Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the daddy of a former Israeli hostage, has been appointed to affix Columbia College as a professor of historical past with a course load that features instruction about trendy Israel.
Dekel-Chen’s son Sagui spent 498 days in captivity in Gaza after he was taken by Hamas from Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023. Dekel-Chen turned a persistent advocate for a ceasefire deal and a critic of Israel’s prosecution of the warfare in Gaza.
Sagui, who like his father is a twin Israeli and U.S. citizen, was launched throughout a brief ceasefire in February 2025. Out of about 420 individuals who lived at Nir Oz, 47 had been killed and 76 had been taken hostage.
Dekel-Chen, at present a historical past professor on the Hebrew College of Jerusalem, will be a part of Columbia’s College of Worldwide and Public Affairs in July. He’ll train programs on Jewish historical past in Japanese Europe and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict, Russia’s engagement within the Center East and trendy Israeli historical past.
His appointment comes as the varsity faces stress to diversify the attitudes of college instructing in regards to the Center East. The fourth and closing report from the varsity’s antisemitism job drive, launched in December, stated that college students had little entry to educational experience on the Center East that didn’t come from an “explicitly anti-Zionist” perspective. It urged the varsity to maneuver “shortly and energetically” so as to add experience on Jewish and Israeli matters that didn’t take an anti-Israel stance.
The duty drive shaped within the wake of turmoil at Columbia because it turned an epicenter of the pro-Palestinian scholar motion that swept the USA in 2024. The college continues to grapple with fallout together with penalties from the Trump administration, which accused it of harboring antisemitism, and speedy management modifications.
Dekel-Chen was born in Connecticut and emigrated to Israel in 1981, although he returned to the USA to earn a doctorate from Brandeis College and to work lately as a visiting scholar at Columbia and different universities. After Oct. 7, his advocacy for the hostages usually introduced him again to the USA, the place he met with former President Joe Biden and different senior officers.
He makes a speciality of trendy Jewish historical past, significantly in Japanese Europe. Along with instructing for SIPA, a graduate program, he’ll train one course for undergraduate college students at Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Research every year.
Dekel-Chen referenced his coaching as a historian in a New York Occasions op-ed in June 2024 that criticized Israeli leaders for evaluating the Hamas assault to the Holocaust. He argued that the analogy gave leaders a method of “shirking their accountability for the bloodbath and their sacred accountability to return all of the hostages alive.”
“Because the son of a person who survived the Holocaust and a lady who fled Nazi Germany, I discover our authorities’s use of such references to the Nazi genocide to be deeply offensive,” stated Dekel-Chen. “As the daddy of a hostage, I discover using such language excruciating. And as a professor of historical past, I’m appalled by the inaccuracy of such statements and frightened by their implications for Israeli society.”
Dekel-Chen additionally stated evaluating pro-Palestinian protests with Nazi Germany was ahistorical, given the protesters’ lack of highly effective assist, and that drawing the parallel averted participating with “the large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza which have sapped our authorities’s means to keep up any ethical excessive floor on this battle.”
In July, Columbia agreed to a $220 million settlement with the U.S. authorities together with a collection of coverage modifications, such because the adoption of an Israel-related definition of antisemitism.
Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of College of Wisconsin, was introduced on Sunday as Columbia’s fourth president in two years. She is the primary Jewish chief to take the helm since Oct. 7.
