How Harvard Lost Its Way and Became Infected With Antisemitism (Hint: It Took a Long Time)

In the context of the murder of more than 1,400 in the Iran-backed terrorist attack on Israel, the exposure of the moral bankruptcy of America’s oldest and richest university might seem like a sideshow. Yet the story of how Harvard lost its way marks the loss of what could have been a powerful ally of the Jewish state.The story unfolded not overnight but over years. The context is a long history, and a series of dozens of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish aggressions by Harvard faculty members, administrators, and students. The individuals in charge of the university never made it a sustained priority to confront those issues or repair the damage, despite increasingly desperate public warnings by persons who love Harvard.Now the issue has finally become impossible to ignore. Prominent Americans from across the political spectrum have spent recent days publicly recoiling from Harvard’s reaction to Hamas’s attack on the Jews of Israel. That reaction began with the Palestine Solidarity Committee and dozens of Harvard student organizations issuing a joint statement contending that Israel, “the apartheid regime,” is “the only one to blame” for “all” the violence.The university’s newly installed president, Claudine Gay, at first said nothing. Then she issued a statement with deans and other administrators that failed to condemn either the terrorist attack — in which babies were beheaded and women were raped and hundreds of civilians were killed — or the statement from the student groups.Then Ms. Gay belatedly condemned the terrorist attack but not the statement from the student groups or the students who, on social media, applauded the murders. Then, as the Israel Defense Forces arose to uproot the terrorists from Gaza, she sent out a YouTube video urging the Harvard community to “focus on the unfolding tragedy thousands of miles away.” In that latest message, headlined “our choices,” Ms. Gay took no responsibility for her own choices in botching the initial response.So abject was this default that a former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, used the word “sickened” to describe his sentiment to what he called the “morally unconscionable” statement from the student groups and by the university administration’s failure to condemn it.“What the hell is wrong with Harvard?” Senator Cruz, a Harvard Law School graduate, asked. “Given the choice between standing with Israel or supporting terrorists who are raping, kidnapping & killing thousands of women & children … 31 student groups choose the terrorists. They’re blazing hatred & antisemitism utterly blinding.”“Harvard’s leadership has failed. The president and deans refuse to denounce the antisemitism of Harvard student groups. Instead of moral clarity and courage, they offer word salad approved by committee. I am ashamed of my alma mater,” Congressman Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said.“I cannot recall a moment when I’ve been more embarrassed by my alma mater,” Congressman Seth Moulton, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said. “Given the use of Harvard’s name by Hamas-supporting student groups, it was a grave mistake not to condemn the hate messages more quickly and absolutely,” the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, a major Harvard donor, told the New York Times.More than 3,000 Harvard students, faculty, and alumni signed a Harvard Chabad-Harvard Hillel letter describing the blame-Israel-only letter as “completely wrong and deeply offensive” and Harvard’s failure to condemn the attacks as “a moral stain on the university and its leadership.”On Monday, the Wexner Foundation, which has had a 34-year partnership with Harvard to educate Israeli leaders at the Harvard Kennedy School, notified Harvard that it was ending the partnership. “The Harvard Kennedy School and The Wexner Foundation are no longer compatible partners. Our core values and those of Harvard no longer align,” the foundation said in a statement.The hatred of Israel and hostility to Jews has been mounting on the Harvard campus for years. It has a long back story. The university’s first Hebrew instructor, Judah Monis, was forced to convert to Christianity as a condition of joining the faculty, which he did in 1722.Harvard’s report on slavery, issued in 2022, faults a Harvard president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, for what it calls “anti-Jewish admissions policies” instituted by Lowell during his presidency, which lasted from 1909 to 1933. In 1940, antisemitism in the Harvard economics department was a factor in pushing Paul Samuelson to MIT, as has been documented in several published academic articles.Historians have credited Harvard for a mobilization during World War II that helped to defeat the Nazis, but the real story is more complicated. In 1936, “Harvard invited Nazi academics” to the university’s 300th anniversary celebration, which it held on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, as documented by Stephen Norwood in his 2004 article, “Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933-1937.”In 1936, Harvard, over objections from the Jewish community, sent its dean of the faculty to celebrate the anniversary of the University of Heidelberg, where, Mr. Norwood’s article recounts, the dean mingled with the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, and the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. Oxford and Cambridge boycotted the celebration. With a few exceptions, Harvard was reluctant to provide refuge to European scholars seeking to flee the Nazis, as Laurel Leff documents in her 2019 book, “Well Worth Saving.”Henry Rosovsky was dean of the faculty at Harvard during a golden age of Jewish presence on campus. The Hillel building on campus is named after him. New York Sun archiveEventually, after World War II, Jewish life at Harvard came to flourish in the era of Henry Rosovsky, who was dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences from 1973 to 1984. Harvard’s reputation soared in part on the basis of Jewish professors including Martin Feldstein, Bernard Bailyn, Richard Pipes, Ruth Wisse, Alan Dershowitz, Stephen Breyer, Elana Kagan, Robert Nozick, Marjorie Garber, Sheldon Glashow, Roy Glauber, Claudia Goldin, David Landes, Nathan Glazer, Jerome Groopman, and Stephen Jay Gould.A hasidic rebbe, Isadore Twersky, served as a Harvard professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy. An Israeli architect, Moshe Safdie, designed a Hillel building that was erected at a central location on the Cambridge campus and named Rosovsky Hall.As Harvard took a more secular turn and began admitting more international students from countries hostile to Israel, and as a new-left generation of faculty replaced the Cold War liberals who had once held sway, the tide began to turn at Harvard, and the territory became more difficult. It would take a book to catalog the descent. One highlight, or lowlight, came in March of 2006, when a Harvard Kennedy School professor, Stephen Walt, co-authored a Harvard “working paper” in which he wrote of the “unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.” He wrote, “Were it not for the Lobby’s ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today….“…AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress … manipulating the media.” Professor Walt was praised by David Duke of Louisiana. Yet Mr. Walt is still in good standing on the Harvard faculty, whence he publicly explained the recent Hamas terror attack in poetry as an example of “those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”In 2015, a Harvard government professor wrote a Washington Post op-ed backing a boycott of Israel, which he described as an “apartheid-like regime.” In 2022, during the Jewish holiday of Passover, anti-Israel activists erected an “Israel apartheid” wall inside Harvard Yard, making the false claim that Zionism is racism. A Harvard Crimson staff editorial backed a boycott of Israel.During a faculty meeting in May 2022, a professor, Eric Nelson, asked the then-Harvard president about the “eruption of antisemitism on our campus” and was essentially ignored. That same year, the opening prayer of Harvard commencement was offered “in the name of Jesus, my radical brother, the 1st-century freedom fighter who knew enslavement, at the hands of oppressors and occupiers.” Captions on the large video screens flashed “first century Palestine’s freedom fighter.”In September 2022, a Harvard faculty member hosted an event at which a boycott-Israel activist proudly spoke of how at age 13 in 1983 or 1984 he had demonstrated against Israeli participation in the Cairo book fair. When a student asked about how to get Harvard to divest from Israel, the faculty member replied, “We’re having an organizing class this spring. I can’t think of anything better around which to organize.”In April 2023, to draw attention to antisemitism, Jewish students at Harvard brought to campus a replica of a cattle car of the sort used by Nazis to transport Jews to death camps. Ira StollIn December 2022, after a report ranked Harvard worst in the nation in campus antisemitism, I was quoted publicly in a news article as a Harvard employee: “the level of antisemitism on campus over the past year is shocking, embarrassing, disgraceful — like nothing I’ve seen before.” I said then, “All of us who care about the University really need to work urgently to improve the situation or else face a real risk of Harvard losing Jewish talent and excellence to other, less hostile institutions.”The undergraduate Jewish student population at Harvard has plummeted to as low as 5 percent by some surveys, from about 25 percent in the late 1970s. Currently, the number of Jewish undergraduates at Harvard is less than half the level it was at during the era of Lowell’s anti-Jewish quotas.In 2023, Harvard welcomed boycott-Israel advocates Rashida Tlaib and Linda Sarsour, and reversed a decision to deny a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, one of Israel’s most condescending critics. The new head of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and the academic dean of the Harvard Divinity School both signed a letter falsely demonizing Israel for “apartheid” and ethnic cleansing. An April email from the Harvard Kennedy School’s “Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging” advised people to “be mindful” of Ramadan but made no mention of Passover.Also in April 2023, a Harvard senior, Sabrina Goldfischer, made public her government department senior honors thesis about antisemitism at Harvard College. It described how the First Year Urban Program, a pre-orientation program for incoming Harvard students, had planned a stop on a campus tour of the “bad parts of Harvard” — outside the undergraduate Jewish Center, Hillel.“The training guide instructed tour guides to say that Hillel was unwelcoming to Palestinian students.” Formal freshman convocation ceremonies in both 2022 and 2023 were interrupted by Palestine Solidarity Committee activists with an Israel-apartheid banner, setting the tone and giving arriving students a clear message about acceptable campus dialogue on Israel.Jewish students were so intent on calling attention to the antisemitism that, in April 2023, they brought to Harvard Yard a replica of a cattle car like those the Nazis used to transport Jews to the death camps. Ms. Goldfischer’s thesis also reported that as an icebreaker at a Crimson meeting, students were asked who or what they’d like to “cancel.” One answered, Israel.As recently as September 2023, a Crimson editorial about the criteria for selecting a new Kennedy School dean called for someone with the “courage” and “moral backbone to stand up to potent political forces … pro-Israel forces.”The Crimson editorial board overlaps with the membership of the Palestine Solidarity committee. They hold meetings on Jewish holidays that effectively exclude Jewish students from participating. The students are compensated for writing the anti-Israel editorials in part with donations raised from mainstream-media-executive alumni, in part with federal work-study funds facilitated by Harvard’s financial aid office.The antisemitism affects not only a few student groups but also Harvard’s professional schools and academic programs, which are cloaking anti-Israel activism as academic work. At Harvard Law School, the International Human Rights Clinic filed a submission with the United Nations in 2022 falsely accusing Israel of “the crime of apartheid under international law.”The submission was created jointly with Addameer, which the watchdog group NGO Monitor describes as an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group. At the Harvard Divinity School, the Religion in Public Life Project has served as a platform for advocating a boycott of Israel and the elimination of the Jewish state.At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” offers courses on topics such as “the settler colonial determinants of health,” complete with maps that offer a vivid but falsified version of the classical, medieval antisemitic trope of blaming Jews for the spread of disease. That program was created after a Harvard president, Lawrence Bacow, in March 2023, “met with the president of Birzeit University in Ramallah, Palestine,” as the Harvard central administration’s official Harvard Gazette described it.When I left Harvard in July, an exit interview survey asked me the reasons. I wrote that the antisemitic climate on campus was one of the reasons I left. The human resources department sent me a note saying I was “welcome to pursue a formal complaint.” The links for doing that all went to forms and web pages relating to gender or sexual harassment, not antisemitism — an indication of how blind the university has been in dealing with the problem.For perspective, I reached for “Self-Portrait of a Hero,” a book about a Jewish Harvard student. Yoni Netanyahu enrolled at Harvard as a freshman foreign student from Israel in fall 1967. By April 1968, he was writing his brother Iddo: “The many acts of terror perpetrated in Israel are strengthening my conviction that the sooner I come back, the better—for me personally.” He transferred to Hebrew University.Eventually, Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu of the Israel Defense Forces was killed in action at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. His mission — to rescue 105 hostages from terrorists — was a success. And he went to his grave as, among other things, one of the greatest heroes ever to have set foot in Harvard Yard.President Gay showed up Friday evening at Shabbat 1,000, a pre-planned annual event sponsored by Harvard Chabad. It draws a crowd of Jewish students to a sabbath dinner in a tent on Harvard’s Science Center Plaza. When Ms. Gay rose to speak, she was met with a smattering of boos. She didn’t mention Israel or Hamas at all, but she told the audience, “I’ve learned a lot over the course of this week.”Harvard’s 30th president said she’d learned about the pain that had accumulated in Harvard’s Jewish community over many years. “Harvard has your back. We know the difference between right and wrong,” she said. Then she asked the group to bear with her pronunciation as she wished them a “shabbat shalom,” which she mispronounced as “sabbat shalom.” I took it as a sign of both good intentions and more work needed to get it right. The crowd greeted it with a standing ovation.To hold President Gay to her promise might require a shift in focus, to emphasize less what Harvard says and concentrate more on what Harvard does. How could the university turn it around?It could allow any Harvard student who is called up to reserve duty or who wants on their own initiative to volunteer to help Israel defend itself to leave the university with no academic or financial penalty and re-enroll when they want to. It could publicly announce the policy and also publicly announce that the policy does not apply to any students who want to go fight alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Jihad, or any other group designated by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization. Make the same policy apply to faculty and staff, including at the medical area hospitals.It could adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. That definition, which has been adopted by the U.S. government in multiple presidential administrations, offers some examples that could apply in the recent Harvard context, including, “Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible … even for acts committed by non-Jews“ and “justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology” and “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”It could appoint a committee similar to the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery to investigate antisemitism at Harvard and issue a report. How useful that would be might depend on who is on the committee, but, while risky, it could be a start. Harvard could appoint a senior administrator to field antisemitism complaints and prevent antisemitism on campus, similar to Title IX officers preventing sex-based discrimination. The usefulness of that, too, would depend on who the staff person is and to whom the administrator reports. It could deny university funding, administrative support, and space to any student organization advocating a boycott of Israel.It could commit to admitting to the college a sufficient number of students who intend to be involved in Jewish organizations at Harvard for those organizations to flourish. It does something similar with the band and the sports teams. I have watched the university navigate these sorts of things for a long time. Whether it is demands for an African-American Studies department or to kick ROTC off campus or to get ROTC back on campus or to divest from fossil fuels or recognize the graduate student union or whatever, the university almost inevitably caves eventually to the demands.Right now, the university has an opportunity not merely to get the wording of a statement revised, but to confront in a structural way the antisemitism that has been gathering for years.There are pragmatic reasons for doing that — to calm the anger of donors and politicians, keep attracting excellent talent, avoid the legal costs and negative publicity of lawsuits and government investigations of illegal discrimination, such as the one the university recently fought and lost over discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions.There are academic reasons for doing it — the boycott that Israel’s enemies are advocating would interfere with Harvard’s research and teaching mission, and the stories those enemies are telling make a mockery of Harvard’s slogan of Veritas, or truth. There are restorative justice arguments for doing it: Given Harvard’s history of antisemitism, it has an obligation to make amends.The strongest argument of all, though, may be the one that got President Gay the standing ovation from the Jewish Harvard students, the moral argument: “We know the difference between right and wrong.”Ira Stoll, editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com, is the founding managing editor of The New York Sun. He is a 1994 graduate of Harvard College, where he was president of the Crimson. Between 2019 and 2023 he was managing editor of Harvard’s Education Next.

How Harvard Lost Its Way and Became Infected With Antisemitism (Hint: It Took a Long Time)

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