By: Fern Sidman

By any measure, Columbia University’s reckoning with antisemitism has been one of the most painful chapters in the Ivy League’s recent history. Yet, according to a report on Tuesday in The New York Post, the university’s attempt to confront that crisis has now ignited an extraordinary internal backlash — led not by student radicals or anonymous agitators, but by a tenured professor who also happens to be the father of New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor.

At the center of the storm is Mahmood Mamdani, a professor in Columbia’s Department of Anthropology and a celebrated theorist of colonialism and decolonization. During a University Senate meeting on Dec. 12, Mamdani lashed out at Columbia’s antisemitism task force, branding it a “prosecutorial agency” and likening it to the British Empire’s notorious “divide and rule” strategy — a comparison that stunned Jewish students and faculty already reeling from the task force’s final report.

The episode, first revealed in detail by The New York Post, has become emblematic of the deep ideological rifts now running through elite American universities, where antisemitism is increasingly refracted through the prism of post-colonial theory rather than confronted as a specific and growing form of hatred.

The antisemitism task force was created in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel — an event that sent shockwaves across campuses nationwide. Columbia, long a crucible of anti-Israel activism, soon found itself engulfed in reports of classroom politicization, harassment, and overt hostility toward Jewish students.

Jewish undergraduates and graduate students complained that certain faculty members were using lectures to advance personal ideological agendas about Israel and Zionism, while others alleged they were singled out, mocked, or marginalized because of their Jewish identity.

In December, the task force issued its final “bombshell” report, documenting what it described as “heinous” episodes in which rogue professors had transformed their classrooms into anti-Israel soapboxes and detailing patterns of harassment that had become normalized in parts of the campus culture.

For many Jewish students, the report was the first official acknowledgment that what they had been experiencing was real — and unacceptable.

That is the backdrop against which Mahmood Mamdani chose to speak.

According to a transcript of the Dec. 12 University Senate meeting obtained by The New York Post, Mamdani wasted little time in dismissing the task force’s work.

“It became very clear that [the task force] saw itself not as representing the community, but as a prosecutorial agency,” he said, reacting to the release of the final report.

He went further, suggesting that the very existence of a task force dedicated to antisemitism was, in effect, discriminatory.

Mamdani framed his critique through the lens of his academic specialty.

“I teach colonial history … and this is known as divide and rule in British colonial history,” he declared.

Then came the metaphor that has since ricocheted across social media.

“In British divide and rule, you set up different sections of the population as independent, as autonomous, as separate constituencies — and each begins to see the other as a competitor. Soon, you have a fragmented society like grasshoppers in a bottle.”

To many Jewish students, the analogy was breathtaking — not in its elegance, but in its moral contortions. A university response to antisemitic harassment was being equated to imperial manipulation.

Perhaps most striking was Mamdani’s admission that he had not even read the fourth and final report — the very document he was condemning.

Despite that, he expressed hope that the task force would soon be dismantled.

“We’ve come to a point where hopefully this period can end,” he said. “I suggest one lesson to be drawn from this is not [a] task force on separate grievances, of separate constituencies, but an anti-discrimination task force.”

Such a body, he argued, could serve as a “healing measure,” uniting all groups under a single umbrella rather than addressing antisemitism as a distinct phenomenon.

“The university should not play a divide and rule game,” Mamdani concluded.

A source who attended the meeting confirmed to The New York Post that Mamdani made the remarks exactly as recorded.

Reaction from Columbia’s Jewish community was swift and scathing.

Students told The New York Post they were not surprised that Mamdani had taken aim at the task force. Many drew a direct line between his remarks and the public posture of his son, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had recently been accused of quietly deleting tweets related to New York City’s antisemitism report.

“If you were surprised by Zohran Mamdani illegally deleting tweets about NYC’s antisemitism report two weeks ago, you shouldn’t have been,” the Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students group wrote on X, in a post highlighted by The New York Post. “His father has been trying to delete Columbia’s antisemitism task force for the last two years. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

The message was unmistakable: ideology, they suggested, was not merely academic in this family — it was political, personal, and now institutional.

Columbia graduate student Sam Nahins, 32, pointed to Mamdani’s earlier writings, in which the professor had claimed that the Nazis took cues from America’s history of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised that the professor who said Lincoln was Hitler’s inspiration is now stating that the antisemitism task force can be compared to British colonialism,” Nahins told The New York Post.

His critique cut deeper, laced with bitter sarcasm.

“I would love to know who he compares Stalin, Lenin, Ayatollah, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani or even Rebecca Kadaga to,” Nahins said. “Who knows. Maybe he’ll claim that Kadyrov was inspired by Frederick Douglass.”

To Nahins and others, Mamdani’s intellectual framework seemed to flatten moral distinctions in the service of theory — a move that, they argue, ultimately obscures responsibility.

What troubles Jewish students most, according to The New York Post report, is not simply Mamdani’s disagreement with the task force, but the manner in which he reframed antisemitism as a structural inconvenience rather than a concrete threat.

By casting the task force as a colonial relic, Mamdani did more than criticize its methodology — he implicitly suggested that efforts to protect Jewish students were themselves suspect, even oppressive.

This rhetorical inversion is not new on American campuses, but its deployment by a senior Columbia professor in a formal Senate meeting, at the very moment Jewish students were seeking institutional support, struck many as a betrayal.

The controversy has forced Columbia to confront uncomfortable questions about how it understands antisemitism in 2026.

Is it a specific form of hatred with a unique historical and contemporary expression — or merely one grievance among many, to be subsumed into a generalized framework of discrimination?

As The New York Post report emphasized, this debate is no longer academic. It shapes whether Jewish students feel protected or isolated, believed or dismissed.

For now, the task force’s report stands, but its future appears uncertain amid growing faculty resistance. What is clear is that Mahmood Mamdani’s “grasshoppers in a bottle” analogy has become more than a throwaway metaphor. It has come to symbolize the fragmentation of moral consensus on campus — a fragmentation that, to Jewish students, feels less like colonial legacy and more like contemporary abandonment.