None of this year’s graduates of an elite Upper East Side Jewish high school will be attending Columbia University’s premier liberal arts college for the first time in decades at least partly because of antisemitism.
“For the first time in over 20 years, we will not have a Ramaz graduate enrolling in Columbia College,” Ramaz said in a statement Sunday to The Post.
One Ramaz student enrolled at Columbia’s school of General Studies, and three students enrolled in Columbia-affiliated Barnard College for women — but none at the college, it said.
Ramaz indicated that anti-Israel protests and hostility toward Jewish students at Columbia during the previous semester had a factor in its graduates not attending Columbia College.
“Ramaz provides as much information as possible about the situation at various colleges of interest, and we have given priority to issues surrounding the horrific rise in antisemitic instances at some schools, so that our students and their families are able to make informed decisions about which colleges are right for them,” a Ramaz rep said in an e-mail.
Rory Lancman, a top Jewish civil-rights activist whose two daughters graduated from Ramaz and who is a Columbia Law School graduate, said he would not recommend Jewish students to apply or attend Columbia at the moment because of Jew-bashing.
“Jewish families are voting with their feet and choosing colleges and universities that take antisemitism seriously,” said Lancman, a former Queens city councilman and the current director of corporate initiatives and senior counsel at the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“I would not recommend my daughters to apply to Columbia or other colleges that aren’t committed to protect them as Jews,” he said.
The Ivy League school in Morningside Heights is still grappling with turmoil that has rocked the institution to its core.
Embattled Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned last week and is heading back to England after leading the elite institution for the past year, which was marked by constant — and sometimes destructive — anti-Israel protests.
Shafik’s resignation comes just one week after three university deans also resigned from Columbia following the exposure of their “very troubling” text chain that disparaged Israeli and Jewish students’ fears of rising antisemitism on campus.
A huge mob of masked pro-terror rioters broke into a Columbia academic building and seized it in April, draping it with a giant flag calling for “intifada.”
One shocking video captured a hammer-wielding demonstrator smashing through a glass-paneled door and placing what appeared to be a bike lock around its handles.
Hundreds of students were arrested on trespassing charges for refusing to pack up a campus encampment, triggering the building takeover. But many of the vandals, rioters and trespassers afterward escaped criminal charges.
The protests and anti-Israel vitriol was fueled by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, where the terror insurgents slaughtered 1,200 people in the Jewish state and triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.
