The library at a private women’s liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University reportedly houses anti-Israel pamphlets, including some from an antisemitic student group behind on-campus protests last spring.
The pamphlets on the shelves at Barnard College’s library include some from Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Other pamphlets at the New York City college direct readers to content praising assassinated Hamas leaders, such as Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, and justifying the Hamas terrorists’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the media outlet added.
Known as “zines,” the pamphlets are listed on Columbia’s online catalog, indicating they were not placed on shelves by students.
Barnard’s Milstein Library also stocks an issue of the Indigenous Solidarity Zine, which was published roughly a month after the Oct. 7 attack. The zine was “created by a group of creators indigenous to what is referred to as the United States and Canada” in “direct response to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
A Barnard spokesman told the Free Beacon the zine collection “exists to support intellectual curiosity, creativity, scholarship and teaching.”
“The College does not endorse the content of any individual zine, just as it does not endorse every book on the library’s shelves,” the spokesman said. “But the ability of students, faculty and researchers to access materials, including those we may disagree with, or even find reprehensible, and to study them critically is fundamental to academic freedom and the mission of higher education itself.”
In May, the Washington Examiner reported CUAD helped organize the takeover of Columbia’s library, which it temporarily renamed “Basel Al-Araj Popular University.” The name was an apparent homage to an alleged terrorist who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces in 2017.
At least 65 students were placed on interim suspension, and another 33 were barred from Columbia’s campus after the takeover.
A dozen anti-Israel publications were found in the catalog of roughly 4,000 zines at Milstein Library, the Beacon reported.
Titles in Barnard’s zine collection include “Queers, Wake Up! We Are All Gaza: Free Palestine!,” “Occupation and (Medical) Apartheid in Palestine,” and “A Guide to Palestinian Solidarity Rallies,” the media outlet added.
Two of the anti-Israel pamphlets, both published by CUAD, were included in Milstein’s June 2024 exhibit of zines focused on recognizing “how we can be complicit in systems of oppression locally and abroad,” according to the Beacon.
The zine collection is overseen by several Barnard students and director Jenna Freedman, who helped form a group called Librarians and Archivists for Palestine.
In March, a Barnard student was expelled for participating last year when anti-Israel demonstrators occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Another Barnard student was suspended, according to CUAD.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
