Ninety years ago, Nazis and their sympathizers were far more welcome on the Columbia University campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side than were Jews. We can fairly draw the same conclusion today.
On Dec. 12, 1933, Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the United States, delivered a speech to 1,200 Columbia students and faculty extolling the virtues of the newly installed Nazi regime. Luther spoke at the invitation of Columbia’s then-president, Nicholas Murray Butler. As historians of the Holocaust like Stephen Norwood and Rafael Medoff have carefully and copiously documented, the warm welcome afforded to the Nazi envoy by Butler was part of his broader strategy of legitimizing Hitler’s regime in the eyes of the American public.
Luther the Nazi’s speech came six months after the first mass burnings of books by Jews and other undesirables in German cities, as well as the removal of Jewish faculty from German university posts. But none of this remotely bothered Butler, a well-connected and influential antisemite who sympathized with both Hitler and Mussolini, and who had advocated for and introduced antisemitic quotas to restrict the presence of Jewish students at Columbia and other American elite universities.
In April 2024, Columbia and other institutions of higher learning are following faithfully in Butler’s footsteps. Jewish students there no longer face quotas managed by the administration, but the presence of a viciously antisemitic mob on the campus is leading many of them to avoid attending classes, as well as seriously examining options to continue their studies elsewhere, including at Israel’s fine universities.
In his speech on that December evening in the Horace Mann Auditorium, Luther depicted Germany as a helpless victim, simultaneously bullied by the other European powers and facing a Communist threat on its eastern frontier. These were propagandistic assertions that formed the basis for Hitler’s idea of lebensraum (“living space”) justifying Germany’s forthcoming conquest of neighboring countries so that the Third Reich’s citizens could expand their footprint at the expense of subjugated populations. The Hamas mob screaming antisemitic epithets on the same campus that hosted Luther similarly present the Palestinians as the helpless victims of a genocidal bombing campaign targeting them for no other reason than they fact they are Arabs standing in the way of Zionist colonialism.
The history of Jew hating at Columbia University...
