BY HILTON OBENZINGER

Dear Claire Shipman, President, Columbia University.

I received your letter and other notices about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and I’m disappointed and angry.  I know you have a tough job, but perhaps unwittingly you harmed me.  By agreeing to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, you have turned me into an antisemite.  Since 1972 I have publicly criticized the State of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and have rejected Zionism, politically and religiously.  As a writer and historian, I join many Holocaust scholars and historians in rejecting this definition.

According to the IHRA definition my critical stance would make me an antisemite.  I consider Zionism to be a racist ideology, and like many others have compared Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to the way Nazis treated Jews (such as starvation of Gaza being akin to Nazi starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto).  And I reject the hysterical “whataboutism” that regards criticism of Israel as unlike criticism of other countries, when in fact Israel has been protected from criticism by its supporters for decades.  All of this despite the fact that almost all of my extended family were killed at the hands of the Nazis, and I grew up hearing the horror stories of my aunt and my maternal grandmother who survived.  Genocide is personal, always.

You know this, yet you allow yourself to be used by those who use the real scourge of antisemitism as a means to undermine all civil rights, to advance a starkly racist, xenophobic program.  Once again, Jews are being used for somebody else’s agenda, manipulated, no matter our objections, and this is actually, blatantly antisemitic.  You know this, don’t you?

You have accommodated yourself to a gangster who does not abide by the law, who has armed masked thugs to steal people from the streets, and who seeks to control higher education so it serves his interests – or force universities to die.  You know all of this, I am sure.  But you agreed to his terms – which he will ignore at his pleasure – because you thought it was in Columbia’s best interests.  Would you have succumbed to Hitler’s control of German universities?  I’m afraid to hear your answer.  It’s always easy to condemn fascism, hatred and genocide after the fact.  But the mass murder is today, as is your collaboration with the Death Machine.

I was one of the students who occupied your office in 1968.  We were outraged then about the behavior of Columbia, and we were proven correct: the university had continued to support research to aid the war in Vietnam despite protestations that it had stopped such research; and the university had continued to push ahead with building the gym on public land despite the opposition of Harlem people and its leaders.  We occupied your office out of love for our country, despite its imperialist hubris and racism, and love for our university, despite its acquiescence to those policies.

But as bad as the university was back then, you and your predecessor’s administration have been worse.  At least in 1968 university leaders said they were against the Vietnam War and for civil rights, mourning the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  It was hypocrisy then, but at least they mouthed certain words, too ashamed to say otherwise.  Today you have sided with those who attack students and faculty that cry out for the end to the starvation and mass murder in Gaza; you undermine all the efforts since 1968 to expand the scope of the university to include people of color and to foster democratic rights, to run a university with real input from faculty and students rather than the autocratic heritage handed down from Presidents Butler and Kirk.

I have nothing but praise and admiration for those students who won’t stop screaming in the face of mass murderers, despite any of their excesses.  Excesses can be corrected; excuses for allowing genocide and fascism to thrive cannot be accepted.  Perhaps if more German students screamed and sat down peacefully for a picnic on a lawn of their university in Berlin to stop Hitler, my family might have lived.  I’m not a rich donor, but I’m going to withhold my modest contribution until I can see a change in my Alma Mater.  And I will weep – and take to the streets with millions of others in this country and around the world to stop Netanyahu’s genocide and oppose the Gangster-in-Chief.

Sincerely,
Hilton Obenzinger, PhD (CC’69)

Hilton Obenzinger taught American Studies at Stanford University, where he was Associate Director of the Stanford Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project and Associate Director at the Hume Writing Center for Honors Writing.