Columbia Prof.: It’s a Problem People Are Trained on Antisemitism Definition that We Can’t Have Double Standards

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN International’s “The Brief,” Columbia University Professor Emerita Marianne Hirsch said that there’s a problem with the school adopting a definition of antisemitism that, among other things, “disallows having double standards to Israel and other nations, but there’s also training to train students to tell what antisemitism is and then there’s a training according to those rules and then there’s a zero tolerance policy.”

Hirsch said, “I grew up under an authoritarian regime as a child in Romania in the 1950s, which was extremely repressive. There were certain things — you had to be loyal to the party. … So, it was a very, very repressive place to grow up. It was also deeply, deeply antisemitic. So, I experienced anti-Jewish hatred…I know what it is and I know how to tell what it is, and it’s really about being anti-Jewish.”

She continued,  “But it’s really the repression, the silencing, and the fear that produces echoes in me now, where we will be, on Columbia’s campus, monitored, where there is, not only this policy, the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism, which conflates Jewishness with Israel, which disallows comparing what Israel does with Nazism, and which disallows having double standards to Israel and other nations, but there’s also training to train students to tell what antisemitism is and then there’s a training according to those rules and then there’s a zero tolerance policy. So, it will be very hard to interpret some of the things that we teach openly.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett