Harvard has become a bastion for Jew hatred. A report shows the antisemitic behavior comes from school administrators, faculty and of course, students.
I often receive Harvard-related emails. Some have Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, asking for donations, others are letters from the alumni association, while still others are from the local Harvard Club. Yesterday, I received an email from a group of Jewish Harvard alumni. The group came into existence after 10/7 and yesterday’s mail was to announce the publication of their report: The Soil Beneath the Encampments: How Israel and Jews Became the Focus of Hate at Harvard. It is a painful read. Besides the cases of physical and verbal harassment, anti-Zionist courses, and feelings of ostracism, the report also includes some nuggets from a Harvard-exclusive social media platform, Sidechat:
“Gas the Jews”
“stfu pedo lover! All of you Zionists are the same. Killers and rapists of children.”
“Pro-genocide soph0more… looks just as dumb as her nose is crooked.”
If someone called a black the unmentionable “N Word”, would he or she remain on campus for long?
A fellow 1987 graduate tells me that a Facebook page dedicated to our alumni group also includes a fair amount of antisemitic material.
I have no doubt that the vast majority of Americans understood what happened on 10/7 and support Israel’s efforts to protect its citizenry. Polls consistently suggest strong support for Israel in its multi-front war. But there is a problem with relying on majority sentiment. Something that both Lenin and Hitler understood was that one does not need a majority to take power. Both had popular movements that were nowhere close to majority status but used and gamed the system to seize power and never relinquish it. If one were to take an anonymous poll at Harvard, I would venture to guess that the majority supports Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas. But that makes no difference. The woman who spends her days hidden away in Widener Library or the jock who spends hours down at the boathouse are not the ones making or driving Harvard policy. The majority might support the good, but the raucous minority will be the ones controlling the conversation.
Interim President Alan Garber called it a win when he caved in to every demand of the tent-dwellers who took over Harvard Yard. He and his Harvard Corporation colleagues were desperate to get the protests finished. So he agreed to reinstate students sent away and arrange meetings that the Hamas lovers demanded. Maybe he even helped them fold up their tents. He truly was in a bind. An article in the Harvard Crimson noted in passing that while the Jew Haters were putting away their camping gear in one part of the Yard, the university was busy setting up the necessary infrastructure for graduation in the hallowed space between Widener Library and Memorial Church. How hallowed? A friend of mine was in the marching band in our day, and one Saturday as they returned from a football game, they played the jingle from the Miller Lite commercial as they passed through the middle of the Yard. An infuriated Dean Archie Epps screamed that in that space between those two buildings, only Harvard songs may be performed!
I think that it is important to note that the head of the Harvard Corporation and the de facto most powerful person of the most prestigious university of the land is Penny Pritzker. She and her hand-picked interim president are both Jewish. In an era long ago one might have thought that two such powerful figures would have used their positions to rein in Jew hatred and encourage Jewish students on campus. But we live in an age where religion is like an earring—it’s there but it certainly is not as important as say pants or a shirt. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi always say how they are proud Catholics but openly support policies that fly in the face of Church positions—most notably, abortion and trans treatments for children. So while our Harvard leaders are Jewish, their relationship with Judaism would appear to be something in the background, kind of like Muzak on an elevator. In the months of antisemitic protests demanding the destruction of the state of Israel and, at times, the death of Jews, they have chosen not to use the tools at their disposal to stop the antisemitic orgy. Ten expulsions and the game would have been over. Over the past decades, Harvard has reduced Jewish presence on campus from around 25 percent to 5 percent today. With the open hatred of Jews, Jews will help to reduce that figure further.
While I enjoyed four years at Harvard free of even a whiff of antisemitism, I realize that the professors at that time were the ones training the faculty who today serve as major drivers for campus disruptions. At virtually every campus where there is a significant anti-Jewish mob, faculty can be seen front and center. The report mentioned above discusses classes accusing Israel of apartheid and one professor asking a student to leave when the latter identified himself as being Israeli. And we can see the product of the current faculty: students who know nothing about history, who have no moral compass, whose hatred makes any intellectual discussion impossible, and who do not realize that their new Muslim friends plan to kill them last. Many of today’s students don’t even rise to the level of garbage. And their parents are clueless enough to pay $50,000 or more per year to have their wonderful kids go to Harvard and come back as brain-dead drones.
I don’t know where all this goes. God willing, the war will end. But hatred has been etched onto the brains of large numbers of students, and I find it hard to believe that in the future all will be forgiven and forgotten. Professors will continue to teach anti-Israel courses and universities will continue to make whites and Jews the bad guys, independent of any actual actions. If President Trump wants to save some dough, he might stop all federal funding to schools that have significant antisemitic incidents on campus. Cutting off their funds is the only way to cut off their oxygen.
A 22-year-old in Israel might be flying an F-35 over Lebanon or driving a Merkava tank through the ruins of Khan Younis. His counterpart in the US might be in his fifth year of Earth Rotational Studies while his friend down in the encampment cannot believe that Au Bon Pain did not heat his croissant before they sent it to the Free Gaza protest. The US needs to return to its roots of “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
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