More than half of Columbia University’s Jewish students reported facing religious discrimination during the 2023-24 academic year, according to a June 2025 report from the Ivy League school’s antisemitism task force.
Just 34% of Columbia’s Jewish students reported a positive sense of belonging at the school, while 53% said that they experienced anti-Jewish discrimination, according to the report, which was published on Wednesday.
Conducted between June and September 2024, the survey includes responses from 9,000 students. Among Jews, 87% reported feeling afraid to express beliefs on campus, compared with 63% of the overall student population concerned about doing so.
“As a proud alumna, who has spent decades championing this institution, I found the results of this survey difficult to read,” stated Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia.
The survey confirms “the undeniable and painful reality that we failed to adhere to our values and failed to meet the expectations we set for our campus community,” she stated. “We are also dismayed to learn that a majority of our Muslim students felt a distinct sense of alienation and lack of well-being.”
The findings “put the challenges we face in stark relief,” she continued. “The increase in horrific antisemitic violence in the U.S. and across the globe in recent weeks and months serves as a constant, brutal reminder of the dangers of anti-Jewish bigotry, underscores the urgency with which all concerned citizens need to act in addressing it head-on, and the fact that antisemitism can and should be addressed as a unique form of hatred.”
Shipman added that it was right for the Jew-hatred task force to “focus on our entire student population.”
“Our efforts to improve the campus climate are strengthened by efforts to benchmark broadly, and to understand and address discrimination and harassment against other groups, including Muslim and Arab students, who, in many cases, believe their fears are being ignored or marginalized,” she said.
Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, told JNS that the survey was “very significant and sobering.”
“There has been progress since the survey was done, but more is clearly needed,” he said.
Jonathan Harounoff, a Columbia Journalism School alumnus and international spokesman for Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York, told JNS that the report’s survey of antisemitism at the Ivy League school “should not be clumped together with other equally valid forms of hate that deserve their own space and attention.”
“That just 34% of Jewish Columbia students polled reported positive sentiments of belonging is, unfortunately, unsurprising,” he said. “Jewish and Israeli Columbia students have had to endure a lot in the past 621 days, whether it was the Oct. 7 massacre or the tsunami of antisemitism that followed across college campuses, including at New York’s only Ivy League campus.”
Harounoff told JNS the report demonstrates that Jewish students feel unsafe on campus to express their sympathies toward the State of Israel and “to proudly display their Judaism, with nearly 62% of Jewish students reporting a low feeling of acceptance at Columbia based on their religious identity.”
“That’s deeply concerning and suggests that the university’s administration has a long way to go to win back the trust of students, prospective students and parents of students,” he told JNS.
Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the education and national security program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS of the Columbia president’s comments that “it is unfortunate, but not surprising, that anti-Jewish discrimination is minimized by false equivalencies with the experiences of Muslim community members.”
“The common ‘both sides’ position has played out for a long time, especially since the explosion of anti-Jewish bigotry after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks led by Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorists,” Shufutinsky said.
Many U.S. leaders, and others globally, “have taken the all-too-familiar position of speaking out against ‘antisemitism, Islamophobia and all types of hate’ whenever they’ve felt the need to speak out at all,” she said. “Unfortunately, Columbia University President Shipman is no exception, even when presented with overwhelming evidence that Jewish students on campus experience far more hate, bigotry and bias than their peers.”
Jewish students are not targeted because of their religious practice but because they are Jews, according to Shufutinsky.
“The survey framed every question and their findings in terms of religion, rather than peoplehood, which is itself biased,” she said. “My question is, who or what is motivating President Shipman to engage in false equivalencies. Why not simply take a stand against anti-Jewish bigotry?”