Several anti-Zionist Jewish professors at Columbia University filed claims with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seeking inclusion as eligible claimants in a $21 million settlement fund established to resolve allegations that the university subjected employees to antisemitic, anti-Israeli harassment.
While the deadline to submit claims expired on Tuesday, the group of professors said some potential claimants did not apply earlier because they feared retaliation from the Ivy League school or the federal government.
The settlement stems from an EEOC investigation alleging that Columbia subjected employees to harassment based on their Jewish faith, Jewish ancestry or Israeli national origin following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The fund is part of a broader agreement between Columbia and the federal government.
Raeefa Shams, director of communications and programming at Academic Engagement Network, told JNS that “it is egregious that anti-Zionist Jewish faculty at Columbia University are claiming that they were discriminated against for their views.”
“Many of these faculty helped to create an atmosphere where Jewish, Zionist and Israeli faculty and students felt excluded, unwelcome, and even physically threatened,” Shams said. “They provided the intellectual scaffolding for the actions of student demonstrators. For them to now use topsy-turvy definitions of antisemitism to bolster their claims is absurd.”
Amy Werman, a former senior lecturer in discipline at the Columbia School of Social Work who retired in 2025, told JNS that “as a former full-time faculty member who retired because of antisemitism, my focus is on the members of the Columbia community who were harmed for supporting Israel and standing up to antisemitism on campus.”
“I trust that the EEOC will be able to distinguish the merits of those deserving of compensation amongst all claimants,” she said.
In a statement, the group wrote that, “immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, Columbia University’s leadership issued statements, implemented policies, engaged its disciplinary procedures and took many other actions that made clear that it would brook no tolerance for members of the community who held beliefs or views that conflicted in any way with an ardently pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli position, even, or especially if, those community members were Jewish.”
The group said its members were called “kapos” and “self-hating Jews,” labeled antisemites and subjected to disciplinary investigations, harassment and death threats. Some, they alleged, were forced into retirement, removed from administrative positions or otherwise penalized “for taking positions that conflicted with the University’s favored, pro-Zionist views.”
The statement also included testimonials criticizing Columbia’s antisemitism task force and accusing the university of staffing it with “ardent Zionists.” One claim alleged that the task force “communicated a clear message to the community that a diversity of views held by Jewish members of the Columbia community about the meaning of the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s military response thereto were not going to be tolerated or welcome.”
“The only acceptable way to be Jewish was to support Israel,” another testimonial stated.
The professors acknowledged that many Jews at Columbia experienced “what they regarded as antisemitism on our campus during these two years,” but argued that federal civil-rights law “prohibits discrimination against all members of a protected class, not merely those who hold a particular, favored political viewpoint.”
