March 10, 2025, 5:04pm

[As news broke last Friday of the Trump administration’s plan to revoke $400 million dollars of research funding to Columbia University, filmmaker and Columbia professor James Schamus posted the following to a faculty list serve there. It has been lightly edited for publication here.]

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Permit me to deal with a couple of phrases to my fellow Jewish school members:

So the white nationalist hammer is coming down on Columbia College, which is being made an instance of, with the intention to scare all establishments of upper training into falling in step with the Musk/Trump plan to destroy any and all potential civil society nodes of resistance to the authoritarian regime they’re putting in. Don’t be fooled: the excuse they’re utilizing to destroy the establishment—that Columbia is incorrigibly antisemitic—is, after all, the precise reverse of what’s taking place. They’re coming after Columbia exactly as a result of the College is, to the (not-) “populist” base in entrance of whom they carry out their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem exactly of Jewishness: it’s “globalist,” “cosmopolitan,” New York-based, “liberal,” and so forth.

After all the nationalists coming after us are additionally pro-Israel—they love the concept there’s an ethnonationalist garrison state to which all Jews ought to ship themselves, and which is able to more than likely self-destruct anyway in a cataclysmic orgy of Armageddon-like violence. And the Netanyahu-aligned institution Jewish [sic] organizations, such because the ADL, who right now are cheering on the destruction of Columbia, are more than pleased to make widespread trigger with their fellow nationalists—as long as the billions and billions of {dollars}’ price of bombs hold flowing Israel’s method.

Columbia directors have been relentlessly cracking down on campus speech and protest round Israel’s ongoing depredations in Gaza and elsewhere, in a mix of pro-Israel zeal and “sensible” calculations that such appeasement may protect the establishment from the worst of what’s coming. However after all their abject compliance has completed nothing of the kind. And colleagues who actually thought that such draconian violations of long-cherished values and norms, cloaked within the fictional justification that Columbia had change into some form of antisemitic hotbed, had been justified, are actually seeing what was for a lot of, if not most of us, the inevitable final result of such unhappy labors.

Right here, for instance, is one colleague, quoted simply three days in the past within the New York Instances:

Dr. Brent Stockwell, the chair of the division of organic sciences, mentioned that threatening analysis funding was precisely the improper lever for the Trump administration to drag to struggle antisemitism, partly as a result of many Jewish school members will lose their jobs if their funding is eradicated. “They only don’t perceive that in the event that they wipe out all of the Jewish researchers who’re doing frontier, cutting-edge analysis, that can simply make issues tougher,” mentioned Dr. Stockwell, who’s Jewish. “It’s including salt into the wound.”

However Brent, my man, oh sure, they do perceive. Do they ever. And now, maybe, so do you. They had been by no means going to cease at critics of Israel. They’re coming for the “good” Jews too; certainly, they’ve already come—they’ve come right now, for you. So we’re all on this collectively now. And by “we” I imply not solely us Jews, however each right-thinking defender of the values this college is meant to face for. And we should always, and may, no matter our variations of opinion over Israel, be part of now in widespread trigger to struggle the evil engulfing our college students and colleagues.