“It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.”

The frail old man, amazed when he saw an image of his face while undergoing an MRI in 1987, was the world-renowned physicist and devout Jew Isidor Isaac Rabi.

Whether the technicians who used the MRI machine knew they were diagnosing its famous inventor is unknown. But it was Rabi whose earlier research on nuclear magnetic resonance in 1938 made the magical machine possible.

Few in the hospital would have known their elderly patient as the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1944. Nor would they have known of Rabi’s stellar career at Columbia University, where he was head of the physics department. Under his direction, the department became one of the most prestigious in the world, drawing in scientists and students from around the globe.

Shortly after Rabi’s installation at Columbia in 1929, anti-Semitic campaigns against professors in Europe began. Some of America’s colleges and universities began to raise funds to help refugee Jewish scholars. As Laurel Leff points out, “at some universities, faculty members started funds to pay the salaries of displaced scholars. Columbia University was one of the most active. In 1933, 125 Columbia faculty members contributed a total of ... almost $80,000 in contemporary dollars, for temporary fellowships.” (Italics mine.)

Leff was writing about the same institution of higher learning where recently pro-Hamas demonstrators displayed hatred of Israel and the Jews — the university where those same protesters managed to bar a pro-Israel Jewish professor Shai Davidai from the campus. While the protesters have since been forcibly removed from occupying a building on the campus, the underlying issue of antisemitism remains glaringly problematic.

Perhaps Columbia and other academic institutions should recall the historical context in which even the fundamental science of physics was assaulted by antisemitic (and anti-Christian) forces.

Shortly after Rabi began his long tenure at Columbia in 1929, a huge controversy about the nature of physics erupted. Adolf Hitler’s regime insisted on the sole legitimacy of what it termed “Aryan science,” a supposedly superior and uniquely German science, opposed to what was termed “Jewish science.”

The regime demanded that physicists disassociate themselves from “Jewish physics.” Nazi ideology infiltrated and........

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