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Mitch Schneider

Columbia University recently announced that Jonathan Dekel-Chen is joining the faculty at the School of International and Public Affairs.

 

He’ll teach three courses: Jewish history in Eastern Europe, Russia’s engagement with the Middle East, and modern Israeli history.

His son Sagui was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. Hamas held him in Gaza for 498 days. He was released in February 2025.

Students at Columbia, the campus that became the epicenter of anti-Israel protests, where encampments lasted for weeks, where Jewish students were told to leave because it wasn’t safe, will sit in Jonathan’s classroom and learn from someone who lived what they spent 2024 protesting about.

October 12, 2023. Five days after Hamas massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped over 200 more. Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace held a protest on campus.

Not a vigil. Not solidarity with victims. A protest demanding Columbia divest from Israel.

By November, over 80 student groups formed a coalition called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. They organized walkouts. Suspended classes. Made Jewish students feel like they didn’t belong on their own campus.

Then came April 2024.

Students set up tents on the main lawn. Called it the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” The signs they held: “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets” with arrows pointing at Jewish students holding Israeli flags. Al-Qassam is Hamas’s military wing.

April 18, protesters gathered outside the campus gates and screamed at Jewish students: “Remember the 7th of October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times, but 10,000 more times.”

Jewish students reported hearing “kill all the Jews” and “we want one Arab state.”

Two days later, April 20, protesters chanted “Zionists not allowed here.” Someone told Jewish counter-protesters to “go back to Poland.”

The next day, Rabbi Elie Buechler, who runs Columbia’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative, sent an email to Jewish students. He told them to leave campus and go home. He couldn’t guarantee their safety at an Ivy League university in 2024.

President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD. Twice. Over 100 students arrested. Protesters occupied Hamilton Hall. More arrests. The encampment was finally cleared on April 30.

Shafik resigned four months later.

The numbers tell the story Columbia didn’t want to admit. Their own campus climate survey showed 53% of Jewish students experienced discrimination because they’re Jewish. 62% reported feeling low acceptance based on their religious identity.

Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism documented “pervasive antisemitism across clubs, classrooms, and dormitories, including harassment, hostile faculty remarks, and targeting of religious practices.”

Some faculty held their classes inside the protest encampments. The same encampments with signs saying “Zionists not welcome.”

An astronomy professor started class with a discussion about “genocide in Gaza.” An Arabic instructor taught students to say: “The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services investigated Columbia. On May 22, 2025, they issued their finding: Columbia violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act through “deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 7, 2023, through the present.”

While all of this was happening on Columbia’s campus, while students were building encampments and chanting about intifada and holding signs glorifying Hamas’s military wing, Jonathan Dekel-Chen was doing something those protesters never had to do.

He was fighting to bring his son home from the people they called freedom fighters.

The Classroom They’re About to Enter

July 2026. Jonathan Dekel-Chen will walk into a classroom at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs for the first time as a faculty member.

Students who chanted “Globalize the Intifada” will learn Jewish history from someone whose son was kidnapped from a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors. Students who screamed “10,000 more October 7ths” will learn about October 7 from someone whose kibbutz was destroyed that day. Students who held “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets” signs will study how Russia arms Iran, how Iran arms Hamas, how those weapons ended up in Gaza—from someone whose son was there, underground, for over a year.

You can’t dismiss him. His son was held hostage by Hamas for 498 days. He’s a professor at Hebrew University who spent his career studying Jewish-Arab relations and chose to live on the Gaza border. When students claimed October 7 was “resistance,” Jonathan spent 498 days begging the world to help free his son from the “resistance fighters.”

Students who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” will look at Jonathan Dekel-Chen and explain what they meant. Students who told Jewish classmates to “go back to Poland” will learn where that rhetoric leads.

This is a father whose son spent 498 days in Hamas captivity teaching students who celebrated Hamas what actually happened.

What’s Actually Changed at Columbia

Columbia isn’t fixed. We need to be honest about that.

But something is shifting.

July 2025: Columbia reached a $220 million settlement with the federal government after multiple investigations found the university violated civil rights laws through “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic harassment.

Seventy students who participated in the protests faced real consequences. Suspensions. Expulsions. Degree revocations.

Columbia adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The same definition students and some faculty fought against for months.

The university announced it will not meet with Columbia University Apartheid Divest or any affiliated groups. Their statement: “Organizations that promote violence or encourage disruptions of our academic mission are not welcome on our campuses.”

The campus gates that were always open to the public? Now guarded. Students must show ID to enter.

Private security officers stand on the lawns where the encampments were.

New rules for protests: If you’re demonstrating and you’re wearing a mask, you must show your ID when asked. No exceptions.

The Anti-Defamation League still gives Columbia a D grade on campus antisemitism. Not an F anymore. But a D.

Columbia’s own data shows Jewish students still don’t feel safe. The 2024 campus climate survey found only one-third of Jewish students felt a sense of belonging, compared to half of all students overall.

But here’s what actually matters in all of this: Columbia hired Jonathan Dekel-Chen.

Not to advise administrators behind closed doors. Not to write another report that gets filed away. To teach students. In actual classrooms. Starting in July 2026.

The same students who spent 2024 making campus unsafe for Jews will learn Jewish history, Middle East politics, and modern Israel from someone who lived October 7 in the most personal way possible.

That’s not a policy change. That’s reality walking into the classroom and making students face what they spent a year celebrating.

What We Can’t Forget

None of this absolves Columbia. They let their campus become unsafe for Jewish students. President Shafik testified before Congress while Jewish students were still hiding their identity to get to class.

Hiring Jonathan doesn’t erase that or fix the culture or undo the trauma.

But here’s what I’m hoping for: That Jonathan can walk to and from his classroom without incident. That students show up to learn, not to protest him. That sitting in a room with someone whose son was held by Hamas for 498 days makes some students reconsider what they believed.

I don’t know if that’ll happen. But if Columbia can create space for Jonathan’s truth, that’s a step. Not the whole journey. Just a step.

And right now, a step forward matters.

Why This Actually Matters

Columbia Faculty and Staff Supporting Israel put out a statement: “Many of us marched to support him until his son Sagui was returned from Gaza after 498 days. We are delighted to now have him as a colleague.”

Read that again. A colleague. Not a victim. Not a symbol for a press release. A professor with decades of expertise teaching students who desperately need to learn.

Columbia was the epicenter. When students at other universities wanted to know how to set up encampments, how to organize protests, what slogans to chant, they looked at Columbia. The template spread from here to campuses across the country.

And now Columbia is hiring a hostage father to teach the students who celebrated the people who took his son.

If Columbia can do this, if they can create space for Jonathan’s voice in classrooms where “Zionist” was used as a slur, where Jewish students were told they don’t belong, where some faculty held classes inside encampments that banned Jews, other universities will watch.

This is what turning around looks like. Not statements. Not apologies. Not task forces.

A man whose son spent 498 days in Hamas captivity teaching students what October 7 meant. What “resistance” looks like from the receiving end. What it means when the world celebrates your son’s captors while you’re begging for his life.

In July 2026, Jonathan Dekel-Chen will stand at the front of a Columbia classroom. Students will sit there with their laptops and notebooks. And he’ll teach them Jewish history, Israeli history, Middle East politics.

Sagui survived those 498 days. He came home. He gets to hug his three daughters again.

That’s why students won’t be able to dismiss what they’re learning as propaganda or bias. Because the professor teaching them isn’t talking about abstract concepts or distant history.

He’s talking about his son.

You can’t chant “Globalize the Intifada” when the man teaching you lost sixteen months of his life to the intifada you were glorifying.

You can’t hold signs supporting Hamas’s military wing when you’re looking at someone whose family was destroyed by Hamas.

You can’t scream about “resistance” when you’re learning from someone who knows exactly what your “resistance” cost.

This is what real education looks like. The uncomfortable kind. The kind where lived experience destroys your slogans. The kind where you have to sit with the human cost of what you believed.

Columbia hired Jonathan Dekel-Chen not despite what happened to his son, but because of it. His story, Sagui’s story, is the truth those students need to hear.

Sitting in that classroom, learning from someone who lived through what they spent a year protesting about, will change something.

Welcome to Columbia, Professor Dekel-Chen.

Your students need you more than they know.