There’s a situation at Columbia:

Columbia University is facing a full-blown crisis heading into Passover as a rabbi linked to the Ivy League school urged Jewish students to stay home and tense confrontations on campus sparked condemnation from the White House and New York officials.

The atmosphere is so charged that Columbia officials announced students can attend classes and even possibly take exams virtually starting Monday – the first day of Passover, a major Jewish holiday set to begin in the evening.

Tensions at Columbia, and many universities, have been high ever since the October 7 terror attack on Israel by Hamas. However, the situation at Columbia escalated in recent days after university officials testified before Congress last week about antisemitism on campus and pro-Palestinian protests on and near campus surged.

The latest crisis has opened Columbia President Minouche Shafik up to new attacks from her critics, with Republican US Rep. Elise Stefanik demanding she step down immediately because school leadership has “clearly lost control of its campus.”

Shafik was president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023 and is a member of the House of Lords. She’s originally from Egypt; I can’t tell from the headlines whether she’s Muslim or ex-Muslim or secular or for that matter Jewish. It shouldn’t matter, of course, but on this subject, also of course, it does.

At any rate, anti-Semitic bullying and worse is an issue at Columbia right now.

“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN on Sunday. The statement did not include examples of those incidents.

President Joe Biden similarly said Sunday, “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”

In response, organizers of the protest — Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine — said in a statement, “We have been peaceful,” and distanced themselves from non-student protestors who have gathered outside the campus, calling them “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us.”

And yet they choose to turn up outside the campus. Why might that be do you suppose?

In a statement, New York Mayor Eric Adams said the city’s police department has an “increased presence of officers” in the area around Columbia’s campus “to protect students and all New Yorkers on nearby public streets.”

The Democratic mayor said he was “horrified and disgusted with the antisemitism being spewed at and around the Columbia University campus.”

…

The rabbi sent the message [quoted in the lede] after videos circulated showing a man outside the university saying, “Never forget the seventh of October,” and “that will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!”

A video taken on the university’s campus Saturday night also shows a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting, “Fuck Israel. Israel is a bitch,” while waving the Palestinian flag.

Over and over they said it. I watched the clip. Isn’t it fascinating the way the worst most degrading insult is “woman” and the worst threat is rape? Isn’t it fascinating the way fights among men deploy hatred of women as a weapon?