Ten days after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers spirited the Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil away to a detention center in Louisiana, he has been neither charged with a crime nor accused of providing material support to a terrorist organization. The basis for his detainment—and the threat of deportation—is solely Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that Khalil’s presence in the United States could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

This week for the NYR Online, Nadia Abu-El Haj, a professor of anthropology at Columbia, writes about the state of affairs—at the White House, at the university, and in public debates about the pro-Palestine movement—that have led “a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime” to be “abducted and detained for his political speech.”

And in the Review’s April 10 issue, Christopher R. Browning writes about the cynicism of Donald Trump—a man who dined “with the self-proclaimed antisemite Kanye West and the leading Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes”; released campaign ads that were “blatant renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent”; and “proclaimed that if he lost [the 2024 election], it would be because too many American Jews had failed to vote for him”—accusing other people of antisemitism.

Below, alongside Abu El-Haj’s and Browning’s essays, are five articles from our archives about the rise of the right, antisemitism, and Columbia.

Christopher R. Browning
Trump, Antisemitism & Academia

If the Trump administration were truly concerned about antisemitism, it would start in its own house.

Nadia Abu El-Haj
‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest.

Christopher R. Browning
Hitler’s Enablers

The complicity of conservative nationalists in the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 offers disturbing parallels to the current American political situation.

—November 7, 2024

Nadia Abu El-Haj
‘The Eye of the Beholder’

Administrators at Columbia and other US universities have been cracking down on student protest against the war in Gaza—even as right-wing politicians demand they go further.

—December 24, 2023

Mairav Zonszein
How the Right Has Tried to Rebrand Antisemitism

As troubling in Trump’s statement as any echo of the old charge of dual loyalty was its implication that any Jew who doesn’t subscribe to his politics—to both the policies of his Republican Party and of the current Israeli government—is traitorous.

—September 4, 2019

Katherine Franke
The Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics

New policies adopted by the US and Israeli governments are intended to eliminate any rigorous discussion of Israeli–Palestinian politics in university settings. Not since the McCarthyite anti-Communist purges have we seen such an aggressive effort to censor teaching and learning on topics the government disfavors.

—December 12, 2018

Allan Silver
Who Cares for Columbia?

If one wants to know what it is like to live through a political and moral convulsion at an American university these days, I know of no better source than Up Against the Ivy Wall. It is distinguished by clear exposition, an extraordinary degree of accuracy about confused events, and a concern for the University’s welfare that is all the more moving for being largely unspoken. The students who wrote it make running judgments: the Administration is largely inept, uncomprehending, or worse; the faculty inert and, when aroused during the crisis, ineffectual. The leaders of the rebellion were often blemished by indulgent romanticism and manipulatory tactics; the condition of the University disastrous to the point of making rebellion plausible or inevitable.

—January 30, 1969

Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 7pm EDT

Live from NYPL presents
Timothy Snyder: The New Paganism—A Framework for Understanding Our Politics

The Yale professor of history and award-winning author delivers the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture, an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, who was a co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Live stream tickets are still available.

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