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Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, criticizes university over antisemitism and protests
Mahmood Mamdani, a longtime Columbia University professor and father of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, sharply criticized the school’s leadership and its creation of a task force to address allegations of antisemitism in a recent interview with progressive writer Peter Beinart.
Students who hold pro-Palestinian views are “terrified” and “terrorized,” Mamdani said in a Zoom call for Beinart’s Substack on Friday. “The smallest move they make, they are targeted, they are expelled, they are suspended and they are warned. Which means we have less and less of an idea of what they think and how they might respond to their situation.” Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, which co-hosted the webinar.
Mamdani, who has been on medical leave since September, refused to discuss his son’s views or how his son was raised, a condition for participating in the conversation, he said. Though he briefly acknowledged the election’s broader significance as an immigrant was elected to the city’s highest office.
Mamdani, who has been critical of Israel and teaches about the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, said the school’s leadership is in a “vindictive mood” since it entered a settlement with the Trump administration and created a task force to address complaints of harassment and allegations of antisemitism by Jews on campus.
Pro-Palestinian protests intensified in April 2024 after a House hearing highlighted antisemitism at Columbia and the school’s police crackdown on students.
Mamdani, a faculty senator at Columbia, said he was planning to suggest at a Senate meeting convened on Friday a “healing process” through an alternative, broad-based commission on discrimination, rather than separate initiatives for specific groups to address concerns about Islamophobia or other forms of discrimination.
“Can’t you resist turning anti-discrimination into a device to set up one group of students against another group of students, like a divide and rule policy under British colonialism that I grew up under,” he said about the university’s approach.
“I think these people have lost a sense of what it means to govern,” Mamdani said, pointing to the Board of Trustees’ struggle to find a new president.
Mamdani said that Minouche Shafik, a former World Bank official who resigned in the summer of 2024 after being accused of exacerbating the turmoil on campus, was ill-equipped to handle the student encampments that erupted shortly after she took on the top post. “To her credit, when she realized that, she resigned,” Mamdani said.
Columbia has struggled to install permanent leadership since Shafik’s departure. Katrina Armstrong, a medical school executive, stepped down from her interim post in March after the university agreed to a list of demands from the White House. Claire Shipman is the current acting president. The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that this is the longest the university has gone without a permanent president since 1948.
Mamdani on the U.S.-Israel relationship
In Friday’s interview, Mamdani also spoke about comparative scholarship on settler colonialism, including his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and South Africa. He said that U.S. policy toward Israel differs fundamentally from its past approach to apartheid South Africa because Israel is an “internal issue” in American politics. “To face up to Israel will require some significant changes inside the U.S.,” Mamdani said.
The Mayor-elect is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and faced fierce backlash for refusing to outright condemn the use of the slogan “‘globalize the intifada”’ at some of the protests for Palestinian rights and against the war in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary was attributed to a surge among young and new voters who agreed with his views. In the general election, Mamdani swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win. He recently met with Jewish leaders to discuss his positions.
Mamdani did talk about his son’s election and stance on Israel in an interview with Democracy Now. “His refusal to budge, to soften his critique of the state of Israel, even in the face of millions of dollars being pumped against him, even in the face of big personalities, including the president of the United States, coming out against him, his refusal to change his stand, convinced the electorate that this was a man of principle,” Mamdani said.
In the webinar with Beinart, the senior Mamdani said that meaningful political change will come from younger Jews and Palestinians in the diaspora rather than from within Israel itself. “Jewish children in New York City have become increasingly skeptical of the direction in which Israel has been moving,” he said, “and increasingly disillusioned with both the moral and the political efficacy of that route and are increasingly open to exploring an alternative.”
This week, Mamdani released his 12th book, Slow Poison, a political history of Uganda under the dictators Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. His next book is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The post Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, criticizes university over antisemitism and protests appeared first on The Forward.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.