Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was blasted Thursday by Jewish critics after documents emerged indicating that he told Columbia University’s leaders to ignore criticism of antisemitism in campus protests.
As Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reported, the Republican staff report of the House Education and Workforce Committee, which spent the past year investigating the explosion of antisemitism on university campuses, included text messages sent by then-Columbia president Minouche Shafik to trustees.
Columbia was the site of some of the most radical, antisemitic, and violent protests.
In the text messages, Minouche reported that Schumer had told her that only Republicans were concerned about the issue of antisemitism on campus since the Hamas terror attack of October 7 in Israel. In addition, she wrote, a Schumer staffer had advised her “that best strategy is to keep heads down” and ignore the problem, as well as criticism of the university’s handling of it.
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a graduate student at Harvard who ended up speaking at the Republican National Convention, was furious at what he called “the greatest coverup of antisemitism in American history”:
Former Democrat Dov Hikind, who served in the New York state legislature, referred to Schumer as a “kapo,” an derogatory term referring to Jews whom the Nazis appointed as guards in concentration camps in the Holocaust.
Shafik eventually resigned before the start of the school year, following several other resignations among senior officials at the university.
Notably, Senate Democrats did not hold hearings of their own into antisemitism on campus until one in September, at which Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) argued against “prioritizing” antisemitism.
Schumer largely avoided the issue of antisemitism issues except for a speech in which he made a point of criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he later said should be ousted by the Israeli people through early elections. He also refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand — at least in public (he shook Netanyahu’s hand in private).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.