In 2004, during the Second Intifada, a group of pro-Israel students at Columbia University in New York City, along with the pro-Israel campus group The David Project, produced the 25-minute film Columbia Unbecoming presenting interviews with some students and the campus Jewish chaplain Rabbi Charles Sheer about professors in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC)—mainly George Saliba, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Dabashi—whom they described as biased against Israel and whom they accused of misconduct. Massad said the episodes concerning him did not take place and that none of the people in the film had been students of his, describing the film project as a "witch-hunt." Saliba too denied that the episode concerning him happened as described in the film. Critics of the film called the film "propaganda" and described it as part of a "smear campaign" against professors critical of Israel.
There were select screenings of the film in the autumn of 2004. Some of the students interviewed said they had been intimidated by the three professors over their pro-Israel views. Others complained about an atmosphere that was hostile to Israel. Pro-Israel pundits, including figures such as Anthony Weiner, called for Columbia to fire Joseph Massad, who was not yet tenured at the time. Columbia initiated an inquiry by an ad‑hoc faculty committee, which concluded in 2005 that there was no evidence to support allegations of antisemitism against Massad.
The controversy sparked a national debate on the topic of academic freedom and its limits. Many felt that Massad was the target of a witch-hunt for his pro-Palestinian views and that the controversy was part of a larger campaign to rein in academic freedom in the U.S. Some argued that the students' perception of bias against Israel stemmed from their unfamiliarity with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the social conditioning of a strongly pro-Israel society.
Background The David Project, which produced the film, was a Boston-based, pro-Israel campus group, founded by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, in 2002. It met with LionPAC, a pro-Israel student group at Columbia, and agreed to fund the film. Rabbi Charles Sheer, director of the Columbia-Barnard chapter of Hillel and central figure in the film, had led a campaign in 2003https://archive-publications.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs20030514-01.2.13&srpos=24&e=-------en-20-cs-21--txt-txIN-Charles+Sheer----2003-- against a proposal to divest from companies selling arms to Israel that gathered 33,000 signatures in support.
Columbia University is an Ivy League university, in New York, where about one quarter of the undergraduate students are Jewish. Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar, became Columbia's president in 2002, after having served for five years as the President of the University of Michigan. Alan Brinkley became the provost of Columbia on July 1, 2003.
The three professors that would be named in Columbia Unbecoming, Joseph Massad, George Saliba, and Hamid Dabashi, all worked at Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department, colloquially known as MEALAC. MEALAC was a small department with only 20 full-time professors. Saliba and Dabashi both had tenure, but not Massad who would come to stand in the center of the controversy.
The student newspaper at Columbia, Columbia Daily Spectator, covered the controversy extensively as it unfolded, as did the small but influential conservative newspaper The New York Sun.
Beginning of the controversy
Massad received his doctorate in political science from Columbia in 1998. Next year he began teaching at the university. He taught one elective course called Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies for which he became known, as his views on Israel and Palestine differed with those of many of his students.
Massad recalled that, in the spring 2001, Jewish students in his class began to tell him that he was discussed at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Hillel and that his class upset Zionists. According to Massad, he didn't think much about it but he began to notice "cantankerous students who insisted on scoring political points during the lectures." For the spring 2002, he updated the course description to ensure that students understood that the course was critical of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism (emphasis in the original):
Nevertheless, a student circulated a petition in his class to get him fired. But following a visit to Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories, she was remorseful and told him that someone "from the outside" had asked her to circulate the petition.
On 26 February 2002, Daphna Berman wrote an op-ed in the Spectator, which referenced a lecture Massad had held recently titled "Zionism and Jewish Supremacy". Berman compared Massad's lecture with a swastika that recently had been found in a bathroom on campus:
Leadup to Columbia Unbecoming Pro-Palestinian rally Massad, in a speech at a large pro-Palestinian rally on campus on April 17, compared Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, saying:Like white South Africans who felt threatened under apartheid and who only felt safe when they gave up their commitment to white supremacy, Israeli Jews will continue to feel threatened if they persist in supporting Jewish supremacy. Israeli Jews will only feel safe in a democratic Israeli state where all Jews and Arabs are treated equally. No state has the right to be a racist state.In an article in the Columbia Spectator, Massad was quoted as saying that Israel is "a Jewish supremacist and racist state" and "every racist state should be threatened." Massad complained to the journalist who wrote the article. She admitted to not having attended the rally, and the Spectator ran a correction on April 24, 2002. https://archive-publications.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs20020423-01.2.10&srpos=17&e=------200-en-20-cs-1-byDA-txt-txIN-Massad------
Dabashi and some other professors cancelled their classes so that they could attend the rally. He argued in an email sent to his students the day after that he was "morally bound to perform a public duty," but apologized for the inconvenience the cancellation caused and promised that it would be made up for with an additional session. The cancellations irritated Columbia's Hillel Director Rabbi Charles Sheer and some students. In a letter to the Spectator called the cancellations "not kosher" and unacceptable that some professors didn't inform the students in advance. "To have students come to a class and advise them only then that the class is cancelled because the professor is about to deliver a public speech is a coercive invitation," he argued.
Dabashi and Saliba repudiated Sheer's claims in letters published on May 3 in the Spectator. Dabashi's reply was particularly dismissive:
Saliba, expressing much the same sentiment, urged Sheer: "Rabbi! Just preach! Do not even attempt to teach!"
Growing outside media attention According to Massad, "two major pro-Israeli propagandists," Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, began writing "hit pieces" about him, containing the misquotes from the Spectator article. Kramer was an American-Israeli scholar of the Middle East at Shalem College in Jerusalem and a frequent critic of Middle East studies. Pipes was a conservative pundit and founder of the think tank Middle East Forum. He had recently launched Campus Watch, a site that harshly criticized scholars he was ideologically opposed to. On June 20, 2002, Kramer posted an article to his website, calling for Massad's dismissal:
On June 25, Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer published an article in the Sun, "Extremists on Campus", naming Massad as one such extremist, asserting that he used his class as a "soapbox for anti-Israeli polemics". On September 18, 2002, the Wall Street Journal covered Campus Watch, writing that the site listed eight professors, labeling them as enemies of America and Israel. Two of the eight listed were Massad and Dabashi. Massad claimed that the negative publicity led to him becoming the victim of an identity theft and an e-mail spam campaign and that he started receiving racist emails and death threats.
In January 2003, Massad began writing columns about the Middle East for the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly. These columns were often attacked by Kramer and Pipes, and Ariel Beery, a freshman student at Columbia. Beery had his own column in the Spectator. He criticized both Massad's course and the opinions Massad expressed in Al-Ahram:
Massad found Beery's criticism odd since he had never taken his course.
From January 24 to 27, MEALAC in collaboration with the Turath undergraduate student club held a Palestinian film festival on Columbia titled "Dreams on a Nation". While the festival was well-visited, some criticized its poster which was a map of Palestine with no internal borders. "This vision of the Middle East endorsed by MEALAC seems to suggest that there will only be peace once Israel ceases to exist," Beery wrote in an op-ed, "MEALAC ... has consistently focused on the Palestinian side of the issue, not legitimately addressing the Israeli-Zionist narrative."
Massad replied to the criticism from Pipes and Kramer in Al-Ahram on March 10:
"A million Mogadishus" On March 26, at a teach-in protesting the recently launched U.S. invasion of Iraq, assistant professor Nicholas De Genova commented that he wished "a million Mogadishus" on the invading American troops, referencing the humiliating defeat of U.S. troops in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, which brought about the end of the U.S. Intervention in Somalia. The comment caused a storm of outrage and Bollinger received a letter signed by 143 members of the House of Representatives and 20,000 e-mails about them.
This prompted Bollinger to appoint a committee to explore the "limits of political expression in the campus environment." Law professor Vincent Blasi would lead the committee and hence it became known as the Blasi committee. The other members of the committee were law professor Michael C. Dorf, business school dean Glenn Hubbard, engineering professor Paul Duby, English professor Kathy Eden, and university chaplain, Jewelnel Davis. According to Blasi, the committee had no mandate to investigate whether departments were "biased or has any particular kind of slant," but it investigated whether "grade retaliation" occurred and whether students had any reason to fear expressing views opposing those of their professors. The committee would meet once a month starting in September.
In another column on April 14 in the Spectator, Beery wrote:
Massad, who was on a sabbatical, returned to Columbia in the fall of 2003. He held a lecture on October 2, with an unusually large crowd, which included Professor Nicholas Dirks. Massad claimed that after the lecture he was asked a series of rude and hostile questions from students and Sheer, but that he kept his composure.
The David Project met with the pro-Israel student group LionPAC in October and agreed to fund Columbia Unbecoming. Most of the recording of the film was done in December that same year.
On January 6, 2004, Sheer posted a letter to the Hillel site for the university, stating that the "principal anti-Israel voices" on Columbia were the faculty and academic departments. He added:
He repeated the allegation that Massad had said that "the Zionists are the new Nazis": "Professor Massad has reversed the roles of all the players and redefined many of the historic events: the Zionists are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are oppressed victims and therefore the new Jews." He urged students not to take Massad's course and announced the film project that was underway: "A student group, is currently working on a video that records how intimidated students feel by advocacy teaching."