None of this year’s graduates from an elite Jewish Upper East Side high school will attend Columbia University’s leading liberal arts college for the first time in decades – at least in part because of the anti-Semitism that prevails there.
“For the first time in over 20 years, no Ramaz graduate will enroll at Columbia College,” Ramaz said in a statement to The Post on Sunday.
One Ramaz student was enrolled at Columbia University’s School of General Studies and three students were enrolled at Columbia’s affiliated Barnard College for Women – but none at the university itself, it said.
Ramaz stated that anti-Israel protests and hostility toward Jewish students at Columbia University the previous semester were one reason why the university’s graduates did not attend Columbia College.
“Ramaz provides as much information as possible about the situation at various colleges of interest, and we have prioritized issues surrounding the alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents at some schools so that our students and their families can make informed decisions about which colleges are right for them,” a Ramaz representative said in an email.
Rory Lancman, a leading Jewish civil rights activist whose two daughters graduated from Ramaz University and who is himself a graduate of Columbia Law School, said he would not recommend Jewish students apply or study there at this time because of the anti-Semitism there.
“Jewish families are voting with their feet and choosing colleges and universities that take anti-Semitism seriously,” said Lancman, a former Queens City Council member and currently director of corporate initiatives and senior staff attorney at the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“I would not recommend that my daughters apply to Columbia or other colleges that do not feel obliged to protect them as Jews,” he said.
Columbia declined to comment to The Post on Sunday.
The Ivy League university in Morningside Heights is still grappling with the turmoil that has shaken the institution to its core.
Controversial Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned last week and is returning to England after spending the past year at the helm of the elite institution, which was marked by constant – and sometimes destructive – anti-Israel protests.
Shafik’s resignation comes just a week after three other university deans at Columbia University resigned after their “very disturbing” text messages were revealed in which they denigrated Israeli and Jewish students’ fears of rising anti-Semitism on campus.
In April, a huge mob of masked terrorists broke into a Columbia University building, occupied it and hung a giant flag over it calling for the Intifada.
A shocking video shows a protester using a hammer to break a glass door and place what looks like a bicycle lock around the handles.
Hundreds of students were arrested for trespassing for refusing to dismantle their camp on campus, sparking the occupation of the building. Yet many of the vandals, rioters and intruders later escaped charges.
The protests and anti-Israel agitation were fueled by the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, in which the terrorists massacred 1,200 people in the Jewish state and sparked the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
