[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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Allow me to address a few words to my fellow Jewish faculty members:
So the white nationalist hammer is coming down on Columbia University, which is being made an example of, in order to scare all institutions of higher education into falling in line with the Musk/Trump plan to destroy any and all potential civil society nodes of resistance to the authoritarian regime they are putting in place. Don’t be fooled: the excuse they are using to destroy the institution—that Columbia is incorrigibly antisemitic—is, of course, the exact opposite of what is happening. They are coming after Columbia precisely because the University is, to the (not-) “populist” base in front of whom they perform their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem precisely of Jewishness: it’s “globalist,” “cosmopolitan,” New York-based, “liberal,” etc.
Of course the nationalists coming after us are also pro-Israel—they love the idea that there is an ethnonationalist garrison state to which all Jews should send themselves, and which will most likely self-destruct anyway in a cataclysmic orgy of Armageddon-like violence. And the Netanyahu-aligned establishment Jewish [sic] organizations, such as the ADL, who today are cheering on the destruction of Columbia, are more than happy to make common cause with their fellow nationalists—so long as the billions and billions of dollars’ worth of bombs keep flowing Israel’s way.
Columbia administrators have been relentlessly cracking down on campus speech and protest around Israel’s ongoing depredations in Gaza and elsewhere, in a combination of pro-Israel zeal and “practical” calculations that such appeasement might shield the institution from the worst of what’s coming. But of course their abject compliance has done nothing of the sort. And colleagues who honestly thought that such draconian violations of long-cherished values and norms, cloaked in the fictional justification that Columbia had become some kind of antisemitic hotbed, were justified, are now seeing what was for many, if not most of us, the inevitable outcome of such sad labors.
Here, for example, is one colleague, quoted just three days ago in the New York Times:
Dr. Brent Stockwell, the chair of the department of biological sciences, said that threatening research funding was exactly the wrong lever for the Trump administration to pull to fight antisemitism, in part because many Jewish faculty members will lose their jobs if their funding is eliminated. “They just don’t understand that if they wipe out all the Jewish researchers who are doing frontier, cutting-edge research, that will just make things more difficult,” said Dr. Stockwell, who is Jewish. “It’s adding salt into the wound.”
But Brent, my man, oh yes, they do understand. Do they ever. And now, perhaps, so do you. They were never going to stop at critics of Israel. They’re coming for the “good” Jews too; indeed, they have already come—they’ve come today, for you. So we’re all in this together now. And by “we” I mean not only us Jews, but every right-thinking defender of the values this university is supposed to stand for. And we should, and can, regardless of our differences of opinion over Israel, join now in common cause to fight the evil engulfing our students and colleagues.
