Sunday afternoon, September 22, hundreds of Harvard community members donning miniature Israeli flags and hostage dog tags filed into Sanders Theatre for a summit about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. The high-security gathering was organized by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA), a group formed following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last October 7. Throughout the afternoon, undergraduates, Israeli government officials, and the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism took the stage to discuss their perceptions of conditions on Harvard’s campus.
The afternoon began with a series of memorials to the victims of Hamas’s attack. A video showed Israelis being shot in their cars, dragged bloody into trucks, and hiding in trees during the assault. Avigail Gimpel, an Israeli who prepared bodies for burial, spoke about the conditions of the corpses. She recalled a young girl whose arm had been sawed off, a Russian grandmother strangled in her own curtains, and a father and son tied together and burnt. “Evil was not a strong enough word,” she said. “These murders were slow. They were deliberate. They were meant to inflict as much pain, harm, terror, and suffering on their victims.”
The October 7 attacks were a focal point of the summit. When discussing what has happened at Harvard in the year since, speakers found it important to remind the audience how the war in the Middle East—and by extension, the chaos on campus—began. “None of us chose this war,” said Gimpel. “We were pulled into it in Israel and on college campuses. But now we are called upon to fight bravely.”
One of the loudest voices in that fight has been Shabbos Kestenbaum, M.T.S. ’24. In February, he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about experiencing antisemitism on campus. In June, he spoke at the Republican National Convention. He is suing Harvard for “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism. His protest tactics have struck some students as inflammatory.
At the summit, Kestenbaum talked about being rejected for a class called “Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine,” saying that the professors told him the “process of unlearning” would leave him “so psychologically traumatized I will be unable to reassociate myself with my Jewish community at home.” His condemnation of Harvard’s administration received a loud round of applause: “For a year, Claudine Gay, Alan Garber, and my dean, Marla Frederick, have proved to be incompetent at best, and deliberately indifferent to Jewish students.”
Other speakers argued that campus antisemitism did not begin last October. Sabrina Goldfischer ’23, former president of Harvard Hillel, discussed writing her government thesis about antisemitism at the University. “The Death of Discourse,” which won Harvard’s Harry and Cecile Starr Prize in Jewish Studies, “documented the ways openly identifying as pro-Israel or even just being Jewish often led to social alienation, psychological distress, or even academic consequences,” she said. “Because of my research, the surge of hatred on Harvard’s campus after October 7, while appalling, did not surprise me.” Danny Denenberg ’26, Harvard Hillel’s Israel chair, also mentioned president Abbot Lawrence Lowell’s 1922 attempt to institute a Jewish admissions quota.
Goldfischer introduced the event’s first keynote speaker, U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, who pulled the conversation back from campus and into a general discussion of antisemitism.
Lipstadt described antisemitism as a unique hatred. In some ways, she said, it operates like other prejudices: “A Jew does something wrong? That’s how all Jews are. A Jew does something right? That’s one of the good ones,” she explained. Like other hatreds, antisemitism leads people to see Jews as lesser human beings. But unlike other prejudices, antisemitism also “punches up”—claiming that “Jews are more powerful…richer…stronger…able to control the society, and they must be stopped—to borrow a phrase that has been used against all of us in this room—by any means necessary.” She also explained that antisemitism takes different forms depending on where and when it takes place. “It mutates,” she said. “It changes, it’s a virus.”
During her two years as antisemitism envoy, Lipstadt’s thinking has evolved. She noticed that people are good at calling out antisemitism expressed by their political rivals but struggle to identify hatred expressed by their fellow partisans. Now, she explains antisemitism as a horseshoe rather than a spectrum. “The two extreme ends meet,” she said, “even though they may agree on nothing at all, when it comes to their depiction of the Jews, they have the same depiction.”
Lipstadt argued that antisemitism should concern non-Jews, too. Direct action against Jews can harm non-Jews, such as a Christian grandfather and grandson killed in a 2014 shooting outside a Kansas City Jewish Community Center. “If antisemitism were solely that,” she said, “it would be the right thing for a government to fight.” But antisemitism also poses a threat to democracy, she argued. Antisemitic “conspiracy myths” about Jewish control of the government erode believers’ trust in democracy. Jews also lose faith in government when they stop believing that federal, state, local, or campus authorities will protect them.
She further argued antisemitism threatens national security, citing a July report by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that foreign actors associated with Iran were amplifying campus pro-Palestine demonstrations. (Lipstadt emphasized that the report did not allege Iran initiated the protests.) “Much of this is not organic,” she said. “Antisemitism is the perfect…spoon to stir up the pot.”
Student speakers criticized Harvard’s pro-Palestine protesters. In September, the Dean of Students Office reinstated the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), whose club privileges were suspended in April for holding an unauthorized rally in the Yard. Charlie Covit ’27 attacked PSC for an online post that implied Palestinians would never accept a two-state solution. Alex Bernat ’25, co-president of Harvard Chabad, rebuked PSC for a Saturday protest in Widener Library, which he said violated Harvard’s time, place, and manner protest policies. (Harvard administrators warned the PSC beforehand that the protest did not abide by campus rules and might result in discipline.) Bernat also criticized Harvard faculty members for drawing a red triangle (which he described as an antisemitic symbol) by the John Harvard statue during a protest against University chalking regulations.
Covit moderated a discussion between two former Israeli government officials, Einat Wilf ’96 (former member of the Israeli Parliament) and Eylon Levy (former Israeli government spokesman during this war). Wilf emphasized the importance of rhetoric on Harvard’s campus. Universities, Wilf said, are “the modern churches: they determine doctrine, they determine the right way to think… they excommunicate people.” Nazi antisemitism, she argued, began in Germany’s universities.
Levy argued that antisemitism is a malicious tool intended to divide the Jewish community. “Dividing us makes us weaker and easier to pick off,” he said. Hamas, he said, wants to destroy Israel. “They think it will be easier to destroy Israel if they convince the world that Israel deserves to be destroyed. That is the purpose of the campaign to call Israel a white, settler-colonial, apartheid, fascist, genocide, baby-murdering state.” Levy continued, “When Iran is ready to activate its ring of fire and destroy us, they want people in the West to say, ‘Well, the Jews had it coming.’”
Speakers throughout the afternoon pushed back on common critiques of Israel’s war in Gaza. Covit characterized claims of genocide and apartheid by organizations like International Human Rights Watch and the International Court of Justice as lies. Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi addressed the phrase “there are no universities left in Gaza,” a frequent call at campus protests last spring. “There are no universities in Gaza because each and every one of them were taken over by Hamas and turned into bases from which they shoot rockets indiscriminately,” he said. “There are no hospitals because those hospitals were transformed into bases of terror, where hostages were tortured and murdered.”
The final keynote speaker, author Dara Horn ’99, Ph.D. ’06, discussed HJAA’s educational audit published in May. Horn was a member of the antisemitism advisory group convened by former president Gay in late October 2023, which Horn said “went so badly that I got called to Congress to testify.” She recalled the first meeting with Harvard administrators two weeks after October 7. One administrator, she remarked, said “We’re dealing with a lot of ignorance. Most students are very ignorant about the Middle East or Israel or Zionism.” She remembered thinking, “Wow, that’s so sad, that you have so many ignorant students….If only there were an educational institution with a $50-billion dollar endowment that could address that ignorance.”
Horn analyzed the concept that antisemitism emerges from ignorance. “If hatred comes from ignorance,” she asked, “why is Harvard full of this very specific ignorance?” Describing historical examples of antisemitism, she remarked that many leading antisemitic thinkers were smart. “Antisemitism is an intellectual enterprise,” she said. “It’s the product of intense thought about how to defend one’s ideals. The problem is that the whole edifice of thought is based on the assumption that Jews are the obstacle to a society’s ideals, and need to be taken down.”
Horn criticized the University’s response to October 7, expressing frustration that few of the advisory group’s suggestions have been adopted. “The only ones the University has tried to adopt so far are the ones that ignore actual Jews,” she said, referring to time, place, and manner protest policies. “No one is arguing against free speech,” she said. “Students can absolutely scream whatever racist things they want. But this avoids the deeper question: Why is Harvard full of screaming racists?” (The short-lived advisory group was succeeded by the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, organized in January by President Alan M. Garber. In June, its preliminary report found that anti-Israel bias was present at Harvard and affirmed that neither antisemitism nor anti-Israel bias has a “place within the Harvard community.” The group is expected to report more extensively this fall.)
The University’s Middle East education, she argued, is insufficient. Referring to HJAA’s audit, she said that the Center for Middle East Studies has hosted “more events about Gaza and the West Bank than about Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt combined,” but that “almost none of those events have mentioned Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years.” Students, she continued, “have to dig really, really deep to find a class or event that even mentions that Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies of Iran, or that Israel is actually fighting a multifront war against Iran.”
Although the fall term has begun quietly, Israel’s recent strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and the approaching anniversary of the terror attack that started the war may give rise to a new round of campus demonstrations.
Despite the anger toward Harvard’s administration and despair about antisemitism expressed at the summit and in HJAA’s report, some speakers retained a hopeful outlook. “Since October 7,” said Michael Oved ’25, “Shabbat dinners have been overflowing….Holidays have seen unprecedented attendance. Speakers, events, rallies, programming: all have been filled to the brim.” Throughout a challenging year, Jewish Harvard affiliates continue to seek out others, including at Sunday’s summit. It will be important to see whether the Task Force report (and a companion one from the task force addressing bias against Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs also due this fall), is received by this constituency, and others, with skepticism and hostility, or as steps forward for the University community.
