. 

“Nothing will ever be the same after 10/7,” he said. “And so, at ADL, it forced us to step back, look in the mirror and ask hard questions about how we reached this point—and what we are going to do differently in response.”

He continued, “In all honesty, I think every Jewish organization should be undertaking this kind of process in light of 10/7. For ADL, that meant taking a beat and examining our policies, evaluating our programs, endeavouring to measure the efficacy of our activities, and making hard decisions based on what we learn. The Center for Antisemitism Research has helped us to do this.”

The ADL’s introspection over the past few years has come amid growing criticism that mainstream approaches to fighting antisemitism aren’t working. And attacks on the ADL have come from both the right and the left. 

The right has tended to blame the ADL for being too soft on the pro-Palestinian movement or for getting distracted from its core mission of defending Jews by progressive ideas about race and identity. 

The ADL has also been affected by a distrust washing over society of legacy institutions, especially ones perceived by the right as having a left-wing bias. Founded in 2018, an organization called StopAntisemitism has positioned itself as a grassroots alternative to the establishment. Diving head first into the chaotic fray of social media, the group quickly amassed followers whom it sicced on a flurry of targets it accused of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel behavior. 

In some regards, the mainstream has shifted to the right when it comes to fighting antisemitism. When Kenneth Marcus and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law began using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses years ago, many Jewish communal leaders rejected his efforts. Nowadays, they are far less likely to tell Marcus that his tactics are counterproductive or that he’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism—instead, they are starting to partner with him on lawsuits. 

Meanwhile, on the left, the ADL is often accused of caring about antisemitism mostly insofar as it can be used as a weapon for its pro-Israel advocacy. Rooted in the concept of intersectionality, the left argues that all forms of oppression are intertwined and therefore must be resisted in tandem. One result of that thinking is a critical focus on a certain type of rhetoric from the ADL — for example, when Greenblatt morally equated anti-Zionist groups with white supremacists or when he seemed to liken the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika, though he later clarified that he doesn’t think the keffiyeh is a hate symbol. 

A group that exemplifies this critique is the Diaspora Alliance, which says that Jewish fears are being exploited for pro-Israel purposes at the expense of democratic norms protecting civil society and free speech. Emma Saltzberg, an activist with the group and a critic of the ADL, accuses Greenblatt of engaging in rhetoric that often undermines what she sees as the valuable expertise of the organization’s technical staff. She anticipates the same dynamic with the ADL’s new research agenda. 

“I think it’s possible for good things to come out of research funded by actors with questionable political agendas,” Saltzberg said in an interview. “At the same time, Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s spokesperson and leader, has demonstrated consistent disregard for the organization’s own in-house experts, so academics who associate themselves with the organization do risk damage to their reputation as serious researchers.”

Williams defended Greenblatt, rejecting the notion that his public statements served to undermine the organization’s technical work. Williams said he works with a range of researchers who don’t agree with the ADL on everything and that he doesn’t lose sleep over people whose opposition to the group is intractable. He also said, however, that given how challenging Greenblatt’s job is, there’s always room for the ADL to improve.

“There’s absolutely work that we could do to acknowledge — just to give you one example — the reality that there are a lot of people who take up anti-Israel positions out of a real humanitarian commitment and dedication,” Williams said. “Acknowledge it, and at the same time present the evidence that many people are being hurt in ways that single them out as Jews because of presumed support, let alone overt support, for Israel.”

Williams’ work at ADL has only just begun, but he’s already reached one profound conclusion in the fight against antisemitism. 

“The big takeaway,” he said, “is that we can actually reduce it.”

Ben Sales contributed reporting to this story. 

The post Behind the ADL’s effort to get beyond shouting statistics about antisemitism in America appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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X, Meta Approved Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Ads Targeting German Voters Before Election, Study Finds

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X/Twitter, gestures as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

The nonprofit group Ekō has released research showing that the social media platforms X and Meta approved advertising featuring hate speech against Jews and Muslims that was geared toward users in Germany in the lead-up to the country’s federal elections on Sunday.

The organization submitted 10 German-language ads intended to reach German voters before the election. Meta approved half of the proposed ads while X allowed all 10. Ekō canceled all approved ads before they could appear on the sites.

The five approved for publication on Meta referred to Muslim immigrants as a “virus,” “vermin,” “rodents,” or “rapists” and advocated for them to be sterilized, burnt, or gassed. Another Meta-approved ad called for arson attacks against synagogues in order to “stop the globalist Jewish rat agenda.”

“Our findings suggest that Meta’s AI-driven ad moderation systems remain fundamentally broken, despite the Digital Services Act (DSA) now being in full effect,” an unnamed spokesperson for Ekō told TechCrunch. They added that “rather than strengthening its ad review process or hate speech policies, Meta appears to be backtracking across the board.”

Meta spokeswoman Lara Hesse provided a statement to TechCrunch in response to Ekō’s findings, noting that “these ads violate our policies. None of them were published and our systems detected and disabled the advertiser’s page before we became aware of this research.”

The statement argued that “our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live. We’ve taken extensive steps in alignment with the DSA and continue to invest significant resources to protect elections.”

Ekō’s report said that all of the ads “broke Meta and X’s own policies, and several may have also breached German national laws. Meta rejected five ads on the basis that they may qualify as social issue, electoral or politics ads, but they were not rejected on the basis of hate speech or inciting violence.”

In addition to green-lighting the five ads allowed by Meta, X approved and scheduled five more, according to the study. These labeled immigrants as rodents and said that Muslims were “flooding” Germany in order “to steal our democracy.” Another ad used an antisemitic slur and accused Jews of lying about climate change to sabotage European industry. This ad also included an AI-generated image which featured sinister men at a table surrounded by gold bars with a Star of David behind them.

Researchers used OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion to create the AI imagery included with each ad. One image featured immigrants crowded into a gas chamber while another showed a synagogue on fire.

One X-approved ad specifically targeted the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), accusing the center-left party of wanting to allow 60 million Muslim immigrants into the country. One more ad allowed by X urged for the killing of Muslim rapists and claimed that leftists sought “open borders.” While Meta took as much as 12 hours to approve the submitted ads, X scheduled the ads instantly.

The Sunday election saw an 83.5 percent voter turnout, the highest level seen since Germany reunified in 1990. The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party Christian Social Union (CSU) won with 28.6 percent of the vote. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in second with 20.8 percent. X owner Elon Musk had previously endorsed the populist-nationalist, anti-immigrant party, saying in a livestream on his platform that “only AfD can save Germany, end of story, and people really need to get behind AfD, and otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany.” SPD came in third with 16.4 percent of the vote, followed by the Green Party with 11.6 percent.

“Our findings, alongside mounting evidence from other civil society groups, show that Big Tech will not clean up its platforms voluntarily,” the Ekō spokesperson said. “Meta and X continue to allow illegal hate speech, incitement to violence, and election disinformation to spread at scale, despite their legal obligations under the DSA.”

The report from Ekō stated that “at the core of the problem is these platforms’ toxic business model – one dependent on digital advertising revenue and fueled by engagement, no matter the cost.” The report explained that the websites’ systems “are built to maximize attention and revenue, creating little incentive to curb hate speech, disinformation, or incitement of violence.”

According to research released last month by the Anti-Defamation League, 6.2 million people in Germany “harbor elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes,” totaling 9 percent of the population and positioning the European nation with one of the lowest levels of antisemitism globally.

The post X, Meta Approved Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Ads Targeting German Voters Before Election, Study Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Documentary About Former Hamas Hostage Abducted on Oct. 7 Wins Two Awards at Berlin Film Festival

Brandon Kramer and Lance Kramer in front of the Berlinale Palast holding the Berlinale Documentary Award for “Holding Liat” on Feb 22, 2025. Photo: Berlin International Film Festival

A documentary about a woman who was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, 2023, and has since returned to Israel won the annual Berlinale Documentary Award and also an Ecumenical Jury Prize on Saturday at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.

“Holding Liat” was directed by Brandon Kramer and produced by Darren Aronofsky, Lance Kramer, Yoni Brook, Ari Handel, and Justin Gonçalves. Aronofsky is an Oscar-winning director whose credits include “Black Swan,” “Requiem for a Dream,” and “The Whale.”

The Berlinale Documentary Award is accompanied by a prize money of 40,000 euros ($41,907), which is split between the director and producer of the winning film. Winning the award also means the film will advance and take part in the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature. “Holding Liat,” which is in both English and Hebrew, received a standing ovation when it made its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 16.

The American film revolves around Liat Atzili, a civics and history teacher kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, and held captive in the Gaza Strip until she returned to Israel in the first ceasefire and hostage-release deal in November 2023. Her husband, Aviv Atzili, was murdered by Hamas terrorists during their deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, during which they killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

Brandon began filming “Holding Liat” shortly Liat’s abduction, first talking to her family members and unaware how his film would end and what Liat’s fate would be. A Washington, DC-based filmmaker, Brandon and his brother Lance co-founded Meridian Hill Pictures, which produced “Holding Liat.” They are related to Atzili and their documentary also highlights her parents Yehuda and Chaya, who were born in the US and made a number of efforts to secure their daughter’s release from captivity, such as meeting with politicians and other influential figures in the US.

“This isn’t a film that we wanted to make,” Brandon said upon accepting the award on Saturday. “After our relatives, Liat and Aviv Atzili, were taken from their home on Oct. 7, my brother Lance and I felt a responsibility to pick up the camera and document the family’s unique experience. We witnessed up close a family wrestling with different points of view on how to return their loved ones, hold onto their values, and seek a more peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians. In a complicated and polarized moment, telling a nuanced story about one family, navigating their differences, their grief, and their empathy felt universal and urgent to share. Documentaries can help us find each other’s humanity and the shared language of cinema can contribute to peace.”

“Holding Liat” was not the only documentary about the hostages featured this year in the Berlin International Film Festival. “Letter to David,” from Israeli director Tom Shovel, is about hostage David Cunio, an actor who was also abducted by Hamas from the Kibbutz Nir Oz and is still being held captive. Cunio starred in Shoval’s award-winning debut feature film, “Youth,” which was shown in 2013 at the Berlinale and focused on the relationship between brothers and, ironically, revolved around a kidnapping. “Letter to David” made its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on Feb. 14.

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival took place from Feb. 13-23.

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Barnard College Expels Students Who Stormed Israeli History Class, Sources Say

Anti-Israel agitators disrupting an Israeli history class at Columbia University, New York City, Jan. 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

Barnard College has expelled two students who disrupted an active class at Columbia University last month to distribute antisemitic literature and spew pro-Hamas propaganda, The Algemeiner has learned.

As previously reported, the agitators stormed into Professor Avi Shilon’s course, titled “History of Modern Israel,” on the first day of the semester. Clad in keffiyehs, which were wrapped around their faces to conceal their identities, they read prepared remarks which described the course as “Zionist and imperialist” and a “normalization of genocide.” As part of their performance, which they appeared to film, they dropped flyers, one of which contained an illustration of a lifted boot preparing to trample a Star of David. Next to the drawing was a message that said, “Crush Zionism.”

Another flyer proclaimed, “Burn Zionism to the ground.”

News of the expulsion was shared with The Algemeiner on Sunday by a knowledgeable source. However, the college has so far declined to confirm the validity of the report, saying only that expulsion is an immense disciplinary sanction it is willing to impose on any student whose conduct infringes on the right to learn in an environment that is free from discrimination. Until now, it was not widely known that Barnard students had participated in the January demonstration.

“Under federal law, we cannot comment on the academic and disciplinary records of students. That said as a matter of principle and policy, Barnard will always take decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives, individuals feel sage, and higher education is celebrated,” college president Laura Rosenbury said in a statement. “This means upholding the highest standards and acting when those standards are threatened.”

She continued, “When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act. Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience. At Barnard we fiercely defend our values. At Barnard, we always reject harassment and discrimination in all forms. At Barnard, we always do what is right, not what is easy.”

Columbia University and Barnard College’s chapter of Hillel International, the largest campus organization for Jewish students in the world, has since praised the college for enacting a policy which other higher education institutions have largely eschewed since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, an event which precipitated an explosion of antisemitic hate incidents, property destruction, and other illegal conduct on campuses across the US.

“We applaud Barnard College for taking decisive action and hope Columbia follows suit with the other perpetrators who have infringed on student rights in the past year — from the encampments to the takeover of Hamilton Hall,” said Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel. “This will send a clear message that the harassment of Jewish students and faculty will not be tolerated at Columbia.”

Elisha Baker, a junior who was present in Professor Shilon’s class during the January incident, welcomed the news as well, telling The Algemeiner via iMessage that he is a “strong believer in accountability.”

He continued, “In this case, the disruption targeted Jewish and Israeli students including myself inside the classroom, which is supposed to be a sacred place of learning on a college campus. These protestors undermined the very purpose and function of the university. I am curious to see what Columbia will do following Barnard’s strong actions.”

Columbia University has said in a previous statement that it suspended one student and banned from campus several others who participated in the demonstration, punishments that it says will hold until a “full investigation and disciplinary process.”

It added, “The investigation of the disruption, including the identification of additional participants, remains active. Disruptions to our classrooms and our academic mission and efforts to intimidate or harass our students are not acceptable, are an effort to every member of our university community, and will not be tolerated.”

However, Columbia has a history of amnestying violent and destructive anti-Israel protesters. In August, a US congressional education committee report revealed that only a few students who were involved in occupying the Hamilton Hall administrative building in April 2024 were ultimately punished despite the university’s threatening to expel them. Meanwhile, its faculty recently called on administrative officials to do more to combat antisemitism on campus. Writing in a letter which amassed over 200 signatures, the professors called for adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely used by governments and private entities around the world, banning the wearing of face masks which conceal the identities of those who commit violence and destroy school property, and expelling students who, for the purpose of furthering an extremist political agenda, pollute the learning environment.

Today, Columbia must operate in a new political and legal landscape, as the re-election of US President Donald Trump to a rare, nonconsecutive second term in office brought to Washington, DC a chief executive who has vowed not only to purge antisemitism from American schools but also to go as far as taxing the endowments of colleges and universities which refuse to aid the effort. So far, Columbia has remained high on the list of the Trump administration’s priorities, and earlier this month it announced that the university is one of five higher education institutions which will be subjected to an exhaustive investigation of antisemitism that will be led by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Barnard College Expels Students Who Stormed Israeli History Class, Sources Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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