Letter to Columbia University President

[Frederick Nagel]

A Columbia Alum Writes to President Shipman

Guest Blogger / July 31, 2025
BY HILTON OBENZINGER

Dear Claire Shipman, President, Columbia University.

I received your letter and other notices about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and I’m disappointed and angry. I know you have a tough job, but perhaps unwittingly you harmed me. By agreeing to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, you have turned me into an antisemite. Since 1972 I have publicly criticized the State of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and have rejected Zionism, politically and religiously. As a writer and historian, I join many Holocaust scholars and historians in rejecting this definition.

According to the IHRA definition my critical stance would make me an antisemite. I consider Zionism to be a racist ideology, and like many others have compared Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to the way Nazis treated Jews (such as starvation of Gaza being akin to Nazi starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto). And I reject the hysterical “whataboutism” that regards criticism of Israel as unlike criticism of other countries, when in fact Israel has been protected from criticism by its supporters for decades. All of this despite the fact that almost all of my extended family were killed at the hands of the Nazis, and I grew up hearing the horror stories of my aunt and my maternal grandmother who survived. Genocide is personal, always.

You know this, yet you allow yourself to be used by those who use the real scourge of antisemitism as a means to undermine all civil rights, to advance a starkly racist, xenophobic program. Once again, Jews are being used for somebody else’s agenda, manipulated, no matter our objections, and this is actually, blatantly antisemitic. You know this, don’t you?

You have accommodated yourself to a gangster who does not abide by the law, who has armed masked thugs to steal people from the streets, and who seeks to control higher education so it serves his interests – or force universities to die. You know all of this, I am sure. But you agreed to his terms – which he will ignore at his pleasure – because you thought it was in Columbia’s best interests. Would you have succumbed to Hitler’s control of German universities? I’m afraid to hear your answer. It’s always easy to condemn fascism, hatred and genocide after the fact. But the mass murder is today, as is your collaboration with the Death Machine.

MORE: https://academeblog.org/2025/07/31/a-columbia-alum-writes-to-president-shipman/




<Posted by Fred Nagel>