The New York City Commission on Human Rights called on Columbia College and the college alumni publication, Columbia Today, to apologize publicly for an article in its spring 1968 issue on the student revolt at Columbia which the commission said was either “a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to invoke an anti-Semitic response” or revealed that the author was “astonishingly naive about the way in which the poison of anti-Semitism spreads.”
The article, written by George C. Keller, editor of the magazine, said that nearly all of the leaders and many of the members of the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia were Jewish and noted that the family name of Mark Rudd, then SDS chairman, “originally was Rudnitsky.”
The commission, which reached a unanimous decision condemning the magazine for the article, acted on complaint of Paul O’Dwyer who accused the magazine of anti-Semitism. Mr. Keller, who subsequently resigned to become a special assistant to the president of the State University of New York, denied the charge.
The commission noted that the magazine was protected from legal action under the First Amendment but declared it would use the “sanction of public disapproval” to protest against a “shabby exercise in bigotry.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
