Jewish students file federal discrimination suit against Harvard, accusing the university of ‘enabling antisemitism.’
NY Post (h/t Nita) The lawsuit filed Wednesday night alleges that the university has allowed students and faculty accused of engaging in antisemitic acts to remain on campus — and once even plied a mob of pro-Palestinian demonstrators “with burritos and candy.”
“Harvard’s antisemitism cancer — as a past Harvard president termed it — manifests itself as a double standard invidious to Jews,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed in Boston federal court and obtained by the Post.
“Harvard selectively enforces its policies to avoid protecting Jewish students from harassment, hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda, and ignores Jewish students’ pleas for protection.” It goes on to argue that the university “permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews, and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world.
The suit also claims Harvard officials have “been aware of its antisemitism for years, but its response has been, to say the least, clearly unreasonable and totally unacceptable in not just tolerating, but enabling antisemitism.”
The suit alleges that even before Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October, the group Harvard Out of Palestine “led a relentless campaign against retired Israeli Major Gen. Amos Yadlin, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government” in which students marched through campus in April 2022, banging on drums and using a megaphone to accuse Yadlin of being personally responsible for “genocide.”
They cited a number of instances in which Jewish students were confronted by pro-Palestine demonstrators. In one case, a Jewish student was seen being surrounded by protesters who yelled “shame” at him while he was walking to class. Other times, Jewish students were left hiding inside buildings as protesters raged and called for a Jewish genocide, according to the suit.
Professors would cancel classes to allow students to attend these pro-Palestine rallies, and when “a mob of students took over a campus building to further their antisemitic agenda, Harvard’s response was not to remove and discipline them, but to supply them with burritos and candy,” the suit says.
Meanwhile, Harvard officials allegedly told Jewish students to conceal their identity, according to the suit — pointing to a claim made by Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi who said the university required him to take down his menorah at night so it would not be vandalized.
As a result, the suit says the students “are acutely aware that, solely because of their Jewish identities Harvard views and treats them as second-class citizens in the Harvard community, undeserving of the protection that Harvard affords non-Jewish students.”
“It is clear that Harvard will not correct its deep-seated antisemitism problem voluntarily,” attorney Marc E. Kasowitz said in a statement to the Boston Globe.
“Jewish students at Harvard are being subjected to vile and threatening antisemitic harassment and calls for the murder of Jews. “Harvard must be forced to protect its Jewish students and stop applying a double standard when it comes to anti-Jewish bigotry.”
The suit has been brought by Harvard Divinity School student Alexander Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism. The complaint states:
Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people—including infants, children, and the elderly—antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive. Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel. Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object. What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it.
Subjected to intense anti-Jewish vitriol, including from their own professors and Harvard administrators, Kestenbaum and other Jewish students, including SAA members, have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully participate in Harvard’s educational and other programs and have been placed at severe emotional and physical risk. Moreover, over the past ten years, Harvard has instituted admissions policies that have severely reduced—by as much as sixty percent—the number of Jewish students, an enormous decline that evinces an intentional effort, much like Harvard’s quotas one hundred years ago, to exclude Jews. The severe and pervasive hostile environment for Jews on campus leaves Harvard’s remaining Jewish population even more isolated and unsafe against their abusers.
Nearly a century before the Claudine Gay scandal, Harvard University was trying to help Nazi Germany improve its image in the West.
Times of Israel Whether Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation was catalyzed by a plagiarism scandal or her much-criticized lack of response to calls for the genocide of Jewish students, the university already has a century-old history of repressed antisemitism, historian Rafael Medoff told The Times of Israel.
“What today’s Harvard administration has in common with its predecessor in the 1930s is its reluctance to reject an evil regime and its supporters,” said Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. “Now pro-Hamas non-university groups are being allowed to march on the Harvard campus,” said Medoff, whose center has researched the ties of American university leaders to Nazi Germany for two decades.
While Harvard made efforts to atone for its history regarding slavery, including renaming buildings and erecting historical plaques. However, the university maintains a fellowship and professorship named for Alfried Krupp, a top Nazi industrialist.
According to critics, Harvard’s response to antisemitism cannot be disconnected from billions of dollars that Middle East regimes — some of them totalitarian — have donated to Harvard in recent decades. Top donors include Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar, where Hamas leaders are said to be hiding.
On December 27, a prominent international partner of the school — the Lauder Business School in Vienna, Austria — severed ties with Harvard “in solidarity with the Jewish student community,” according to a statement.
In 1922, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowel proposed a quota on Jews admitted into Harvard wherein no more than 15% of the student body would be Jewish, a policy favored by President James B. Conant, who succeeded Lowell in 1933.
Today, Lowell House is an undergraduate residence on campus, while the college’s dazzling Lowell Lecture Hall was renamed to honor the Jewish quota-supporting Harvard president in 1959. When Lowell passed the baton of leadership to Conant in 1933, the latter made a clear choice to support the Nazis, said Medoff.
For example, Harvard sent a high-profile delegate to the University of Heidelberg for celebrations on the heels of the university purging all of its Jewish faculty. Oxford and Cambridge, for their part, declined to send delegates, demonstrating the agency of higher education institutions to protest Nazism before World War II.
“[Harvard] contributed to Nazi Germany’s efforts to improve its image in the West,” wrote historian Stephen Norwood in his book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses.”
“Harvard’s administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime, as it intensified its persecution of Jews and expanded its military strength,” Norwood wrote. Conant “was not just silent” about antisemitism, said Norwood, but “actively collaborated in it.”
In May 1934, Conant was publicly mute during the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe to Boston, some of whose crew members were entertained at Harvard. The next year, Conant permitted Nazi Germany’s top diplomat in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika in a Harvard chapel, according to Norwood.
Throughout the 1930s, Harvard tried to keep out Jewish refugees — and especially Jewish professors — as demonstrated in research on European scholars who attempted to flee Hitler. Conant did not speak out against Nazism until after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. Three years had passed since the Nuremberg race laws stripped German Jews of citizenship.
Conant was determined to build friendly ties with the Universities of Heidelberg and Goettingen, even though they had expelled their Jewish faculty members and thoroughly Nazified their curricula, constructing a ‘scholarly’ foundation for vulgar antisemitism, which was taught as ‘racial science,’” wrote Norwood.
Conant was far from the only Harvard man to be inspired by Hitler’s new Reich.
In 1934, the dean of Harvard’s law school, Roscoe Pound, toured Germany and Austria and wrote favorably of Hitler’s leadership. Pound noted Hitler’s potential to reign in “agitator” groups that plagued Germany in the liberal Weimar years.
“The excuse that ‘everybody was doing it’ in the 1930s is not impressive,” said Medoff.
“Williams College ended its student exchanges with Nazi Germany; British universities refused to participate in events at Nazi-controlled universities; and the New School for Social Research welcomed Jewish refugee scholars. Harvard made a choice — it chose the wrong side,” said Medoff.
Tim h says
Joys of assh_les who don’t any different. Joys of leftist
The Tasmanian Devil says
If Harvard openly banned and persecuted Muslims or blacks in the same way, how long do you think it would take for 1,000 of the FBI’s Gestapo agents to swooped down and SWAT the campus to stop it?
CAIR, BLM and the NAACP would have opened field offices on the campus!
BareNakedIslam says
In a heartbeat.
Ray Jarman says
I guess that Harvard could not wait for the retirement of Hans Morgenthal as he propagated the US policy of bombing Germany into oblivion during WWII. My favorite professor, James Herzog, studied there while in the Navy. He loved the school and he said that Morgenthal’s final exam for a Master’s degree in Political Science consisted of only one choice for written examination. Harvard seems to be proving Hegel correct. It is time for the “synthesis” part of his theorem.
Jacks says
Blue bloods don’t want no Stinkin Papists or Jews in the midst.