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James Schamus
Columbia University
James Schamus is a Professor of Professional Practice Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. Schamus is a also a notable producer, screenwriter, and CEO of Focus Features.
In light of the White House’s withdrawal of $400 million dollars of funding from Columbia University, Schamus wrote an article for Literary Hub in which he addressed his fellow Jewish faculty.
Schamus claimed President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are striking a “white nationalist hammer” on Columbia University:
“So the white nationalist hammer is coming down on Columbia University, which is being made an example of, in order to scare all institutions of higher education into falling in line with the Musk/Trump plan to destroy any and all potential civil society nodes of resistance to the authoritarian regime they are putting in place.”
He claims that Columbia University is being targeted by the White House under the guise of being an antisemitic institution:
“Don’t be fooled: the excuse they are using to destroy the institution—that Columbia is incorrigibly antisemitic—is, of course, the exact opposite of what is happening. They are coming after Columbia precisely because the University is, to the (not-) “populist” base in front of whom they perform their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem precisely of Jewishness: it’s ‘globalist,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ New York-based, ‘liberal,’ etc.”
He concluded his address by directing his attention Columbia’s Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, Brent Stockwell, who is also Jewish. Stockwell had claimed, according to the New York Times, that divesting money from the university will affect Jewish university members. Regarding Stockwell’s comments, Schamus stated:
“They’re coming for the ‘good’ Jews too; indeed, they have already come—they’ve come today, for you. So we’re all in this together now. And by ‘we’ I mean not only us Jews, but every right-thinking defender of the values this university is supposed to stand for. And we should, and can, regardless of our differences of opinion over Israel, join now in common cause to fight the evil engulfing our students and colleagues.”
Published – March , 2025
