Transcript

Arielle Angel: Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and today, we’re bringing you a conversation between editor at large Peter Beinart and Nadia Abu El-Haj, a Columbia professor in the Anthropology department and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies.

AA: As listeners are probably aware by now, last week, Columbia capitulated to Trump’s extensive demands on the university in hopes of recovering $400 million in government grants that were revoked by the Trump administration. Almost a week later, there is still no indication that Columbia is going to get the money back, but there is a long list of things granted by the university, among them a mask ban, 36 new campus police with the power to arrest students, the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism (which conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism), broad commitments to disciplinary action for student protesters, and even the advancement of Columbia’s Tel Aviv Center. Strikingly, the university has placed the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, or MESAAS Department into what is known as receivership, which means there will be a new senior vice provost controlling hires and what can be taught. This will exert control over the teaching of Israel/Palestine in particular, starting with the Center for Palestine Studies. Meanwhile, the university committed to the expansion of intellectual diversity among faculty—in other words, they’re going to hire more Zionists to teach in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and in political science in the School for International and Public Affairs. In the case of Israel Studies, this is significant because, as Mari Cohen reported several years ago in Jewish Currents, Jewish scholars of Israel have long been led by the scholarship itself toward a more critical assessment of Israel’s history and its current behavior. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this capitulation at a moment when the US appears to be in democratic freefall and when academic freedom and the foundation of higher education hangs in the balance.

AA: Peter and Nadia spoke just hours before this shocking development, but their conversation really gets into the meat of what’s been happening at Columbia and Barnard and what’s at stake both for the study of Israel/Palestine and for the future of higher ed. This conversation initially appeared in The Beinart Notebook on Substack. Here’s Peter and Nadia.

Peter Beinart: Today, I’m really honored that we’re here with Nadia Abu El-Haj. Nadia is the Anne Whitney Olin professor in the departments of anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and chair of the governing board of The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and we’ve put a link to her piece about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil in the New York Review of Books (which, if you haven’t read, I would really encourage you to). So, Nadia, thank you for doing this.

Nadia Abu El-Haj: Of course.

PB: So, in the piece in the New York Review of Books, you talk about Mahmoud Khalil as a person, and what he’s like, and how you got to know him. So maybe we could just start there. If you could just talk, for those people who never have encountered him and now only know him as a public presence: What is he like as a person?

NAEH: So, I really got to know him during the encampment because he and one other student were the negotiators with the administration. And I spent an endless amount of time there. I wasn’t there as a protester but to just keep an eye on what was happening, because obviously—I mean, this started with the first encampment. We knew by 11 am that Minouche was going to bring in the cops the first day. There was no negotiating. But anyway, he consulted a lot with me and talked about the administration and things. And I would just say he’s the most soft-spoken, gentle person I’ve ever met. I mean, the statement that he released the other day from prison really is him. I mean, he’s this deeply thoughtful, temperate, calm person who was obviously an important leader and part of the movement but also a real mediator.

NAEH: His own life experiences have made him, I would say, older than his age. You know, he grew up in a refugee camp outside of Damascus. He fled on his own, in about 2011, to Beirut without his family. So, you know, he’s pretty young at that point, barely 20, and was a refugee in Lebanon and had to learn English. And when he first got to Lebanon, he had no money. I’m pretty sure he worked as a construction worker or something to help make himself survive and, against all odds, got an undergraduate degree and then found his way to SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs]. So, he’s older than his age. He’s quite wise.

NAEH: And I don’t know, I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about the decision to target him. There is nothing, anything, that man has ever said or done that one could even accuse him of, quote, unquote, “supporting terrorism.” I mean, even verbally. So, I feel like partly, he was chosen, of course, because he is a public figure, and this was a targeted attack. He was someone who was out there publicly because he’s very committed to the cause. And at that point, a lot of students had started hiding faces, but he chose not to—as did many of the Palestinian leaders, including Palestinian Americans. And he really didn’t think he could get arrested for speech. He’s not someone who got arrested in either of the encampments. He did not go into Hamilton Hall. But I also think there’s something about taking out the voices of a movement who can speak to a broader audience. That’s not an accident. He is somebody that, if people would actually listen to him—as opposed to all the claims by Canary Mission, and Betar, and Documenting Jew Hatred [on Campus], and the alumni group, and some of my pretty awful colleagues—if you actually listen to his words, he’s someone who could be a very powerful spokesperson who can build a much wider coalition. So, it’s a choice that I think is no accident, both because of his leadership and because I think, in a way, everyone knows he’s the kind of person that can bring along a much larger coalition.

PB: I’m curious: You said that the Palestinian and Palestinian American students chose generally not to wear masks. Maybe you can just say a little bit more because this mask-wearing thing has become such a topic of discussion. If you can explain why you think those students who wore masks did choose to wear them, and why you think, on balance, the Palestinian and Palestinian American students chose not to.

NAEH: Well, students were not wearing masks from the beginning. I mean, if we go back to the fall of 2023, I think students began masking up around February of last year. And it was after the Barnard administration used facial recognition. I mean, they used both electronic facial recognition and they sent out deans (who were supposed to be deans of students, whose job should be to protect students) to identify students who were part of a demonstration on Barnard’s campus. I think it was late January or sometime in February 2024, and kids who were just walking by got swept up into disciplinary hearings, even though they weren’t participants. But between the rise in doxxing—I have a student who had a death threat put under her door in Brooklyn. Someone found her address and literally slipped a note under her door. So, between anxiety about doxxing but also anxiety about discipline, as the universities on both sides of the street heated up, students started putting on masks. And that increased more and more with the encampment.

NAEH: I think the students who had already been leaders—they were already the leaders. They were already out there. I think for many Palestinian students, this is a cause that’s so important. I mean, they say: This is the risk I take. That’s what the commitment is. And I also think they profoundly felt like: Well, we’re not doing anything wrong. I mean, at that point, there’s fear of the administration, but I think the people that were going to be spokespeople made the choice to take the risk against administrative practice. And we were in a different moment where—you know, I would never defend the Biden administration on any grounds on the Gaza slaughter, but they weren’t arresting people for speech. So, I also think things just shifted really dramatically and really quickly. And to be honest, I think many of us, as people who’ve been around longer, saw this coming. They didn’t. I see an incredible panic that has hit in the last month.

NAEH: And then, of course, with Mahmoud’s arrest and the Indian graduate student who really was never part of the protests, who got picked up because she liked some posts, or they tried to pick her up—and there’s another student who is in hiding at the moment. You know, first of all, I think for some of them, it’s too late, anyway. They are public figures. They’re being doxed. Their names are being sent to ICE, to the White House. We know that. We know there’s a WhatsApp group that The Intercept reported on, where parents and alums are getting their own kids to pass names, and they’re passing them along. So, I think in some sense, it’s too late for them anyway. But now, the risk has shifted. I also think people were not focused on the possibility of expulsion because—I mean, the lawyers working with these students have put together a file. Basically, one person who led an anti-Nazi demonstration in the ’30s got expelled. One person who was involved in the ’68 takeover got expelled, but he’d held a dean hostage for 24 hours. Those are the only two cases of expulsion for political speech in the history of the university that people could take up. Barnard, actually, turns out their last expulsion was 1968, and it was because a woman was living with her boyfriend, they found out. So, I also think they just didn’t think expulsion was on the table.

PB: I mean, Mahmoud was presumably not the only student who was not a US citizen who had been involved in activism at Columbia. And there have been lots of things swirling around about why they chose him and who might have been involved in that decision. And outside groups that were waving at Marco Rubio and saying, like: Go after this guy. Do you have any sense about why, in fact, it was him, and how that decision took place?

NAEH: To be honest, I want to find some very serious investigative reporter to get behind the scenes in these groups. I don’t know where the money is coming from, but clearly, they’re not grassroots groups. I don’t know who’s making the decisions. I have to say, I was a little surprised that Mahmoud would be the first person picked up. I mean, he was the leader of the negotiations, but I didn’t realize people were as fixated on him for that. And now I see that they are, including faculty who are tweeting out: Well, it’s not just what he said; he was the leader of CUAD.

PB: Can you say what CUAD is? People may not know.

NAEH: I’m sorry. CUAD is—after the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were banned at the college, all these student groups created what was called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. And it was the coalition that basically launched the encampment. But it’s a very loose collection. So, within CUAD, there were all these subgroups. So, they’ve named him the leader of CUAD, which he never was; it was a coalition. But that’s what they’re saying on Twitter—or now X. And, you know, it’s like, that’s the argument: Oh, it’s not just about him. He was the leader of CUAD, which is a pro-terrorist group, which, you know, Shai Davidai has accused of being on the Hamas payroll. I mean, they’re just making stuff up. So, I wish I had an answer. I don’t have an answer.

NAEH: But the focus on getting him arrested was immediately after he was videoed at that Milstein sit-in. And what he was actually doing was holding up the phone to get the president and the students to talk to each other. So, Milstein Hall is where the library and classrooms, et cetera, are at Barnard. And the disciplinary processes at Barnard have no faculty, staff, or student involvement. It’s run by the dean’s office. The two deans in charge are some of the cruelest people I’ve ever met. And basically, the process is they decide on the charges, they hold the hearing, they decide on the punishment, and then they decide on the appeal. I mean, there isn’t even a pretense to due process. So early in the semester, a couple students went into a classroom by this Israeli professor teaching History of Modern Israel. It was not a choice I would have made. Let us just say—I do not want to engage in criticizing students, but it was a small group of students. The Columbia students were suspended until a hearing by the University Judicial Board at Columbia; the Barnard students, within two weeks, were expelled with no due process. And again, politically, I would like these kids to not get in trouble—disciplinarily, being suspended for taking over a building or doing what they did is not an implausible punishment. Expulsion is just pretty extreme. And within a few days later, they then expelled a third student who’d been in Hamilton Hall. Again, there’s no precedent for this kind of stuff.

NAEH: So, what the students did, it was the second of two demonstrations. I think it was like 20, 25 students or something (maybe a little more) went and sat in Milstein. It was being portrayed as taking over the building; it wasn’t. They went and sat down. They didn’t lock down the building. People were wandering in and out until Barnard security decided it was unsafe. They locked down the building, so they wouldn’t let faculty back into their offices. They wouldn’t let people in. So, it really was a sit-in, not a building takeover, and Laura Rosenbury, who’s the president of Barnard—being who she is, and the deans being who they are, do not believe in negotiating anything. So, it just spiraled. They locked down the building; they told everybody to shelter in place. The cops were already lined up a couple hours later outside Barnard’s gates. And then, all of a sudden, there was a bomb that the president’s office announced, and then, they claim that’s why they brought the police in. The cops were there long before the bomb threat, first of all, so that was clearly a pretext. Secondly, the cops came in without a bomb squad. They didn’t evacuate the upper floors from the building, either, and they had everybody standing right outside the glass. And then the students had already—they weren’t going to stay forever. So, they had left the building when the cops came in. And nevertheless, I mean, one student ended up in the hospital because she got her chest stomped on by a cop. They really beat up some of these kids. And then, that was the event that they filmed Mahmoud at. And from that moment, he was tagged to ICE and to Rubio. I mean, the tweets were like: We need to deport him.

PB: Just to broaden out: Why do you think that Columbia and Barnard—I mean, it just seems like in general there has been very, very little resistance from the administration standing up for principles of free speech and academic freedom. You know, even before Trump, going back to when Minouche Shafik testified. For people who are outsiders to universities, help us explain why that’s been the case.

NAEH: The problem is, from the get-go last October, they escalated; so Minouche Shafik came in out of her depth. I mean, she spent what, five years at the LSC? But she’s really not someone who has a long history in the academy at all. She’s at the World Bank. She was at the Bank of England. And I think she really understood her role as she was answerable to the board. She never met with the students, ever. She almost never met with faculty, to the point where when the second encampment, you know, we were trying to de-escalate, and she was in a university senate meeting. People said: We’ll take you; go talk to the students. She laughed and hung up. So, the problem was, starting October 2023, all they did was escalate. The minute October 7 happened, they set up a new security committee, which bypassed all existing rules of the university, in terms of how you did discipline. What are the rules around demonstration? They put in new time/place/manner restrictions which were: You need 14 days to get permission to demonstrate. Well, when there’s a slaughter unfolding on a daily basis, what student is going to wait 14 days?

NAEH: And the person they put in charge, Gerald Rosberg—there were no faculty on this committee. There was Gerald Rosberg, a couple administrators, and people from Columbia Security. Gerald Rosberg is a committed right-wing Zionist. It was like putting a fox in charge of the hen house. And they were threatening those students from the get-go, and they were accusing them of antisemitism from the get-go. And the board was behind them, and major donors were behind them, and I know from various people talking—“you don’t know how many calls we’re getting from alumni and parents about antisemitism. We’re not getting the other calls.” And I’m like, yeah, because most of these Muslim/Arab kids’ parents are immigrants who don’t feel like they can call up and complain to the university. But once they set that in motion—it was three weeks in or four weeks in that they banned SJP and JVP.

NAEH: And the other thing I should say is at every demonstration, there was a counter-demonstration, which also didn’t have permits. They were never slapped with any disciplinary warnings or hearings. And I knew last November, when things were escalating, escalating, escalating, I’d heard both that Minouche Shafik and the Barnard president had this theory that they would make an example of these kids, or a kid or two, and that would calm everything down. And I just thought: Have you ever met a teenager? I mean, it was the craziest thing. So basically, they kept escalating and getting harsher and harsher and more and more arbitrary. I mean, the first encounter was set up in the middle of the night. By 11 am, I got there, and they had already been warned if they didn’t leave, the police were coming in. And it kept spiraling. I mean, there was never an attempt to seriously negotiate on any front.

NAEH: I think with the second encampment, Minouche kind of did want to negotiate because I know she called somebody (who I won’t name) and said: Oh my God, can you get me out of this? And the person said: Are you kidding me? You should have talked to me three months ago when I tried. At that point, there was zero trust between the students and the administration, and the administration had never pushed back on the narrative that this campus was dangerous, that this was a hotbed of antisemitism, that these kids were antisemites. Faculty were trying all last winter and then into the spring. Where are our PR people that are coming out and saying: This is a misrepresentation of what is going on in college? Students are walking around the encampments and going to class. It is not dangerous. The head of Hillel did not help. He declared it dangerous. And nobody wanted to contradict this. Nobody wanted to say: Yeah, some students may feel uncomfortable, but nobody’s unsafe. And most students are going about their daily lives. And actually, lots of students were supporting the encampment.

NAEH: So, your question is why didn’t they push back? I think it’s a combination of political commitments, of members of the board and huge donors that they were totally too terrified to alienate, but not recognizing that not pushing back was never going to get them what they wanted. And I think they really thought if they just genuflected, somehow, they’d get themselves out of this mess. And they’re still kind of doing that. I mean, I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. I think they are trying to fight it, but they still have not publicly pushed back at the narrative. No one has made a statement about Mahmoud Khalid. I think there’s still some weird belief that if we accommodate in some ways, everyone will back off. But there’s nothing you can do to satisfy this. It’s not actually about antisemitism. This is the wedge into the academy, and the faculty as a whole—at least in arts and sciences—are desperate for them to fight, and to fight publicly. But they’re making some calculus that we don’t understand and we’re not privy to.

PB: On the question of the claims of antisemitism, there was also this antisemitism report that was written by a number of Columbia faculty, which also, I think, contributed to this picture. Because it said basically, there’s a huge problem, especially with pro-Palestinian antisemitism. I mean, I know people who are connected to Columbia who buy that, as well as I know many Jewish students who don’t. I’m curious what you thought of that report and what role you think it played. Because, I mean, the administration created it, but it was actually written by faculty.

NAEH: Yeah, well, that is another thing. They put three people in charge, three faculty members who’ve been accusing me and Rashid and all sorts of people who are anything but inflammatory in our speech of being antisemites for over a decade. Like, they put these three people in charge and let them choose. No one was an expert on antisemitism at a scholarly level. The criteria for being on it really seemed to be being a Zionist. I mean, there’s a chair of Israel Studies who’s an Israeli—he’s not on that committee. He was never even asked to be. The chair of MESAAS, an Israeli—she was never even asked to be on it. They had one person, a historian, who was one of the authors of the Jerusalem Declaration. Everyone else was people who believe in the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

NAEH: And the way they set this up was, they did all these listening sessions, quote-unquote, “with Jewish students.” Didn’t do them with anybody else. And students would come in—so I’ll do it in two parts—and just make claims, and the report never verified any of the claims. So, it did two things: It just took as fact any claim that a student made. It did not differentiate between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in their reporting of feeling unsafe or being unsafe. There was no verification. And on the other side, I know from quite a few Jewish students who were arguing with them about the opposite—this is not antisemitism, this is anti-Zionism—they were yelled at and shut up by the committee members saying: We want to know your experiences, we don’t want to have a political argument. And they were like: But I’m telling you my experiences. And they were completely written off.

NAEH: That report has had an incredible effect. It was not supposed to be released to the public. It was released to Haaretz before the provost or anybody in the administration had even seen them. They went over the heads of the administration to get it released. And it’s becoming the data, but by any research standards, it’s not data. And again, the university hasn’t actually done anything with it (because the new regime kind of knows it’s nuts, is my guess). But once it’s out there, it’s out there. And here we are.

PB: You made the point earlier that a lot of parents of Palestinian or Arab students might not be calling in because they may not feel as privileged. And I’m just curious—because there is so much attention on the experience of Jewish students—if you can say something about what you feel like the experience of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students has been. I imagine that some of those students might come and seek you out to talk to you about what their experience has been like on campus over the last 15 months.

NAEH: I mean, I don’t think Columbia has sent out a single email over the last 17 months that used the word Palestine or Palestinian. They will not say that word. And yet, it’s constantly about the crisis of antisemitism. Same at Barnard. So, to begin with, they feel like nobody has their backs. They are not reporting discrimination because they don’t believe it’s going to go anywhere. I mean, we’ve been encouraging them to, and some people are beginning to because we need a record. And they also—people are so miserable. They just want to get out and graduate. Anybody who’s been involved in this movement has felt beaten up by the university. I mean, we had a student try to commit suicide. I am really worried about somebody else who’s been harassed intensively by a dean for over a year, that this person is going to have a breakdown. I mean, it has taken an incredible emotional toll on people who also have family members who are dying in large numbers. And the fact that there’s just no empathy at that level—there are a lot of the deans, I know they do care, but there’s no public statement of support. You can’t have a year and a half constantly making these statements about how Jewish students feel, and how antisemitism, and this and that, and the other, and not say anything about these other kids. It’s really a sense of who belongs here, and I think it’s quite clear that at an administrative level—not at a faculty level, but at an administrative level—this university remains a white university committed to its white—including, now, its Jewish—students. Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily true if you talk to people as individuals, but the institutional response has given that message loud and clear.

PB: I wonder what it’s been like for you as a prominent Palestinian faculty. I know even going back to when you were getting tenure, you have faced this kind of pressure and accusations for your entire career. Have you felt unsafe, or have you felt that people have gone after you personally, or have you felt like the university has protected you? I’m just curious what your experience has been like.

NAEH: I have not felt unsafe. I’ve certainly gotten some crazy emails, but I think it’s very easy to send threatening emails. I don’t really take them all that seriously. I mean, I think more than anything I’m just exhausted. Like, if I hadn’t had a sabbatical this year, there was no way I was going to be back. And even now, I honestly have to say I don’t know how I’m going back in the fall, and I don’t know that I am—I mean, I may make a decision this summer that I can’t do it, and I’ll just take unpaid leave. It’s that hostile. I mean, it’s just exhausting. And most of my energy at the campus level has gone to fighting for the students. Like, I would never go after a student. I mean, Students for Supporting Israel have done some horrible things. They have horrible politics. Some of those students are literally passing names to the administration. But they’re kids. Kids are allowed to make mistakes. I do not understand why it is so unforgiving with these students. I mean, I do understand, but you know, that’s where a lot of my energy is on. We’re all trying to put up a fight against the various administrations. I’ve kind of thrown my hands up. I mean, on the Barnard side of the street, it’s useless. I just feel like that president is actually aligned with Trump on so many issues. And on the Columbia side of the street, it’s hard to know. I think there were big wins this last summer because the faculty took back control of the disciplinary process. But now, with the Trump administration pressure—I don’t know what Columbia’s gonna look like in six months if the university doesn’t stand up, if the administration doesn’t stand up.

PB: Right. Can you talk about what would be the implications of Columbia accepting the Trump administration’s demands? You may know them better than me. I know there’s something about admissions and discipline and masks and their whole series of things, demands. What would it do to Columbia University to accept these Trump administration demands?

NAEH: Okay, well first, I think there’s a general sense among the faculty, including some of the faculty who have brought this about, that the federal government does not get to determine the rules of a university. Discipline’s an internal matter. You can’t just put the president in charge. I mean, they want a model where there’s no due process. It’s not clear to me what their demands on admission are, specifically. I mean, they’ve already outlawed DEI, so I don’t know what they’re demanding. The disciplinary demands are outrageous. There’s no way—I mean, the university could do it, but what does that mean? It’s Trump’s vision of being the king. The couple demands that are, academically, extraordinarily serious is taking the Middle East South Asian African Studies department into receivership. So, receivership—what the university does is they appoint an interim chair from outside the department. It happened in the anthropology department 30 years ago. It was dysfunctional. I mean, literally, this was like in the ’80s or something. Like, it was to the point where faculty members were throwing chairs at each other in faculty meetings. I mean, complete and utter dysfunction. And so, basically, you disempower the faculty that don’t know how to behave; you start hiring and you restructure the department.

NAEH: MESAAS is not dysfunctional. It has an excellent chair. It has a lot of majors; it has graduate students. It has a few faculty members that the federal government and others may not like, but you can’t take a department into receivership over the content of speech. So that would be a complete violation of academic freedom for them to do that. The AAUP will sue Columbia if they do that—the American Association of University Professors. The other thing that’s extremely serious is the demand that we adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. I mean, the Center for Palestine Studies couldn’t exist. I couldn’t teach half my classes. Like, I couldn’t assign half the Israeli academic science because anti-Zionism would be antisemitism. It would make teaching on the Middle East and on Palestine virtually impossible.

PB: Harvard has adopted this. Has it prevented Harvard from teaching classes?

NAEH: Well, I’m waiting to see what happens. I mean, as it is, I’m going to be hauled into the Title VI office on a regular basis when I start teaching these kinds of classes.

PB: Because of the IHRA, or even if—

NAEH: No, even without it, people are being hauled in and being accused of antisemitism on unbelievably specious grounds. Now, most of those things are getting dismissed—the minute the IHRA definition is formally the definition, you can’t dismiss it. So, this question at Harvard is now: What’s going to happen when people are teaching? I think people will stop teaching certain kinds of classes. They will stop teaching certain books. There’s already someone at Barnard who decided not to teach a class this term because she’s vulnerable. I think we’re going to see it play out through this discrimination here.

PB: This is, obviously, not only happening at Columbia and Harvard. What does this mean for this academic study of Palestine and Israel in the United States?

NAEH: I don’t know what it means. There’ll be a lot of self-censorship. Anybody who’s not tenured or not on a tenure-line is not going to teach this stuff. Many people who are tenured are not going to do it because it’s just a pain in the ass to deal with, constantly. Now, if people don’t report, it will have no consequences, but they’re going to report because that’s the whole point. There’s a coordinated campaign. The number of OIE complaints—again, Title VI complaints—that came down in the first month of this semester—it was an onslaught against Palestinian students. I was in with one student who was accused of discrimination on the basis of national origin, on the basis of posters that showed up in the Graduate School of Architecture. One of them said “Israel is a terrorist state.” One of them had the Genocide Convention next to some drawing of the Palestinian village. He’d never even seen the posters before, by the way, but there had been a slew of these. So, I can’t imagine that there would not be a coordinated campaign to submit these complaints. And if IHRA is formally the criteria, of course, we’ll all be found guilty, right? I mean, the Center for Palestine Studies, I think, would be shut. The argument will be: Everything we do is antisemitic.

PB: I mean, I guess one of the things that I’m wondering about recently is people sometimes make analogies to the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Red Scare of the early ’20s; these huge crackdowns—including at Columbia—these huge crackdowns in antisemitism in the name of communism. And then, sometimes people say: Well, there was a fever, there was a kind of mania, and it passed. Do you have a sense of whether you think this is a phase that will pass, or do you think that really Columbia and universities like that may never be the same?

NAEH: I think, again, if we were still in a Biden administration world, there’s part of me that thinks that at some point, it would reset, of—okay, this is a little bit much, right? But the problem is, this is about a much larger Republican transformation of the country. Again, it’s just not—I mean, for some people, it’s about antisemitism and Palestine, but they’re willing to get in bed with antisemites to do it. That’s not the agenda here, right? I mean, they just pulled $145 million from Penn because of a trans athlete. I think race studies programs, gender and sexuality programs, are going to be in deep trouble. So, the question is how long this lasts. It depends on how long this right-wing fascist authoritarianism lasts and how far it goes. Because Palestine—it’s not just swept into it; it’s the Trojan horse. It’s the wedge in. It was a way to bring Democrats and Republicans together a year and a half ago, and it gave Republicans an in to the elite academy that they didn’t have before. They could do the state schools in Texas and Florida, but because the Democrats got in bed with them, because this is the issue that unites them, it was the wedge. And now, the Trump administration’s taken over.

NAEH: So I think there’s no answer to that, separate from the general political direction of the country, because this is just the beginning. I mean, Columbia could give them everything and they’ll come back next and say, “We don’t approve of this program, medical school research program,” and “Why do you have a center for the study of sexuality?” Will the university survive? I don’t know. I mean, these universities have huge endowments. I mean, Harvard I feel like could just dig into its endowment and just survive. But for some reason, the boards don’t think that’s what endowments are for. I think even if they dig into their endowments, a lot of stuff will be pared back. And there was already a lot of pressure in particular on arts and sciences, in terms of whether arts and sciences are valuable to the university. We’ve been being shrunk forever. So, the question is: Will these research universities look recognizable? If Trump really cuts off money to Columbia, I don’t know what Columbia looks like. I mean, the med school can’t function. Even if the board digs into the base of the endowment, which they don’t want to do, they cannot come up with all of that money. But the question, I guess, is: Can the universities reconstitute themselves again? I think partly, it depends how long this lasts. Maybe after four years. After 10 years? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how long it would take.

PB: I’m curious if you talk to faculty members who are in a different place than you are on the question of Israel and Palestine; if you ever say to them: Listen, we may not even agree on the subject, but don’t you recognize that this is destroying the university? I mean, I’m curious: Are there people who do have a different view but now have woken up and said, “Oh my gosh, something dangerous is happening”?

NAEH: Arts and Sciences. Starting last spring, after Minouche called the cops on students and named faculty members in the congressional hearing—American Association of University Professors did not have an active Columbia chapter. It got formed after that. All sorts of faculty members who have never been on our side on Palestine were like: This is not okay. We do not call cops on our students. You do not have the authority to call cops on campus without faculty approval, and you do not name faculty in the Senate. And so, there was a demonstration with all sorts of people who—they were like: We don’t want any of the signs from the encampment, but we’re going to join. And then, there was a big chapter that was formed. So that was even before.

NAEH: With Trump, the University Senate is in a tizzy. Faculty are terrified and really angry that the university is not publicly standing up. A bunch of law faculty wrote a letter the other day that this entire threat is unconstitutional. Why aren’t we standing up? The AAUP chapter held a meeting called “In Defense of the University” maybe three weeks ago. I spoke, and there were like 500 people in the room, mostly faculty and staff. So, there’s an absolute recognition at this point. Anybody who was in denial that this was about a bigger issue (again, except for these deep, deep ideologues) has absolutely recognized it. And I think it was important that the discussion wasn’t about Palestine— that I was the only person. As I said, I stand up and do my role, but the threat is much bigger. The climate school knows they’re done. So, people do realize.

NAEH: And I think part of what’s happening—and I think this is true for citizens, too—the question is, how do we fight this? It’s not clear. This is a new regime, and strategies that have often perhaps been used—like faculty goes on strike—that’s just going to feed into the Trump administration’s argument. So, I think people are really upset, and the medical school is really upset, although I think they probably blame the students, but I think nobody’s quite sure yet what the pushback will look like. I think the reality is it can’t be Columbia alone. And I suspect for me, the question is: What’s the tipping point where Penn and Harvard and all these elite university presidents decide to get together and fight it? Right now, they’re trying to see what happens to Columbia and hope it doesn’t happen to them. At some point, they’re going to know that is just naive beyond belief. But there has to be a cross-university fight, and we’re not seeing it yet. I don’t know what it will take. I mean, where’s the Democratic Party? I mean, the point is, universities are also just a symptom of a much larger crisis, and I think the opposition has not found its seat.

PB: Do you have advice for what Columbia alums or whatever should be doing?

NAEH: They need to hear from as many people as possible that this is not okay, that they need to stand up for these students, that they need to stand up to the federal government. And if anybody’s a donor, you should tell them you’re not giving them a cent until they change. Because it’s about money, but it’s also just about being inundated with calls by parents saying you have to crack down harder, or the antisemitism is whatever. And again, I want to be clear: Have there been some antisemitic instances on campus? Absolutely. I mean, Palestinian kids have been called terrorists, have been followed and filmed. People have had their hijabs ripped off. There have been a handful of these kinds of cases across the board, if we had to count them. I’m not sure they’re more on the antisemitism side than the other side. I don’t care. It’s not acceptable.

PB: Just the last question: Do you know anything about how Mahmoud Khalil’s wife is doing, or are you able to hear anything about his conditions? Do you have any sense, just on the personal level, of what’s happening to him and the people around him?

NAEH: I mean, I’m in touch with one of his lawyers directly. I think he’s okay, whatever that means. I think he’s pretty resilient, and he’s one of the most educated people in that immigration detention center. So, I also think he’s probably playing a certain role there. His wife, I saw about a week ago, I mean, you know, she’s holding up. It’s really hard. They’re really relieved that the case is going to be heard in New Jersey and not Louisiana. But as of a couple of days ago, they didn’t know who the judge was yet. I don’t know if they know now. And the ruling that it be moved to New Jersey did not consider the question of moving him back from Louisiana. So, what I do know is the first fight is to try to get him moved because then at least he’s closer. I mean, his wife is going to deliver any day, but she has—there’s a big community at Columbia, the Palestinian student group is taking care of her, too. I mean, there’s a strong community. So, I mean, I guess what I would say is I think they’re as good as anybody could be in these circumstances, but terrified.

PB: Nadia, thank you so much for doing this. It’s really informative and powerful, and I’m really grateful for your time.

NAEH: Thank you. And thank you all for coming.

AA: This has been another episode of On the Nose. If you liked it, please rate us or share it with a friend. And please subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org See you next time.