Father of former Israeli hostage joins Columbia as a Jewish history professor

Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of Sagui Dekel-Chen, speaks to reporters after he and other family members of American hostages being held by Hamas participated in a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, July 25, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of a former Israeli hostage, has been appointed to join Columbia University as a professor of history with a course load that includes instruction about modern 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 became a persistent advocate for a ceasefire deal and a critic of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.

Sagui, who like his father is a dual Israeli and U.S. citizen, was released during a temporary ceasefire in February 2025. Out of about 420 people who lived at Nir Oz, 47 were killed and 76 were taken hostage.

Dekel-Chen, currently a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will join Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in July. He will teach courses on Jewish history in Eastern Europe and the Russia-Ukraine War, Russia’s engagement in the Middle East and modern Israeli history.

His appointment comes as the school faces pressure to diversify the attitudes of faculty teaching about the Middle East. The fourth and final report from the school’s antisemitism task force, released in December, said that students had little access to academic expertise on the Middle East that did not come from an “explicitly anti-Zionist” perspective. It urged the school to move “quickly and energetically” to add expertise on Jewish and Israeli topics that did not take an anti-Israel stance.

The task force formed in the wake of turmoil at Columbia as it became an epicenter of the pro-Palestinian student movement that swept the United States in 2024. The university continues to grapple with fallout including penalties from the Trump administration, which accused it of harboring antisemitism, and rapid leadership changes.

Dekel-Chen was born in Connecticut and emigrated to Israel in 1981, though he returned to the United States to earn a doctorate from Brandeis University and to work in recent years as a visiting scholar at Columbia and other universities. After Oct. 7, his advocacy for the hostages often brought him back to the United States, where he met with former President Joe Biden and other senior officials.

He specializes in modern Jewish history, particularly in Eastern Europe. In addition to teaching for SIPA, a graduate program, he will teach one course for undergraduate students at Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies each year.

Dekel-Chen referenced his training as a historian in a New York Times op-ed in June 2024 that criticized Israeli leaders for comparing the Hamas attack to the Holocaust. He argued that the analogy gave leaders a way of “shirking their accountability for the massacre and their sacred responsibility to return all the hostages alive.”

“As the son of a man who survived the Holocaust and a woman who fled Nazi Germany, I find our government’s use of such references to the Nazi genocide to be deeply offensive,” said Dekel-Chen. “As the father of a hostage, I find the use of such language excruciating. And as a professor of history, I am appalled by the inaccuracy of such statements and frightened by their implications for Israeli society.”

Dekel-Chen also said comparing pro-Palestinian protests with Nazi Germany was ahistorical, given the protesters’ lack of powerful support, and that drawing the parallel avoided engaging with “the large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza that have sapped our government’s ability to maintain any moral high ground in this conflict.”

In July, Columbia agreed to a $220 million settlement with the U.S. government along with a suite of policy changes, such as the adoption of an Israel-related definition of antisemitism.

Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of University of Wisconsin, was announced on Sunday as Columbia’s fourth president in two years. She is the first Jewish leader to take the helm since Oct. 7.