Investigation reveals faculty-driven hostility to Zionism, leaving Jewish students targeted and academic freedom endangered.
Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism has released its fourth and final report, delivering the most comprehensive—and devastating—documentation to date of the university’s deepening antisemitic climate and entrenched ideological bias against Israel.
The 70-page report highlights a startling reality: Columbia’s Middle East studies department is staffed exclusively by anti-Zionist academics hostile to the State of Israel. According to investigators, the university “lacks full-time tenure-line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.” In other words, students are denied access to any balanced or mainstream scholarship that recognizes Zionism as a legitimate national movement.
The Task Force found that students searching for courses presenting Zionism fairly—or even neutrally—hit a wall of uniform ideological messaging. Some faculty even crossed professional boundaries, the report noted, by pressuring or incentivizing students to join anti-Israel demonstrations, shifting classrooms away from genuine inquiry toward political activism. As the report states, educators are entrusted with teaching students how to think—not indoctrinating them into one predetermined worldview.
Investigators also documented alarming antisemitic incidents, including instructors singling out Jewish and Israeli students for public blame regarding Israel’s actions. In one of the most serious cases, a visiting Israeli professor’s lecture was shut down by protesters simply because his scholarly perspective diverged from the anti-Zionist dogma dominating the department.
The report echoes the growing national concern that Columbia has become a breeding ground for campus antisemitism, rather than a place of academic pluralism. This conclusion was reinforced by Columbia’s recent “F” grade in the new StopAntisemitism campus rankings—one of fourteen American universities deemed to have failed Jewish students and neglected their safety.
Together, the findings paint a stark picture: a world-renowned university where anti-Zionist ideology has hardened into institutional bias, creating an environment in which Jewish identity, Israeli perspectives, and academic freedom are routinely undermined.
