Rashid Khalidi said the agreement, which included adopting the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism, would make his class ‘impossible to teach’
An anti-Israel Columbia University professor emeritus, Rashid Khalidi, canceled his Middle Eastern history course over the Ivy League school’s settlement with the Trump administration, claiming the deal makes it “impossible to teach.”
In an open letter published Friday in the Guardian to acting president Claire Shipman, Khalidi wrote that he couldn’t teach the course “under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration.” He pointed to the university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. It defines anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews” and lists examples such as inciting violence against Jews, denying or minimizing the Holocaust, and holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.
Khalidi argued that the definition made it “impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel” and “the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.”
Incorporating the IHRA’s definition was one of several components included in Columbia’s $221 million deal with the Trump administration. Other Ivy League schools are following suit. Brown University paid $50 million to resolve investigations into anti-Semitism and Harvard has indicated that it would pay up to $500 million to settle its dispute with the Trump administration.
Khalidi, a former Palestine Liberation Organization flack, scrutinized other parts of Columbia’s deal as well. He criticized the university for mandating anti-Semitism trainings from the Anti-Defamation League and Project Shema, a group “built by progressive Jews” and focused on “depolarizing difficult conversations around anti-Jewish harm,” according to its website. He accused both of linking anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism.
Khalidi also said teaching assistants and students would feel constrained “by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel.”
Anti-Semitic activists have consistently run amok on Columbia’s campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack. In May, more than 80 agitators were arrested after they stormed a Columbia library, renamed it after a terrorist, injured two security officials, damaged bookshelves, and distributed pamphlets praising Hamas.
Faculty members have likewise pushed anti-Semitic sentiments. Khalidi, a member of the anti-Israel Faculty for Justice in Palestine, himself blamed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli “settler colonialism” and “apartheid.”
Still, Khalidi said that another aspect of Columbia’s deal—appointing a vice provost to review the university’s Middle East department—was “abhorrent” and called it “a shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.”
Khalidi taught at Columbia from 2003 until retiring in 2024, but planned to return in the fall as a special lecturer to teach his “History of the Modern Middle East” course. He said he was using an open letter to announce the cancellation since Shipman has “seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.”
In lieu of teaching at Columbia, Khalidi will offer a series of public lectures in New York. Proceeds will be donated to “Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions,” he wrote.
The courses will be held at The People’s Forum, a radical nonprofit that in April 2024 encouraged a group of anti-Israel activists to re-create the “summer of 2020” in the name of the Palestinian “resistance.” Hours later, rioters stormed and occupied a building on Columbia’s nearby campus.
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.
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