Columbia University attempted to distance itself from the Pulitzer Prize Board's newest member, Harvard professor Vijay Iyer, after a Washington Free Beacon report revealed his strident anti-Israel activism and membership in a faculty group that published an anti-Semitic cartoon. "The Pulitzer Prizes are housed at Columbia University, but the Pulitzer Prize Board is independent of the University and operates as such," the university said in a statement on Wednesday . "The members of the