Harvard University has released its long awaited report on antisemitism, making several recommendations to combat bigotry on campus.
The report gives what is likely the most detailed account to date of how pro-Palestine protests have swept the college since October 7, 2023.
“For many students, including Jewish ones, sympathy with the Palestinians was a natural response to Israel’s massive military response to the October 7 attacks and a rapidly mounting toll of death and destruction,” the report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias stated. “This sympathy did not mean that each and every participating student was calling for Israel’s violent downfall or hatred of Jews worldwide.”
“Yet for some protestors, at times the anti-Zionism enunciated in the student protests crossed a line from a call for freedom and security for Palestinians and Jews alike to a stereotyped notion,” it went on, “that Israel is not a state but rather a ‘settler colony’ of white Europeans, who have no real connection with the land they had stolen, that epitomised aggression and was bereft of virtues.”
The report also noted that Jews and Israelis had been uniquely singled out at Harvard in allegedly biased academic courses.
“Some Jewish students in programs at the Harvard schools ostensibly most committed to social justice seemed to struggle to navigate environments they perceived as systemically antisemitic,” the report added. “This struggle appeared particularly acute when they encountered what they believed to be one-sided programming that portrayed Israelis as uniquely villainous.”
In his statement releasing the reports, Harvard president Alan Garber, who is Jewish, apologised for “the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community”.
“Harvard cannot – and will not – abide bigotry,” Garber stated. “We will continue to provide for the safety and security of all members of our community and safeguard their freedom from harassment.”
Republican lawmakers, who have been pushing for investigations into antisemitism at Harvard and other universities in Congress, called the reports “scathing.”
“Harvard’s president said the school will not abide bigotry, yet that’s exactly what the school’s feckless leadership did,” declared Michigan’s Tim Walberg, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. “This report shows what committee Republicans have highlighted for years: antisemitism is running rampant on Harvard’s campus.”
New York Representative Elise Stefanik, whose questioning of Claudine Gay at a hearing on antisemitism contributed to the latter being ousted as Harvard’s president in 2024, stated that Harvard’s task force had revealed “longtime, deep-rooted, dangerous and rampant antisemitism” at the school.
“This is further confirmation of the significant moral crisis facing higher education that I have sounded the alarm on in Congress,” Stefanik concluded. “There must be accountability and real reform to save American higher education – not just reports.”
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, stated that the report “marks a critical step in Harvard’s long, and long overdue, reckoning with antisemitism”.
“Two things are clear. For years, Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard have been the victims of a social, political and intellectual campaign of delegitimisation and stigmatisation supported by many members of the student body and faculty,” Rubenstein said.
Garber is also “committed to addressing the deeper causes of this intolerable state of affairs and not merely their headline-grabbing manifestations over the past 19 months,” the Conservative rabbi claimed.
