On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest from apartheid South Africa.
They spoke as alumni and as Jews to condemn the university’s investments in Israel, its repression of pro-Palestinian speech, and its capitulation to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom in the name of fighting antisemitism on campus. They had planned to burn their Columbia diplomas in protest, but the rain got in their way, so many ripped them to pieces instead.
