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NEW YORK: For years, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at Columbia University, has used Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” to spark discussion among her students about the Holocaust and its lingering traumas.
But after Columbia’s recent adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech, Hirsch fears she may face official sanction for even mentioning the landmark text by Arendt, a philosopher who criticized Israel’s founding.
For the first time since she started teaching five decades ago, Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” she told The Associated Press. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”
Hirsch is not alone. At universities across the country, academics have raised alarm about growing efforts to define antisemitism on terms pushed by the Trump administration, often under the threat of federal funding cuts.
Promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the definition lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying “double standards” to Israel, comparing the country’s policies to Nazism or describing its existence as “a racist endeavor.”
Ahead of a $220 million settlement with the Trump administration announced Wednesday, Columbia agreed to incorporate the IHRA definition and its examples into its disciplinary process. It has been endorsed in some form by Harvard, Yale and dozens of other universities.
While supporters say the semantic shift is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it will further suppress pro-Palestinian speech already under attack by President Donald Trump.
For Hirsch, the restrictions on drawing comparisons to the Holocaust and questioning Israel’s founding amount to “clear censorship,” which she fears will chill discussions in the classroom and open her and other faculty up to spurious lawsuits.
“We learn by making analogies,” Hirsch said. “Now the university is saying that’s off-limits. How can you have a university course where ideas are not up for discussion or interpretation?”
A spokesperson for Columbia didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
The ‘weaponization’ of an educational framework
When he first drafted the IHRA definition of antisemitism two decades ago, Kenneth Stern said he “never imagined it would one day serve as a hate speech code.”
At the time, Stern was working as the lead antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee. The definition and its examples were meant to serve as a broad framework to help European countries track bias against Jews, he said.
In recent years, Stern has spoken forcefully against what he sees as its “weaponization” against pro-Palestinian activists, including anti-Zionist Jews.
“People who believe they’re combating hate are seduced by simple solutions to complicated issues,” he said. “But when used in this context, it’s really actually harming our ability to think about antisemitism.”
Stern said he delivered that warning to Columbia’s leaders last fall after being invited to address them by Claire Shipman, then a co-chair of the board of trustees and the university’s current interim president.
The conversation seemed productive, Stern said. But in March, shortly after the Trump administration said it would withhold $400 million in federal funding to Columbia over concerns about antisemitism, the university announced it would adopt the IHRA definition for “training and educational” purposes.
Then last week, days before announcing a deal with the Trump administration to restore that funding, Shipman said the university would extend the IHRA definition for disciplinary purposes, deploying its examples when assessing “discriminatory intent.”
“The formal incorporation of this definition will strengthen our response to and our community’s understanding of modern antisemitism,” Shipman wrote.
Stern, who now serves as director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, called the move “appalling,” predicting it would spur a new wave of litigation against the university while further curtailing pro-Palestinian speech.
Already, the university’s disciplinary body has faced backlash for investigating students who criticized Israel in op-eds and other venues, often at the behest of pro-Israel groups.
“With this new edict on IHRA, you’re going to have more outside groups looking at what professors are teaching, what’s in the syllabus, filing complaints and applying public pressure to get people fired,” he said. “That will undoubtedly harm the university.”
Calls to ‘self-terminate’
Beyond adopting the IHRA definition, Columbia has also agreed to place its Middle East studies department under new supervision, overhaul its rules for protests and coordinate antisemitism trainings with groups like the Anti-Defamation League.
Earlier this week, the university suspended or expelled nearly 80 students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Kenneth Marcus, chair of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said Columbia’s actions were an overdue step to protect Jewish students from harassment.
He dismissed faculty concerns about the IHRA definition, which he said would “provide clarity, transparency and standardization” to the university’s effort to root out antisemitism.
“There are undoubtedly some Columbia professors who will feel they cannot continue teaching under the new regime,” Marcus said. “To the extent that they self-terminate, it may be sad for them personally, but it may not be so bad for the students at Columbia University.”
But Hirsch, the Columbia professor, said she was committed to continuing her long-standing study of genocides and their aftermath.
Part of that work, she said, will involve talking to students about Israel’s “ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide” in Gaza, where more than 58,000 Palestinians have died, over half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
“With this capitulation to Trump, it may now be impossible to do that inside Columbia,” Hirsch said. “If that’s the case, I’ll continue my work outside the university’s gates.”

EDINBURGH: Lashed by cold winds and overlooking choppy, steel-gray North Sea waters, the breathtaking sand dunes of Scotland’s northeastern coast rank among Donald Trump ‘s favorite spots on earth.

“At some point, maybe in my very old age, I’ll go there and do the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen,” Trump said in 2023, during his New York civil fraud trial, talking about his plans for future developments on his property in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire.

At 79 and back in the White House, Trump is making at least part of that pledge a reality, traveling to Scotland on Friday as his family’s business prepares for the Aug. 13 opening of a new course it is billing as “the greatest 36 holes in golf.”

While there, Trump will talk trade with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a meeting he’s said will take place at “probably one of my properties.”

The Aberdeen area is already home to another of his courses, Trump International Scotland, and the president also plans to visit a Trump course near Turnberry, around 320 kilometers away on Scotland’s southwest coast.

Using this week’s presidential overseas trip – with its sprawling entourage of advisers, White House and support staffers, Secret Service agents and reporters – to help show off Trump-brand golf destinations demonstrates how the president has become increasingly comfortable intermingling his governing pursuits with promoting his family’s business interests.

The White House has brushed off questions about potential conflicts of interest, arguing that Trump’s business success before he entered politics was a key to his appeal with voters.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers called the Scotland swing a “working trip.” But she added that Trump “has built the best and most beautiful world-class golf courses anywhere in the world, which is why they continue to be used for prestigious tournaments and by the most elite players in the sport.”

Trump family’s new golf course has tee times for sale

Trump went to Scotland to play his Turnberry course during his first term in 2018 while en route to a meeting in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, his trip comes as the new golf course is about to debut and is already actively selling tee times.

It’s not cheap for the president to travel.

The helicopters that operate as Marine One when the president is on board cost between $16,700 and nearly $20,000 per hour to operate, according to Pentagon data for fiscal year 2022. The modified Boeing 747s that serve as the iconic Air Force One cost about $200,000 per hour to fly. That’s not to mention the military cargo aircraft that fly ahead of the president with his armored limousines and other official vehicles.

“We’re at a point where the Trump administration is so intertwined with the Trump business that he doesn’t seem to see much of a difference,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president and spokesperson for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s as if the White House were almost an arm of the Trump Organization.”

During his first term, the Trump Organization signed an ethics pact barring deals with foreign companies. An ethics frameworks for Trump’s second term allows them.

Trump’s assets are in a trust run by his children, who are also handling day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization while he’s in the White House. The company has inked many recent, lucrative foreign agreements involving golf courses, including plans to build luxury developments in Qatar and Vietnam, even as the administration continues to negotiate tariff rates for those countries and around the globe.

Trump’s first Aberdeen course has sparked legal battles

Trump’s existing Aberdeenshire course, meanwhile, has a history nearly as rocky as the area’s cliffs.

It has struggled to turn a profit and was found by Scottish conservation authorities to have partially destroyed nearby sand dunes. Trump’s company also was ordered to cover the Scottish government’s legal costs after the course unsuccessfully sued over the construction of a nearby wind farm, arguing in part that it hurt golfers’ views.

And the development was part of the massive civil case, which accused Trump of inflating his wealth to secure loans and make business deals.

Trump’s company’s initial plans for his first Aberdeen-area course called for a luxury hotel and nearby housing. His company received permission to build 500 houses, but Trump suggested he’d be allowed to build five times as many and borrowed against their values without actually building any homes, the lawsuit alleged.

Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump liable last year and ordered his company to pay $355 million in fines – a judgment that has grown with interest to more than $510 million as Trump appeals.

Golfers-in-chief

Family financial interests aside, Trump isn’t the first sitting US president to golf in Scotland. That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played in Turnberry in 1959. George W. Bush visited the famed course at Gleneagles in 2005 but didn’t play.

Many historians trace golf back to Scotland in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest known references to game was a Scottish Parliament resolution in 1457 that tried to ban it, along with soccer, because of fears both were distracting men from practicing archery – then considered vital to national defense.

The first US president to golf regularly was William Howard Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913 and ignored warnings from his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, that playing too much would make it seem like he wasn’t working hard enough.

Woodrow Wilson played nearly every day but Sundays, and even had the Secret Service paint his golf balls red so he could practice in the snow, said Mike Trostel, director of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Warren G. Harding trained his dog Laddie Boy to fetch golf balls while he practiced. Lyndon B. Johnson’s swing was sometimes described as looking like a man trying to kill a rattlesnake.

Bill Clinton, who liked to joke that he was the only president whose game improved while in office, restored a putting green on the White House’s South Lawn. It was originally installed by Eisenhower, who was such an avid user that he left cleat marks in the wooden floors of the Oval Office by the door leading out to it.

Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war in 2003 because of the optics. Barack Obama had a golf simulator installed in the White House that Trump upgraded during his first term, Trostel said.

John F. Kennedy largely hid his love of the game as president, but he played on Harvard’s golf team and nearly made a hole-in-one at California’s renowned Cypress Point Golf Club just before the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

“I’d say, between President Trump and President John F. Kennedy, those are two of the most skilled golfers we’ve had in the White House,” Trostel said.

Trump, Trostel said, has a handicap index – how many strokes above par a golfer is likely to score – of a very strong 2.5, though he’s not posted an official round with the US Golf Association since 2021. That’s better than Joe Biden’s handicap of 6.7, which also might be outdated, and Obama, who once described his own handicap as an “honest 13.”

The White House described Trump as a championship-level golfer but said he plays with no handicap.