Columbia’s New Task Force on Antisemitism Might Want To Take a Look at the University’s Policy of Providing Its Students and Faculty Free Access to the New York Times

The presidents of Columbia, Teachers College, and Barnard earlier this month announced a “task force on antisemitism.” It was described as “part of a commitment to ensuring that our campuses are safe, welcoming, and inclusive for Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and all of us.”This might be progress. As recently as 2020, the then-president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, was ridiculing allegations of systemic antisemitism at his university as “preposterous.” The leaders of the new task force — Ester Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer — are a distinguished group. Their heads and hearts are in the right place. They’ve been working on this issue for years.The Sun’s archives from the years between 2004 and 2006 — “Bollinger To Probe Bias on Campus,” “The Bollinger Committee,” “Anti-Israel Professor Is Defended,” “Alleged Intimidator of Jewish Students Likely To Achieve Tenure at Columbia” — provide some illuminating context on the roots of the current crisis at Morningside Heights.Ms. Fuchs and Messrs. Lemann and Schizer don’t need a lot of suggestions from me. Yet so long as there’s a task force on antisemitism gathering at Columbia, let me venture one idea: the job won’t be complete unless Columbia’s task force takes a look at the role of the New York Times, access to which the university provides free to students and faculty.What does this have to do with antisemitism? The Times has been cheerleading the anti-Israel activists at Columbia. Plus, it’s lately been devoting vast resources to a campaign demonizing Jewish schools in New York state.Until the Times was pressured to stop, it was making money by having its journalists provide readers with paid guided tours of Iran. One of the Times’ frequent opinion contributors was getting paid by the Iranian mission to the United Nations, which the Times still hasn’t disclosed to readers. This past Yom Kippur, the Times turned for advice on antisemitism to an advocate of boycotting Israel. A March 2023 letter from Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said the Times’ “overt anti-Israel bias” and “deceitful” coverage “plays a role in endangering Jews around the globe.” In April 2019, Israel’s ambassador to America, Ron Dermer, called the Times “a cesspool of hostility towards Israel” and an example of “the Jew-hatred of growing parts of the intellectual class.”Increasingly, even the Times itself and its personnel are acknowledging the paper’s antisemitism problem. After the newspaper apologized for publishing an antisemitic editorial cartoon, Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about, “the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry.”Another Times writer and editor, Bari Weiss, quit with a letter complaining about the paper’s having published a “fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite.” She said her Times colleagues had bullied her with comments about how she was “writing about the Jews again.”In Commentary, a longtime New York Times reporter and editor, Alison Leigh Cowan, recently faulted the paper for what she called its “moral blindness” and “grave journalistic errors.” Dig into some of the Times’ Middle East coverage honored by Columbia with the Pulitzer Prize, and one can discover the threads of some of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate roiling Columbia and other campuses today. The “Israel Apartheid” lie? It spread in part because of Thomas Friedman, whose 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning international reporting included a line about how “Israeli Jews will either have to extend voting rights to the Arabs in the occupied territories and risk their taking over the state, or systematically deprive them of their rights and turn Israel into a South Africa-like nation.”Actually, the migration of Russian Jews to Israel changed the demographic story, as did high Jewish fertility rates and Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Mr. Friedman and other frequent Times contributors, such as Peter Beinart, kept clinging to the South Africa analogy like Soviet diplomats pushing the old Zionism-Is-Racism lie. In 2020, Columbia gave a Pulitzer for investigative reporting to a Times series about how Jewish moneylenders were throwing excessively lavish bar mitzvah parties while offering “exploitative loans” to Muslim immigrant cab drivers.The Times managed to blame Jewish money lenders for a phenomenon — the rise of Uber and Lyft and the related decline in the value of taxi medallions — that wasn’t their fault.One way Columbia students and faculty acquire the antisemitism could well be by reading it in the New York Times, for which the university provides full access, via a campus-wide site license, to all Columbia faculty, staff, and students.No less an eminent authority on antisemitism than the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, publicly canceled his New York Times subscription back in 2021, accusing it of a front-page “blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people.” So long as Columbia supplies it as reading material for the campus community, is it any wonder that the university has an antisemitism problem it needs a task force to solve?

Columbia’s New Task Force on Antisemitism Might Want To Take a Look at the University’s Policy of Providing Its Students and Faculty Free Access to the New York Times

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