What Died at Columbia

From eJewish Philanthropy (MAY 4, 2024)

Columbia used to be a university. I now see it as the burial ground of many foundational concepts of the contemporary American Jewish experience.

Here you go again, I hear you saying, exaggerating, dramatizing, catastrophizing. After all, aren’t we talking about a few hundred students and a few radical professors doing something that most Americans ignore or deride?

True, the “protests” aren’t representative of America, and probably not of most Columbia students; but they are what Argentinian psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-Rivière calls a “social emergent.” According to Pichon-Riviere, the emergent is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Just as  mental illness in a family member is, in many cases, an expression of troubled family dynamics, in group dynamics a member being disruptive may be the sign of something emergent in the group at large.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in eJP.