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      What We Know About the Protests at Columbia University

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      Demonstrations outside the school gates have added to the upheaval, with protesters who appear unconnected to the university targeting Jewish students.Columbia University is grappling with the fallout from its president’s promise to Congress that she would crack down on unsanctioned protests, and her decision to ask the police to clear an encampment on campus.Demonstrations just outside Columbia’s gates, which are currently closed to the public, took an especially dark tone over the weekend, when protesters who did not appear to be connected to the university were accused of celebrating Hamas and targeting Jewish students.“The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days,” Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president, said in a statement early Monday. “These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas. We need a reset.”All classes on Monday would be held virtually, Dr. Shafik said, and university officials urged students to stay away from the campus in Upper Manhattan if they did not live on it.How Columbia got hereSince the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, American college campuses have been hubs of protest and debate. The scene at Columbia has been particularly contentious, with protests drawing hundreds of demonstrators, and some faculty members drawing attention for statements that critics considered to be antisemitic.Columbia administrators, like their counterparts on campuses across the country, have struggled to fine-tune a response that balances discipline, free speech and institutional and national politics. For example, Columbia suspended two pro-Palestinian student groups after a walkout, and it has rewritten its protest policies, suspended some students and moved to cut or reduce ties to some faculty members.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Protests Continue at Columbia, Some Jewish Students Feel Targeted

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      After reports of harassment by demonstrators, some Jewish students said they felt unsafe. Others rejected that view, while condemning antisemitism.Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students.Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be unaffiliated with the university just outside Columbia’s gated campus in Upper Manhattan, which was closed to the public because of the protests.Some of those protests took a dark turn on Saturday evening, leading to the harassment of some Jewish students who were targeted with antisemitic vitriol. The verbal attacks left some of the 5,000 Jewish students at Columbia fearful for their safety on the campus and its vicinity, and even drew condemnation from the White House and Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.“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,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said in a statement.But Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus said they felt solidarity, not a sense of danger, even as they denounced the acts of antisemitism.Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia University, says he doesn’t feel unsafe on campus.Bing Guan for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ken Holtzman, Who Pitched Two No-Hitters, Is Dead at 78

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      A left-hander, he was part of the Oakland A’s dynasty in the ’70s. He was also the winningest Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball, with more victories than Sandy Koufax.Ken Holtzman, a left-hander who pitched two no-hitters for the Chicago Cubs and won three World Series with the Oakland A’s in a 15-season career, died on Monday in St. Louis. He was 78.He had been hospitalized for the last three weeks with heart and respiratory illnesses, his brother, Bob, said in confirming the death.Holtzman won 174 games, the most for a Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball — nine more than the Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, who is considered one of the best pitchers ever and who had a shorter career.In addition to his win total, Holtzman, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds cut a lanky figure, had a career earned run average of 3.49 and was chosen for the 1972 and 1973 All-Star teams.Holtzman, at 23, threw his first no-hitter on Aug. 19, 1969, a 3-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves — a performance distinguished by the fact that he didn’t strike out any Braves. It was the first time since 1923 that a no-hitter had been pitched without a strikeout.“I didn’t have my good curve, and I must have thrown 90 percent fastballs,” Holtzman told The Atlanta Constitution afterward. “When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early in the game, I thought it might be a long day.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Passover, the Only Constant Is Changing Recipes

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      Joan Nathan, a doyenne of Jewish American cuisine, has long treasured the holiday and witnessed its evolution through food.In 1980, my husband Allan and I hosted our first Passover Seder at our home.There were about eight of us: my husband’s Uncle Henik, who had numbers from Auschwitz on his arm; my Polish in-laws who’d had to flee to the Soviet Union; a few friends; and my daughter, still a toddler, racing around making us all laugh.Recipe: BrisketWe sipped wine from the silver bar mitzvah cup my father had brought from Bavaria, but the rest of the tradition came mostly from my husband’s family. In my more assimilated German family, we would have started the Seder with Manischewitz gefilte fish cut into small pieces with toothpicks and herring in cream sauce. But at this first Seder, where I learned how traditions are adapted, how each family creates their own, and the compromises of marriage, it was my husband’s Polish Jewish traditions: a platter of gefilte fish with carrots in the eyes, sweet Manischewitz.At Passover, the Seder table becomes an altar. Each family’s voyage personalizes the holiday, bringing with it customs and culinary adaptations of recipes. As our world gets more fluid, tradition differentiates each of us, in a good way, from everyone else. And yet, sometimes traditions need freshening up.Once a spring festival of rebirth in the desert, Passover goes back thousands of years and has always been a ganze production, a big deal, as my mother used to say. The original menu, as outlined in the Book of Exodus, consisted of maror, which we know as arugula and later came to represent the bitterness of enslavement; unleavened bread (matzo), round and baked in an open fire; and a whole lamb roasted before dawn. That’s it. No haroseth, no gefilte fish, no chicken soup, no matzo brittle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Cornell Student Admits Targeting Jewish Students With Online Threats

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      Patrick Dai pleaded guilty to posting a series of messages in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people.A former Cornell University student pleaded guilty on Wednesday to posting a series of online messages shortly after the war in Gaza began last fall in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people, federal prosecutors said.The former student, Patrick Dai, pleaded guilty to posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communications, according to federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Northern District.Mr. Dai, 21, who is originally from Pittsford, N.Y., is scheduled to be sentenced in August and faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, prosecutors said.“This defendant is being held accountable for vile, abhorrent, antisemitic threats of violence levied against members of the Cornell University Jewish community,” Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.Lisa Peebles, a federal public defender representing Mr. Dai, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with WHEC, a local television station, outside the federal courthouse in Syracuse, N.Y., on Wednesday, she said the threats were a product of a “bad decision” over “a bad couple of days.”“He’s very remorseful,” she said. “He accepts responsibility.”A university spokesman declined to comment on the plea.Mr. Dai was a junior majoring in computer science when he made the threats. In pleading guilty, he admitted to posting them anonymously on Oct. 28 and Oct. 29 in the Cornell section of an online discussion forum about fraternity and sorority life, prosecutors said.The threats included saying he was “gonna shoot up” a kosher dining hall on the Cornell campus and was “gonna bomb” a Jewish residence there, prosecutors said.In one post, prosecutors said, he threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish man he saw on campus; to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish women; to behead Jewish babies; and to “bring an assault rifle to campus” and shoot Jews.The F.B.I. traced the threats to Mr. Dai through an IP address, and he admitted they were his in an interview with federal agents, according to a criminal complaint.The threats came amid a surge in antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric across the United States, including at colleges and universities, after the war in Gaza began in October. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, traveled to Cornell’s Ithaca campus to show support for rattled students. Cornell canceled classes for a day.Mr. Dai’s mother, Bing Liu, told The Associated Press in November that she believed the threats were partly the fault of medication her son had been taking for depression and anxiety.She told The A.P. that her son’s depression had prompted her to bring him home on weekends, that he was home the weekend the threats were made and that he had previously taken three semesters off. More

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      At Rally for Hostages, Nadler Is Booed After Calling for Gaza Aid

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      Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York was booed on Sunday at a demonstration in Manhattan calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas after he encouraged attendees to also push for humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza.“As we remember the heinous crimes committed by Hamas, we must continue to press for lifesaving humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people, too,” Mr. Nadler, a Democrat and the longest-serving Jewish member of the House of Representatives, said during a speech at the event at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, near the United Nations headquarters.While some people in the crowd applauded, others began to boo as he went on: “We must do more, because we are better than Hamas. We must do more to bring food and assistance to those who are suffering.” The heckling grew louder and continued until the end of the congressman’s remarks as more attendees joined in, some chanting “bring them home” or “shame.”A crowd that appeared to number in the thousands had gathered for the demonstration, whose date was chosen to mark six months since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. As police officers looked on, participants arrived holding Israeli flags and signs that said “Bring them home now.” The event was coordinated by over 150 organizations, including synagogues, pro-Israel groups and the New York chapter of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which was founded in the wake of the attacks. About 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.Mr. Nadler, introduced as a “leader who is a strong supporter of Israel and a fighter of antisemitism,” was among a list of speakers that included family members of hostages and Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister.The response to Mr. Nadler reflected a divide among Jewish New Yorkers over the way Israel is conducting its war against Hamas. Some reject any criticism of Israel, while others, including activist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, have rallied for a cease-fire, denouncing the Israeli and U.S. governments over the mounting death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New England Journal of Medicine Ignored Nazi Atrocities, Historians Find

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      The New England Journal of Medicine published an article condemning its own record during World War II.A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis.The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.”In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended.The new article, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the journal’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s.“Learning from our past mistakes can help us going forward,” said the journal’s editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure that we don’t fall into the same sorts of objectionable ideas in the future?”In the publication’s archives, Dr. Abi-Rached discovered a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis’ emphasis on public health, which was infused with dubious ideas about Germans’ innate superiority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech Is Defended by Jewish Film Artists

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      Remarks about Israel that the director Jonathan Glazer made as he accepted an Oscar for “The Zone of Interest” drew a letter of support after facing criticism last month.More than 150 Jewish actors, filmmakers and other artists signed an open letter that was published on Friday in defense of remarks about Jewishness and the war in Gaza that the director Jonathan Glazer made in his Oscars acceptance speech for “The Zone of Interest,” his film about the Holocaust.Glazer’s speech has become one of the most hotly debated in Oscars history, drawing an open letter of strong denunciation from other Jewish film professionals last month and now one of support.“Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said at the Academy Awards on March 10. “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”The new letter expresses support for Glazer. “In his speech, Glazer asked how we can resist the dehumanization that has led to mass atrocities throughout history,” it says. “For such a statement to be taken as an affront only underscores its urgency.”Its signatories included the actors Joaquin Phoenix, Hari Nef and Debra Winger; the directors Joel Coen, Nicole Holofcener and Boots Riley; the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard; and the artist Nan Goldin, according to Variety, which reported the existence of the letter on Friday. Its signatories were confirmed by Sarah Sophie Flicker, an artist and cultural organizer who helped organize the letter.“We stand with all those calling for a permanent cease-fire, including the safe return of all hostages and the immediate delivery of aid into Gaza, and an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of and siege on Gaza,” the letter says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More