At a now-notorious congressional hearing this past Tuesday, newly inaugurated Harvard president Claudine Gay testified that the reason she could not take action against the wave of pro-Palestinian protests on her campus, even when they include chants like “Globalize the intifada,” which Gay said she found “personally abhorrent” and “at odds with the values of Harvard,” was because Harvard gives “a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable, outrageous, or offensive.”
Elise Stefanik, a Republican representing New York and a Harvard alumna herself, countered that Harvard had ranked last of 248 colleges in a recent free-speech survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “I reject that characterization of our campus,” Gay replied.
Yet Gay’s own characterization of Harvard as a place of open dialogue is somewhat at odds with the picture painted by Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana—and by some of Harvard’s own students.
On a Zoom call last month with hundreds of Harvard volunteers, Khurana was asked how the university made sure that there was a respectful exchange of ideas on campus given how polarized people have become.
“I’ll just say, Houston, we have a problem,” he replied.
Citing a survey that Harvard College itself conducted last spring, to which 98 percent of its graduating seniors responded, Khurana noted that only 39 percent of students reported feeling comfortable engaging in controversial topics with their peers, and that only some 37 percent felt comfortable talking about controversial topics within the classroom. “We can’t be an effective academic institution,” he said, when people aren’t comfortable having difficult conversations. The Harvard community, he said, needed to “recognize that a bumper sticker is not an argument” and to “avoid hyperbolic language.”
Khurana, a professor of sociology and organizational behavior who has been dean of Harvard College since 2014, described a campus culture where students have a lack of knowledge when it comes to significant topics like World War II and the history of the Middle East, and social media just fills in the gaps. “Education on things we might have taken for granted is very uneven,” he said.
Khurana added that when talking with “students who have been incredibly passionate on some of these areas” he would “ask them to recommend two or three books to me that I should read to inform myself more deeply about some of these issues, and they have a very hard time even naming one.”
President Gay, Provost Alan Garber, and Harvard’s vice president of public affairs didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It had all started rather magnificently when Gay entered Tercentenary Theater for her pomp-filled, historic inauguration as the first Black president of Harvard, on September 29. But it began to rain as she ascended to the podium, trailed by three of her predecessors: Larry Bacow, Drew Faust, and Lawrence Summers. In their long black gowns, the emeritus trio sat directly behind Gay while she gave her inaugural address, entitled “Courage to be Harvard.”
“I have loved this place since the day I arrived as a graduate student in 1992,” Gay declared. “Now you have given me the great honor of leading this University into the future, setting a compass by its constellation of brilliant—if sometimes unruly—stars.” It seemed like a platitude. Or maybe even a compliment.
But on October 7—just eight days later—Hamas invaded Israel. By the day’s end, 33 of the university’s student groups signed a joint statement issued on Instagram by the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine, which blamed not Hamas but rather “the Israeli regime” for “all unfolding violence.” Meanwhile, Gay’s administration was silent.
The following Monday, Summers publicly denounced what he saw as Gay’s lack of leadership. “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” Summers posted on X. Later that day, Gay, together with senior leadership including 15 deans, did release a statement, but the absence of any condemnation of Hamas, or the original student groups’ statement, only brought further criticism. Over the next four days, Gay put out two additional statements, but to many her belated protestation that she condemned Hamas’s “terrorist atrocities” didn’t seem genuine.
Into the breach stepped activist hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman. A Jewish Harvard alumnus who, in 2014, donated $17 million to the university through his Pershing Square Foundation, Ackman called on the school to release the names of the students who had signed the Israel-condemning statement so that he and his fellow C.E.O.’s wouldn’t “inadvertently hire” them. (Summers, in a television interview, said that Ackman was getting “a bit carried away.”)
The university didn’t accede to Ackman’s demand, but a conservative nonprofit called Accuracy in Media was more than happy to oblige, displaying students’ photographs and names under the words HARVARD’S LEADING ANTISEMITES on a billboard truck it parked across the street from campus. (The doxing truck even eventually drove to the family homes of some of the students.) Some of the students involved received death threats. Others had corporate job offers rescinded.
Harvard had already been assisting involved students when it launched a formal task force to help those who were affected. To some Jewish students and alumni this was a bridge too far. Just days later, over two dozen of the nation’s top law firms would send letters to Harvard Law’s dean, as well as deans at the other top American law schools, calling on them to take a stronger stand against anti-Semitism. (The letter also noted that there should “not be room” for “Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses.”)
“Harvard does not owe any of their students a job,” a Jewish alumnus who is still very active on campus tells me. “They do owe their students protection and safety at their school and in their dorm, and that’s really what’s at stake.”
On the night of October 13, Gay showed up to join around 1,000 Jewish Harvard students and faculty gathered in a giant tent on the lawn in front of the Science Center for Harvard Chabad’s annual Shabbat 1000 dinner. While Gay had been invited to attend the dinner prior to October 7, and declined the invite, saying she was going to be out of town, event organizers were surprised when they arrived at the tent to find Gay’s security person there, saying that she was going to join for five minutes. As it turned out, not only did Gay stay, she accepted Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi’s invitation to give a speech.
As Gay, in her trademark thick black glasses, a black leather jacket, and orange pants, ascended the podium to stand in front of the Harvard Chabad Presents Shabbat 1000 banner, one attendee heard scattered booing.
“I have learned a lot not only about the aching pain and grief that many of you are experiencing,” Gay said, “but also learned a lot about the pain and grief that many of you have been experiencing on our campus for years. And what I want to say,” she said, her voice breaking, “is that Harvard has your back. We know the difference between right and wrong. And that we’re going to find ways every day to affirm your sense of belonging here and to remind all those who might doubt it that you belong here.” At which point not only did the crowd applaud, but they stood up and gave her a standing ovation.
“The Incident”
On October 19, Jason Greenblatt came to speak at Harvard Law School at the invitation of its Alliance for Israel. As a former White House special envoy to the Middle East, Greenblatt had played a key role in the 2020 Abraham Accords, which established friendly relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia had been preparing to join, too—until Hamas’s surprise attack.
After his speech, Greenblatt met with a small group of students in a conference room for a more intimate discussion. Though he had come to talk about the Abraham Accords and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large, the students were more eager to discuss the issue of anti-Semitism at Harvard.
Only the day before, they told Greenblatt, an Israeli business student had been harassed at Harvard Business School as he filmed protesters who were lying on the ground as part of a “die-in” for Gaza in front of Klarman Hall, a building named for one of the country’s most prolific pro-Israel philanthropists. Adding to the irony, this student had given talks at Harvard about how, prior to his arrival on campus, he had volunteered at an Israeli nonprofit that seeks to foster peace by incubating start-ups that have both Israeli and Arab co-founders. He even planned to move to Dubai after graduation in order to capitalize on the Abraham Accords and the meaningful relationships that he hoped to forge with his Arab B-school classmates. Instead, he ended up in the center of a political storm, filing a report with both the Harvard University Police Department and the F.B.I.’s Boston office.
As the law students described the general protest climate on campus, Greenblatt was sympathetic, but he counseled the group to remember that the protesters were “a small amount of students.”
“And all of a sudden,” says one law student who was present, “we started hearing crazy noises. We were afraid someone was an active shooter. It was just very loud.”
Even though classes were taking place elsewhere in the building, outside the door of the conference room, dozens and dozens of protesters began marching past. Many were masked, making it difficult to tell how many of them were Harvard students. “Not another nickel! Not another dime! No more money for Israel’s crimes!” they chanted as they beat on upside-down buckets. “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”
“We actually planned this,” one law student joked to Greenblatt, but many of the students were frightened. A few took off their kippahs. Others ran up to the third-floor, which houses the Office of Community Engagement, Equity, and Belonging (C.E.E.B.) and locked themselves inside.
The student being accosted by protesters in the video had worked at an Israeli nonprofit that seeks to foster peace by incubating start-ups that have both Israeli and Arab co-founders.
After the protest was over, two of the law-school deans told a group of the Jewish law students they were sorry about what had happened. “That’s the story throughout the whole last three weeks,” the law student tells me. “They’re super, super empathetic, but they don’t do anything.”
Soon after Greenblatt’s visit, video of the Israeli student being accosted went viral on social media. “Don’t grab me,” the student says in the video. “You’re grabbing me.” Footage showed several pro-Palestinian protesters surrounding the student with their keffiyehs, obscuring his view, and screaming “Shame!” at him repeatedly. The video provoked outrage among the greater Harvard Jewish community.
What many who watched the clip likely did not know was that two of the protesters who accosted the Israeli were not only students but held positions of authority at Harvard. One was Ibrahim Bharmal, a third-year law student on the Harvard Law Review and a teaching fellow in a first-year civil-procedure class. On October 10, just three days after the Hamas invasion, Bharmal had attached a Palestine Solidarity Committee flyer for a vigil in an official academic e-mail. The information went out to all 160 of Bharmal’s students, including one whose Israeli relatives, a young married couple who had lain atop their infant twins to protect them during the invasion, had just been murdered by Hamas.
The other was a Harvard Divinity School student and dorm proctor named Elom Tettey-Tamaklo. According to Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, the president of the Jewish student group Harvard Chabad, in early November, Tettey-Tamaklo posted on his Instagram account “The beast of Zionism shall be slain” over a photo from a pro-Palestine rally. Last March, he wrote a laudatory blog post for Institute for Palestine Studies, whose main headquarters are in Beirut, about Fatima Bernawi, a Palestinian woman who attempted to bomb a cinema screening in Jerusalem in 1967.
On November 9, a day that pro-Palestinian groups dedicated to a “Shut It Down for Palestine” nationwide walkout, Gay sent a lengthy e-mail to the Harvard community with the subject line “Combating Antisemitism.”
Detailing the assembly of the Antisemitism Advisory Group, Gay went on to condemn the rallying cry “From the river to the sea,” a slogan she described as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.” She also noted that the F.B.I. and Harvard University Police were investigating what she referred to as “the incident on the Harvard Business School campus on October 18.” The university, she said, would wait until those inquiries were complete, and then “determine if University policies or codes of conduct have been violated, and, if so, take appropriate action.”
But once again, she failed to quell her critics.
“It doesn’t make sense for the university to wait for law enforcement when law enforcement is applying a completely different standard,” explains a member of the Harvard Law School faculty. “To put someone in prison requires a narrow, specific situation, whereas to suspend or expel them does not.”
Rabbi Zarchi believes “the university book is being violated left and right, and yet there’s no enforcement of it. It’s almost like you could break university principles if it’s about undermining the Jew.”
On November 10, the day after Gay sent out her e-mail, Tettey-Tamaklo moved out of his Harvard Yard first-year dorm. In losing his role as proctor, he had become something of a cause célèbre. Soon, a petition calling on Harvard to reinstate Elom as a proctor was drawn up on Change.org. “Elom was suspended for expressing his views on Palestine; an act that is not only protected under the First Amendment but also fundamental to any thriving academic institution,” it states. It currently has more than 9,000 signatures. Bharmal, meanwhile, remains a teaching fellow.
“A Jewish Hit List”
Notwithstanding Gay’s condemnation, “From the river to the sea” could be heard frequently at on-campus protests over the coming weeks, along with calls to “Globalize the intifada.”
“I’m seeing a lot of anti-Semitism bubble to the surface, with Israel as an excuse,” one Harvard junior tells me. “It went in a couple of days from ‘Free Palestine’ to people posting about how Jews control the media and the I.D.F. is making up atrocities.”
When this student arrived at Harvard, in the fall of 2021, he said that he was prepared to encounter hostility toward Israel, as that was already the case at so many colleges and universities throughout the country. But at least in retrospect, the signs were there that a very significant problem was brewing at Harvard.
In May 2021, Rosovsky Hall, the building that houses the Jewish student group Harvard Hillel, and which is named after Henry Rosovsky, a refugee from the Nazis who became a longtime Harvard dean and economist, was vandalized twice. First, a Palestinian flag with the anti-police slogan “Fuck 12” was zip-tied to the front door by two masked men who were never apprehended. In the other incident, one of the windows was broken.
The following April, The Harvard Crimson endorsed the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement. B.D.S., which partially originated in 2001 at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, is modeled on the anti-apartheid campus movement of the 1980s. It has so far failed to do much damage to Israel’s economy, but it has succeeded in strengthening the pro-Palestine contingent among Western students.
“The B.D.S. movement,” says Kenneth L. Marcus, the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, “essentially took the long-standing anti-Jewish [Arab League] boycott and reframed it in the language of the international human-rights movement.”
“It went in a couple of days from ‘Free Palestine’ to people posting about how Jews control the media and the I.D.F. is making up atrocities.”
The Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee hosts an Israeli Apartheid Week each spring, as do many like-minded organizations at other colleges, and in 2022, its speakers included M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. That year, the Palestine Solidarity Committee installed an approximately 10-foot-high structure in Harvard Yard, made up of six painted, double-sided panels, to symbolize the barrier that separates Israel from the West Bank.
One panel featured a Holocaust-like scene, with an Israeli flag flying from a watchtower as trains came in behind it, and a barbed-wire-enclosed area below it where men holding machine guns pointed them in the direction of children. Another featured a keffiyeh-clad figure holding a Palestinian flag while hugging a tree. A third simply featured black and red words in all caps against an all-white background: ZIONISM IS RACISM SETTLER COLONIALISM WHITE SUPREMACY APARTHEID.
In the wake of the Crimson’s B.D.S. endorsement, 150 members of Harvard’s faculty, including Summers, Jerome Groopman, Steven Pinker, and Alan Dershowitz, signed a petition in which they declared that while “there are many diverse perspectives among us on issues of Israeli policy, the boundaries of academic freedom, and the role of universities as political actors, we are united in our opposition to BDS and The Crimson stance. We are deeply concerned about the long-term impact of this recent staff editorial on the morale and well-being of Jewish and Zionist students at Harvard, some of whom have already reported that they have become alienated from the newspaper on account of the inhospitable culture that prevails there.”
Little more than a month later came the Boston Mapping Project, a searchable site—with Harvard as a suggested keyword—listing the names, addresses, and sometimes photos of Israel supporters in the Boston area, including those involved with Jewish student groups at Harvard. The project’s stated goal was to “reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them.” As with Accuracy in Media, this doxing was done by an outside entity or at least what seemed to be one: an anonymous group endorsed by B.D.S. Boston.
The Boston Globe titled an article on the campaign “‘A Jewish Hit List’: Antisemitic Mapping Project Seen as Incitement to Violence in Massacusetts.” And yet, Harvard neither released a statement condemning the Mapping Project nor offered assistance to the Jewish students who had been doxed.
Meanwhile, as per an annual Harvard Crimson survey of first-years, the Harvard College Jewish student population was shrinking. In 2017, 9.5 percent of responding students identified as Jewish. By this year, the number had dropped to 5.3 percent.
According to Rabbi Zarchi, who established Chabad on campus when he and his wife moved to Cambridge 26 years ago, anti-Semitism at Harvard “didn’t happen overnight. This has been going on for a long time.”
In September of 2001, a Jewish Tennessean named Rachel Fish arrived at Harvard Divinity School to study contemporary thought in Judaism and Islam. During this post-9/11 period, Fish recalls, “there was a real uptick in anti-Semitism in the Arab World. You saw Mein Kampf get new releases and new heightened interest. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was aired on Egyptian state television.”
Fish decided to organize a conference on global anti-Semitism, and it was there that she learned that the Harvard Divinity School had recently received a $2.5 million donation for a chair in Islamic Studies from the United Arab Emirates. But as she would learn, not only was the U.A.E. an autocratic country run by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, its Zayed International Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, which was a think tank run by the sheikh’s son, was publishing and distributing anti-Semitic materials and featuring speakers who had declared Jews “the enemies of all nations.” Its speakers had included an Arab scholar who claimed that Jews used human blood to make baked goods and a French writer who claimed that it was America and Israel that had been behind the attacks on 9/11.
Ultimately, Fish got a copy of the written agreement between Harvard and the U.A.E., signed by both the U.A.E. and then Harvard provost Harvey Fineberg, which showed that, in exchange for $2.5 million, Harvard would establish the Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan Professorship in Islamic Religious Studies and “advise the UAE on procedures relating to application and admission to the University, and will encourage relations in other areas of research and development, as appropriate.”
In the end, the U.A.E. closed its Zayed Center, and Fish’s campaign to get Harvard to reject the U.A.E.’s gift succeeded in the summer of 2004, when then Harvard president Larry Summers returned the donation.
A Vast Unlearning
The question of what the university administration should and perhaps even—given the fact that it received $676 million in federal research funding this year and is a federally tax-exempt institution—must be doing to provide a non-discriminatory educational environment for its Jewish students is currently roiling not just Harvard but much of the Ivy League, as well as other colleges and universities throughout the country.
“The question for Harvard is the same as the question for America,” says Marcus. “Will we look back at this 10 years from now and say that this was the turning point at which Harvard and other institutions in America became inhospitable to the Jewish community? Or was this simply an ugly moment from which we will have recovered?”
While many of the students and faculty have leaned left for decades, there is also a vocal centrist-to-conservative contingent of faculty. Then there is the issue of the university’s gargantuan $50.7 billion endowment. This vast sum, which has, in a sense, been the engine of Harvard’s liberalism, also makes it dependent on alumni donors. Recently, some 2,000 Harvard graduates have formed a Harvard Jewish Alumni Association, some of whom are now declining to follow through on their gift commitments and are donating just $1 instead as protest.
In recent weeks, there has been much talk that Harvard, which last spring lost a landmark affirmative-action case at the Supreme Court, will soon be buried in a new round of litigation. Last month, for example, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education informed the school that it is investigating an allegation that the university “discriminated against students on the basis of their national origin (shared Jewish ancestry and/or Israeli)” in failing to respond appropriately following the “incidents of harassment.” If proven, this would be a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any “program or activity” that receives federal funding from the Department of Education.
Then there is the involvement of the Brandeis Center in the aftermath of an incident that occurred last spring involving three Israeli students enrolled in Professor Marshall Ganz’s “Organizing: People, Power, Change” class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. When, as part of their coursework, the Israeli students proposed developing a plan to unite diverse and moderate Israelis in order to strengthen Israel’s Jewish democracy, Ganz, a well-known labor organizer and progressive activist who happens to be the son of a rabbi, demanded they change topics.
An independent investigation launched by Harvard to look into the matter culminated with a 25-page report, concluding that there had been a “hostile learning environment for the Students based on their Israeli nationality and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry,” that Professor Ganz had “compared the Students’ purpose to Christian white supremacy in an effort to demonstrate that their claim to ‘Jewish democracy’ was ‘contradictory,’” and that the Kennedy School “effectively denied them the opportunities of a safe learning environment in the Course.”
Outgoing Kennedy School dean Douglas Elmendorf promised to “ensure that the School fulfills these commitments and that the violations of policies that occurred this spring are addressed fully and do not recur.” But according to the Brandeis Center, which sent a follow-up letter to Harvard’s general counsel just last month, no actions have been taken.
Since Gay’s testimony, the fallout has only grown more severe. Bill Ackman, who for weeks had been tweeting not only about the problems with anti-Semitism at Harvard but, like the activist investor he is at heart, seeking to fix them by visiting campus and issuing long, bullet-pointed memos packed with suggestions, finally threw up his hands. But not until after calling Gay’s academic credentials into question.
At the same time, Accuracy in Media directed onlookers to a site called harvardhatesjews.com, which had a form for sending an automated e-mail to Harvard demanding Gay’s resignation.
Meanwhile, the House Committee on Education & the Workforce announced an investigation into Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. after their presidents’ testimony which, as Representative Stefanik noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “Harvard Bans ‘Cisheterosexism’ but Shrugs at Antisemitism,” was viewed more than 1 billion times worldwide, “making it the most viewed congressional testimony in history.”
So dire was the situation that an airplane was hired—allegedly by a group representing Jewish students—to fly over campus trailing the Palestinian flag and a banner proclaiming Harvard Hates Jews.
On Friday evening, 76 members of Congress sent a letter to the governing boards at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and M.I.T. calling for them to dismiss their school presidents based on their testimony that Tuesday.
But saddest, and most disheartening of all perhaps, was when Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned from Gay’s vaunted Antisemitism Advisory Group just two hours before the start of Hanukkah.
“The short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped,” he posted on X. “I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person. Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas....
“However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along the axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil…. Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.”
As Dean Khurana said at the end of the volunteer call last month, “If we are just seen as a place where ideology is simply reproduced or credentialism happens, then we have failed at our mission of what makes us unique which is this never ending search for Veritas.”
Johanna Berkman is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. You can read her profile of Jumi Bello, which won the 2023 Deadline Club award for Arts Reporting, here