Hotspots of Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Sentiment on US Campuses | Page 29

Hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses

Columbia University
This study obtained 52 responses for students at Columbia University—not enough to allow for
robust, quantitative comparisons between Columbia and other schools in this study. Yet an
examination of the responses of these students strongly suggests that many Jewish students at
Columbia perceived it to have particularly high levels of hostility toward Israel. Thirty-six out of
the 52 respondents at Columbia (70%) at least somewhat agreed that there is a hostile
environment toward Israel on their campus. Although these estimates are not particularly
stable, and would be noticeably different if even a single respondent changed his or her answer,
they still place Columbia at or near the top of all the schools studied in terms of hostility toward
Israel.
Fifteen out of 52 respondents (28%) at Columbia agreed at least somewhat that there is a
hostile environment toward Jews. This would place Columbia in the top ten schools with the
highest rates of hostility toward Jews but considerably lower than the rates reported at UCLA
and CUNY-Brooklyn. The percentage of respondents at Columbia experiencing and witnessing
antisemitic harassment was similar to the rates seen at the schools with the highest levels of
harassment (e.g., Northwestern, Wisconsin, and schools in the UC system).
Additional analyses suggest that hostility perceived by Jewish students at Columbia is closely
connected to criticism of Israel and the BDS movement in particular. Sixteen out of 52
respondents (32%) at Columbia reported hearing that “Israelis behaved like Nazis toward the
Palestinians,” a number substantially higher than the 23% reported at Northwestern and the
other UC campuses. Respondents’ open-ended responses in the survey further highlighted
criticism of Israel as a source of perceived hostility. Several Columbia students explicitly
mentioned “Israeli apartheid week” in their discussion of antisemitic incidents on campus.

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