After harassment at Columbia, this Jewish undergrad felt most attacked by her student paper
Eliana Goldin says she was fired from Columbia Spectator in ‘worst antisemitic attack I faced’; Spectator editor says her column was stopped to protect her
Eliana Goldin was a Jewish student leader at Columbia University. Courtesy of Eliana Goldin
By Benyamin Cohen May 21, 2025
Eliana Goldin graduated from Columbia University on Monday. On Tuesday, she went public with what she called “the worst antisemitic attack I faced personally on campus.”
In a social media thread on X — which has so far racked up nearly 1 million views — Goldin said she was removed from her columnist role at The Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, after an Instagram poll she posted months earlier was recast by critics as a call for violence against Palestinians. The post, she said, had nothing to do with geopolitics — and everything to do with a Jewish theological dilemma she’d been taught to wrestle with.
Milène Klein, who was the Spectator‘s deputy editorial page editor at the time, said the decision to part ways with Goldin had nothing to do with the poll, theology or Goldin’s Jewish identity. It was in response to the harassment Goldin received after her first column, about the spread of campus unrest after Oct. 7.
‘Would you kill someone from Amalek?’
The poll, posted in July 2023 — months before Hamas attacked Israel — asked Goldin’s Instagram followers: “Would you kill someone from Amalek?” It was one of dozens she regularly shared with her more than 2,000 followers, some playful (“What’s the best way to slice a potato?”), others more profound. This one — referencing the biblical enemy of the Jews — drew on a longstanding tradition of debate over divine command and human morality.
“The Jewish tradition is full of texts that ask us to wrestle with unethical commands,” she said in an interview Tuesday. She likened it to the binding of Isaac — a test of faith whose meaning remains contested. In the Amalek case, she said, “obviously the answer is no.”
She never expected the poll to resurface. But in February 2024, days after the Spectator published her first column — about the eruption of campus protests over the war in Gaza — a screenshot of the old post began circulating on social media. An anonymous Instagram account reposted it with a caption indicating that Amalek was a “dog whistle” for Palestinians. Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine followed with a similar post.
What happened next, Goldin said, was a wave of harassment. On the anonymous campus app SideChat, students debated both the poll and her column. “People were saying I needed to be dealt with,” she said. “I went to public safety. I got threatening DMs. It felt like the whole campus thought I was a monster.”
Days after the column ran, Goldin said, the Spectator told her the planned recurring column would not continue.
A disputed decision
Columbia has been at the epicenter of campus unrest since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. In recent months, the university saw mass arrests during a building takeover for the second time in a year and came under federal investigation for antisemitism. The tensions have drawn national attention, including from the Trump administration, which has accused Columbia of fostering a hostile environment for Jews. In April, just days after Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong announced her resignation, the government grilled her during a contentious interview on antisemitism in higher education. Columbia has lost more than $600 million in federal grants and contracts and is in negotiations with the administration to be under government oversight.
Goldin, now 23, had written for the paper since her freshman year, eventually rising to senior staff writer. She took a break in fall 2023 and spent the semester helping lead Aryeh, the pro-Israel group at the Columbia-Barnard Hillel. When the paper put out a call for columnists in early 2024, she pitched one called Common Ground as a space to bridge divides between Zionist and Palestinian students.
“I was trying to build bridges,” she said. “But no one wanted to listen.”
The Spectator’s Klein explains what happened differently.
“Ultimately what we decided was that, in light of the extreme amount of harassment that she was receiving and the fear that she was expressing, we felt that it would not be safe for her, or really tenable for us, to continue publishing this column,” said Klein, who is also Jewish. “We didn’t want her to be given this platform on a weekly basis that would expose her to a really large audience that was, at that time, really hostile.”
Klein said the Spectator’s editorial leadership debated the situation at length. “We also felt that the column being called Common Ground was not really tenable, just given the tenor of the discourse at the time,” she said. “Because she was not a source who, I think, readers would have felt was speaking from a place of common ground.”
She also pushed back on the word “fired.”
“She wasn’t fired,” Klein said. “She was never part of Spectator opinion.” Goldin, she explained, was a contributor — not staff. “We told her very explicitly that she was welcome to continue writing op-eds for Spectator, and that we valued her voice and her place, as a sort of collaborator.”
Goldin did publish another piece in the paper that summer, co-authoring a July 2024 op-ed calling on Columbia’s president to restore trust on campus. Klein cited that article as evidence that Goldin remained welcome at the paper. “If she truly felt insanely uncomfortable,” Klein said, “I find it difficult to imagine that she would want to work with us again.”
Klein said she was troubled by Goldin’s characterization of the incident as antisemitic. “I’m sorry that she feels that she was targeted for her religious beliefs,” she said. “But I find that framing of this situation very confusing. This simply isn’t what happened.”
“At the end of the day,” Klein added, “we’re student journalists. We’re also people who have our own beliefs and feelings about what we’re seeing in the world and on campus. But in our capacity as student journalists, we were extremely committed to creating and maintaining an environment that was responsive to everything that was happening. I think our record speaks for itself.”
Goldin doesn’t deny the challenges of running a student paper in a moment of rising tensions. But she still feels abandoned.
“I had worked the hardest I’ve ever worked to be a Zionist leader I could be proud of,” she said. “Including Palestinians in the conversation, including anti-Zionist Jews — that was central to what I was trying to do.”
For now, she’s stepping away. She plans to put a career in journalism in the rearview mirror and spend the next academic year in Israel. “I’m gonna go learn Torah,” she said, “and get away from politics for a bit.”
