Harvard’s Antisemitism Begins in the Classroom

No one in the advisory group argued against free speech. Students can chant “globalize the intifada” all they want. As the screaming students point out, “intifada” simply means “uprising.” True. Also, “Sieg Heil” simply means “Hail victory,” and Confederate flags are simply regional symbols. Students can scream whatever racist things they like. But this evades the question: Why is Harvard full of screaming racists?

Our recommendations sought to address this question, but Harvard’s only major reforms since have been rules around protests—suggesting that Harvard believes it plays no role in shaping its students’ ideas. The school completely ignored our most important recommendation, which suggested that if students raised concerns about antisemitic content in courses or lectures, Harvard should review those academic events—not for the opinions expressed, but for academic rigor.

What is Harvard doing to advance academic rigor? As the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance revealed in a May 2024 audit of Harvard’s educational offerings, the answer is worse than nothing.

Harvard’s School of Public Health, for instance, has a partnership program with Birzeit University in Ramallah. Harvard is usually allergic to bigotry—so much so that it changed its official law school crest in 2021 to avoid connections with a slaveholder who died centuries ago. At Birzeit, buildings are named after antisemitic murderers and students host Hamas military parades. Why does Harvard maintain a partnership with Birzeit, of all the universities on the planet? (In July Harvard moved the partnership program from the West Bank to Jordan due to “security concerns”—though not, presumably, due to Birzeit’s institutional enthusiasm for murdering Jews.)

Harvard’s educational approach to the Middle East is best described as what the journalist Matti Friedman calls the “America-Italy conflict.” The U.S. invaded Italy in 1943, but instead of calling this the “America-Italy conflict,” we call it World War II. By contrast, Harvard is diligently teaching future leaders about the Middle East in the near-exclusive context of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

In the 2022-23 academic year, Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies hosted the same number of events about Gaza and the West Bank as it did about Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt combined. The Harvard course catalogue and events calendar frequently feature “Palestine” and “decolonization.” But students need to dig deep to find a course or lecture mentioning that Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies of Iran, or that Israel has been fighting a multifront war against Iran for decades. Harvard is a pipeline to the State Department, so that future diplomats are carefully studying the America-Italy conflict.

Harvard students are clearly fascinated by the intifada; they can’t stop screaming about it. How do they learn what the First and Second Intifadas were? Given Harvard’s minimal academic coverage of this topic, the answer is probably TikTok.

This spring, a Harvard student told me that in one of his classes, the instructor taught about the Dreyfus Affair without mentioning antisemitism or that Alfred Dreyfus was Jewish. Imagine if a Harvard instructor taught about the causes of the Civil War without mentioning slavery or that enslaved people were black. This is academic malpractice at the price of $80,000 a year.

Academia doesn’t seem to attract many courageous people. The tenure process encourages conformity, and students also perform to conform. When Harvard and its academic departments are invested—via billions of dollars from autocratic Middle Eastern regimes—in the same old bogus story in which the villains are Jews and the heroes are federally designated terrorist organizations, there’s no incentive for anyone to disagree.

The Harvard students cheering for dictatorships have exposed a deeper problem. As one faculty member was quoted in the audit, “Yes, students are under attack. But mainly, all of them should feel ripped off.” Another said: “The last place you will have a free, interesting discussion is a Harvard classroom.”

In the early 20th century, the University of Vienna, founded in 1365, was one of the world’s academic giants, until it caved in to student groups and faculty who celebrated terrorists and tyrants. Today, U.S. News & World Report ranks it 215th in global universities, slightly below the University of Cincinnati.

Harvard has been around for only about 400 years, which in Jewish historical time is about 15 minutes. Maybe in another 400 years, Jews will look back and see that Harvard followed the University of Vienna’s path, its buildings mere memorials to what was once the world’s best education.

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