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Columbia University and the New Student Anti-War Movement

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Joe Howley on how Israel’s war in Gaza is coming to the home front.

Jeet Heer

April 28, 2024

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the South Lawn of Columbia University.(Lara-Nour Walton)

There’s a new battleground in Israel/Palestine conflict: academia. Columba University, long the hotbed for arguments about the issue, has boiled over in open conflict as pro-Palestine students set up an encampment, only to be met with an administration that called the police to crack down on the protesters. They students have also been denounced by a bipartisan group of politicians led by Joe Biden and been accused of antisemitism.

But this repression has only emboldened the students and their peers across America, as encampments have spread to numerous other campuses.

To gauge the prospects for this new anti-war movement, I was very happy to talk to Joseph Howley, an associate professor at the Department of Classics at Columbia. Howley brought a wealth of knowledge to describing how the situation looks on the ground. During the discussion, the recommended these sources of student journalism: the Columbia Daily Spectator, the radio station WKCR, and the blog BWOG.

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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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