Joseph Massad

This page is a corrective companion to Wikipedia’s article Joseph Massad. Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine articles have a documented bias problem; below are the framing problems recorded in our audit (checked 2026-06), each verifiable against the live article.

Who he is

Joseph Andoni Massad was born in 1963 in Amman, Jordan, to a Palestinian Christian family. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1998 under the supervision of Edward Said, the literary theorist whose work on Orientalism shaped Massad’s own scholarship, and he has taught in Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies ever since, holding the title Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History. He is a naturalized US citizen and a fixture of Columbia’s Middle East studies faculty, and for two decades he has also been a fixture of Columbia’s recurring fights over how that faculty treats Israel and its supporters.

The scholarship

Massad’s early academic work, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (2001), examined how British colonial administration shaped modern Jordanian nationhood. His best-known book, Desiring Arabs (2007), won Columbia’s Lionel Trilling Book Award and argued that what he called the “Gay International,” Western LGBT-rights organizations operating in the Middle East, imposes a foreign heterosexual/homosexual binary on Arab societies and, in his framing, provokes state repression against people who would otherwise not be categorized or targeted at all. The thesis, first published as a 2002 journal article, drew sustained criticism from other Middle East scholars and from LGBT activists in the Arab world itself, who argued it minimizes real, independently documented persecution and effectively tells persecuted gay Arabs that their own self-understanding is a colonial import. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006) collected his essays on Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. All three books are genuine, peer-reviewed academic work; the controversy around Massad has never been about whether he publishes, but about what he does in the classroom and in public commentary.

Columbia Unbecoming and the tenure fight

In 2004, pro-Israel students and the advocacy group The David Project produced a film, Columbia Unbecoming, built on interviews alleging that Massad and two colleagues in Columbia’s Middle East department intimidated Jewish and pro-Israel students in class, including one account of a student being told she had no standing to ask a question about Israeli military conduct because of her army service. Columbia convened an Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, advised by First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, which reported in 2005 that it found no pattern of antisemitic harassment but did find the substance of at least one specific classroom complaint credible enough to note. Massad rejected the report as biased against him. The episode fed directly into his 2009 tenure review: fourteen Columbia professors wrote to the provost that summer urging the university to deny him tenure, citing the same allegations. Columbia granted tenure anyway. Fifteen years later, when Columbia’s president was asked under oath whether she would grant that tenure today, she said she would not.

What he wrote on October 8, 2023

The day after the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led fighters killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and took hundreds hostage, Massad published a column in The Electronic Intifada describing the assault in his own words as “astounding,” and writing that the scenes of Palestinian fighters breaking through Israel’s border fence were “no less awesome,” using the term in its literal sense of awe-inspiring rather than as informal praise, he has since insisted, but read by nearly every outlet that covered it as a celebration of the attack. He called the Hamas operation “innovative” and framed the fighters as engaged in “resistance,” the term Palestinian factions and their supporters routinely use to recast attacks on civilians as legitimate armed struggle. See who attacked first on October 7 for the documented sequence of that morning.

The column detonated. Students and faculty circulated petitions demanding his removal from Columbia’s faculty. In an April 17, 2024 House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on campus antisemitism, Congressman Tim Walberg quoted the column’s language directly to Columbia president Nemat Shafik and asked her to respond; Shafik testified, “I do condemn his statement. I am appalled by what he said,” and told the committee he had been removed as chair of an academic review committee and “spoken to.” Two Columbia trustees testifying alongside her, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, both told the committee they would not vote to grant Massad tenure if the decision were made today. Massad disputed Shafik’s account afterward, saying he had never been placed under investigation, that he remained chair of the review committee through the normal end of his term, and that university administrators had privately expressed support rather than criticism after the piece ran, along with concern for his personal safety once the backlash began. In late 2024, Columbia assigned Massad to teach a spring 2025 course on the history of Zionism; an adjunct professor, Lawrence Rosenblatt, resigned from the university in protest, arguing that a scholar who had celebrated an attack on Jews should not be the one teaching Zionism’s history.

The objection, and why the text overrides it

Massad’s defenders raise two points worth taking seriously: the Ad Hoc Grievance Committee that investigated him in 2004-05 did not find a pattern of antisemitic harassment, and Massad says “awesome” and “astounding” describe not the fighters’ actions in his own judgment but the reaction of “millions of jubilant Arabs” watching the news.

Neither survives contact with the byline. Massad chose those words himself, in his own column, one day after the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and called the operation “innovative” and its perpetrators engaged in “resistance,” his own characterization, not a reported reaction. He has since spent congressional testimony, faculty petitions, and a trustee’s on-the-record refusal of his own tenure disputing what his own writing said, and the plain text is what those disputes have to work around, not erase. Some academic-freedom advocates call the backlash weaponized political pressure against protected speech, but that argument has to explain why the professor spent a year denying he wrote what the column, under his own byline, still says.

October 7 Attacks · The Electronic Intifada · Who attacked first on October 7 · Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit