In the 2023-2024 House Education Committee hearings, amidst growing concerns about campus antisemitism following the Hamas attacks on Israel, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) challenged the leaders of prestigious universities—Columbia, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. She questioned whether advocating for the genocide of Jews violated their anti-bullying and harassment policies. The presidents struggled to provide clear responses, and within months, three of them stepped down. In her latest book, “Poisoned Ivies,” Stefanik delves into how esteemed academic institutions have succumbed to moral decay, driven by groupthink, a lack of diverse viewpoints, and indoctrination from far-left ideologies. In this excerpt, she focuses on certain professors, including the father of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who are perpetuating anti-Jewish sentiment at Columbia University.
Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia University faced a barrage of hateful slurs and threats to their safety. Just days after the attacks, an Israeli student was assaulted by a former Columbia undergraduate wielding a stick, who tore down posters of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. The attacker reportedly shouted, “F–k you. F–k all you prick crackers.” The individual was subsequently charged with offenses including second-degree and third-degree assault.
This incident was not isolated.
Columbia University has a history of anti-Jewish prejudice and mistreatment of Jewish and pro-Israel students. Entire departments, such as the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), are perceived as hostile to pro-Israel views, discouraging students from enrolling.
Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history in the Middle Eastern Studies Department, has been a controversial figure since he joined Columbia in 1999 and received tenure in 2009.
Massad’s record of antisemitism is well-documented. He reportedly asked a student who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, “How many Palestinians did you kill?” He has referred to IDF soldiers as “baby-killing Zionist Jewish volunteers for Israeli Jewish supremacy” and branded Zionism as a “genocidal cult.” When confronted by the media about these inflammatory remarks, Columbia University opted not to condemn them, choosing instead to remain silent.
In 2005, a series of student complaints forced Columbia’s then president Lee Bollinger to establish a five-person committee to investigate Massad. The members of the committee were two professors who had signed an anti-Israel BDS petition, a professor who had publicly blamed Israel for worldwide antisemitism, Massad’s dissertation advisor, and a university administrator who had previously been accused of ignoring student complaints of antisemitism on campus. “The man who handpicked the committee, Nick Dirks,” The Post added, “is married to a professor who co-teaches a class with Massad.”
Unsurprisingly, Massad was not disciplined.
So it could hardly come as a shock that, on October 8, 2023, just 24 hours after Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israel, Massad published an online op-ed at the website The Electronic Intifada celebrating Hamas’s “resistance.”
He praised the attacks in paragraph after paragraph. At no point does Massad mention any of the particular acts of violence and terror committed by Hamas — for example, slaughtering whole families in their homes or butchering elderly peace activists. All of that is hidden under the word “resistance.”
A few weeks later, he joined 170 other Columbia faculty in signing an open letter “in Defense of Robust Debate About the History and Meaning of the War in Israel/Gaza.” The bulk of the letter is spent defending a student-written statement that had appeared earlier in the month. At no point in this letter are Hamas’s crimes mentioned or acknowledged.
According to the letter, Hamas’s “armed resistance” is “anticipated” by “international humanitarian law” — a way of saying that Hamas’s acts are implicitly righteous. Whether the “prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians” applies to Hamas or only to Israel is, notably, left ambiguous.
This is just one egregious example of Columbia professors who fully embrace and foment antisemitism on campus.
Hamid Dabashi, Columbia’s Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, has a decades-long record of antisemitism in his classroom. In 2004, Dabashi wrote that Israelis have “a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”
A decade later, he wrote, “from now on, every time any Israeli, every time any Jew, anywhere in the world, utters the word ‘Auschwitz,’ or the word ‘Holocaust,’ the world will hear ‘Gaza.’” In 2018, he wrote, “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name of ‘Israel’ will pup [sic] up as a key actor in the atrocities.”
There’s one other professor whose name might sound familiar. Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia. He is also the father of New York City’s pro-Hamas, defund-the-police, Socialist, I believe jihadist, new mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The elder Mamdani’s bona fides are, naturally, impeccable: anti- American, anti- capitalist, and anti-Israel fanaticism have animated his entire career and shaped his son’s.
For example, in “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” published in 2004, Mamdani asserted that “we need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.” Mamdani rejected the idea that suicide bombing is barbaric. It’s probably not a coincidence that the book appeared at precisely the time that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and other terrorist groups were embracing suicide bombing as the central tactic of the Second Intifada, during which time they killed more than one thousand Israelis.
In “Neither Settler Nor Native,” published in 2020, Mamdani claimed that in Israel “the expunging of non-Jews has taken the form of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, segregation, fragmentation, apartheid, and denial of identity.”
At an event in 2022, taking a moment away from attacking Israel to go the next step and attack America, he explained: “America is the genesis of what we call ‘settler colonialism.’ The American model was exported all around the world.” He claimed that Hitler modeled the Holocaust on American precedents, specifically Abraham Lincoln’s Native American policies.
And that’s far from the worst of it.
Mahmood Mamdani is a member of the Advisory Policy Council of the Gaza Tribunal, the goal of which “is to awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” Other members of the council include the virulently antisemitic ex–UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Ramy Abdu, a human rights lawyer with close ties to Hamas. The Gaza Tribunal hosted a conference in Istanbul in late October 2025. Among its featured speakers were several with present or past ties to designated terrorist organizations.
When it comes to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s radicalism — for example, when he refuses to condemn Hamas or when he peddles antisemitic conspiracy theories such as: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” — the apple does not fall far from the tree. In fact, Zohran Mamdani’s dangerous ideology was developed in a petri dish of antisemitic, anti-American indoctrination from his parents, whom he himself has described as having shaped his political worldview.
For years, Columbia has welcomed professors like those above, treating them as superlative members of Columbia’s academic community. Pro-Israel professors have not received the same welcome. Consider what happened to former Columbia Business School Professor Shai Davidai.
On the evening of October 18, 2023, Professor Davidai, who grew up in Israel, gave an impassioned speech at an anti-terror vigil on Columbia’s campus. He posted the speech to YouTube titled “An Open Letter to Every Parent in America.”
“I’m speaking to you as a dad,” Davidai said: “I want you to know we cannot protect your children from pro-terror student organizations, because the president of Columbia University will not speak out against pro-terror student organizations, because the president of Harvard University, because the president of Stanford, because the president of Berkeley will not speak out against pro-terror student organizations.”
In the course of his ten-minute oration, he accused then Columbia President Minouche Shafik of being a “coward” and said that he feared for his safety on campus, given the indisputable evidence of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred.
Unlike the tenured professors spewing vile antisemitism for decades, Shai Davidai became a target of Columbia’s administration. In December 2023, Columbia University launched an investigation of Davidai, alleging harassment based on “national origin and/or shared ancestry.” The charges reflected accusations from pro-Palestinian students and faculty that Davidai had “doxxed” and “harassed” them — charges that Davidai denies.
Davidai and his wife identify as liberals. Writing in Tablet in February 2024, they articulated their position this way: “As leftist, liberal Zionists, we have always made a clear distinction between the people of Palestine and the inhumane terror organizations that falsely purport to speak in their name. Our support for a two-state solution has never wavered, and to this day we remain staunchly opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, refrain from buying products manufactured beyond the 1967 armistice line, and protest any governmental policy that we see as oppressive or unjust.”
They simply think that Israel has the right to exist — a belief they share with the majority of Americans.
In October 2024, on the first anniversary of October 7th, antisemitic protesters surrounded and intimidated a group of students holding a university-sanctioned memorial. Pro-Hamas protesters sat on the steps of Columbia’s library holding mock newspapers that read, in a full-page advertisement, “Glory to the Martyrs. Victory to the Resistance.”
When Columbia chief operating officer Cas Holloway happened to cross Columbia’s plaza, Davidai challenged him to explain why pro-Hamas protesters were permitted by the university to harass Jewish mourners and accused Holloway of being “indifferent” to “hatred.”
A few days later, Davidai’s campus access was suspended. A university spokesman alleged that he had “repeatedly harassed and intimidated University employees in violation of University policy.”
Eventually, exhausted by Columbia’s mistreatment, Davidai left the university. Writing in Tablet in July 2025, he explained his decision: “Columbia’s failed leadership, morally bankrupt faculty, and indifferent majority have shattered my respect for an institution I once called home. I no longer trust its leaders to do what’s right, or my colleagues to show them the way. With that respect lost, I have no choice but to leave. Staying would betray everything I stand for.”
The pattern is clear. Those who attack Jewish students are treated with kid gloves and allowed to remain in positions of privilege and influence. But those who stand up for the civil rights of Jewish students are bullied— then accused of being the bullies, suspended, canceled, and driven out.
And just to remind you: Columbia University’s undergraduate tuition is an eye-watering $70,000 per year—for this antisemitic, anti-American, and vile anti-West hate.
Copyright © 2026 by Elise Stefanik. From the forthcoming book “POISONED IVIES: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities” by Elise Stefanik to be published by Threshold Editions, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
