Columbia’s President Stepped Down. So Should the Media That Reported On it.

The resigning of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik may feel like sweet justice, if not a little schadenfreude. Okay, a lot of schadenfreude. The sudden news certainly brought joy to my heart, especially at a time when good headlines for Jews are few and far between.

But it feels premature for a victory lap, or if you’re a Canadian female pole vaulter, a public twerking. That’s because it’s not clear yet what conclusions, if any, the school or society will take away from there appearing to be a consequence for her failing to stem the months-long persecution and intimidation of Jewish students.

According to an August 14th article by Politico journalist Irie Sentner, Shafik’s resignation came, “amid lingering bitterness among students and faculty over the school’s forced removal of protesters from an encampment and a building they had taken over on the campus in Upper Manhattan.”

Funny, that doesn’t sound at all like she resigned for having shamefully did nothing to prevent Jews from being targeted and enduring off the charts antisemitism, or for her antisemitic tweets.

Sentner does attribute Shafik’s resigning to “religious discrimination on college campuses,” but religious discrimination against whom? Greek Orthodox? It’s not until the ninth paragraph that the word “antisemitism” is even mentioned.

The article reported that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike said, “she failed to protect Jewish students from harassment and assault,” as if this were open to interpretation based on one’s politics. If she took as pass/fail her responsibility to uphold Title VI, which prohibits discrimination in institutions receiving federal funding, she flunked her ass off.

The University didn’t do us any favors either by not forcing Shafik to apologize to the Jewish community. In her departing statement, she claims to have dismantled the encampments, “Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus,” not for her concern over Jews, or because the protests had become violent.

Neither what she said nor the reporting of why she resigned drew any dotted line between antisemitism and why she had to step down.

This isn’t the only recent high-profile resignation in which the antisemitism behind it was downplayed. On August 1, the New York Times reported that Joe Algrant, head of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, one of the city’s elite private schools, also stepped down.

The reason given for Algrant’s departure was that, “Parents complained that school administrators did not do enough to bring factions together or to articulate and enforce rules around activism, antisemitism and Islamophobia.” I’m sure after a student spray painted, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” the last thing Jewish parents wanted to do was hug it out with Arab parents.

Graffiti and defacing public property used to be a crime. The Times however elevated it to “activism” as if calling for the death of millions was somehow taking a brave stand. And call me dishonest media-phobic, but what Islamophobia could we possibly be talking about when what was graffitied could only be offensive to Jews, not Muslims?

There may be rare times when you can sorta, almost, maybe forgive someone in the public sphere for feeling they need to level the playing field and suggest that antisemitism and islamophobia are equally at play in our society. This was far from one of those times.

Both Shafik and Algrant’s resignations were the direct result of their failure to properly respond to antisemitism. Yet the inability of each article to call out antisemitic behavior in no uncertain or unequivocal terms is indicative of the moral failing in the first place. They just couldn’t get themselves to say that someone was guilty of racism against Jews.

Support for the Palestinians being the new cornerstone of social justice, what protestors were saying could never be seen as anything but free speech, even the call to annihilate an entire population. That’s also why it wasn’t rape on 10.7, but a justified act of people of color against a white oppressor.

For people so concerned about the death toll in Gaza, these writers didn’t seem the least bit afraid to kill the lead. If both school Presidents had been willing to call out antisemitism much sooner, maybe they would still have their jobs. And if both journalists had the guts to call it out sooner, I wouldn’t have had to read all the way to the ninth paragraph.