“I was raised with two stories about Harvard, both of which I believe to be true,” said Porter University Professor Noah Feldman on Thursday morning, at the start of an all-day symposium on antisemitism and universities at Harvard’s Rubenstein Treehouse conference center in Allston. One, Feldman explained, was that Harvard was a place where antisemitism had “played a meaningful role,” including during former President A. Lawrence Lowell’s efforts in the 1920s to limit the number of Jews on campus.
The other was that the University had become “a place of increasing prominence, possibility, and openness for Jews,” especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Feldman’s parents met as Harvard students in the 1960s and got married at Harvard Hillel; Feldman had his bar mitzvah there and went on to graduate from the College in 1992.
Those two competing narratives have made it challenging “to come to terms with changing circumstances in the world and on campus and their effects on Jewish experience here,” said Feldman.
Thursday’s event, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, and the Office of the President and Provost, comes as antisemitism is rising globally on both the political left and right, and universities, including Harvard, have become a particular focus. In March, the Trump administration, as part of its broad campaign against the University, sued Harvard for civil rights violations, alleging it had failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from hostility and harassment following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel in 2023. Last year, the University settled a pair of lawsuits over antisemitic incidents on campus. In the wake of intense criticism of its handling of antisemitism, and based on recommendations from a task force on antisemitism convened by the president’s office, Harvard has taken a number of steps to shift the climate on campus.
The symposium’s speakers offered a mix of personal experience and historical analysis to explore questions of invisibility and alienation, and the sense that many Jews on university campuses have of being “in” a place but not “of” it. James Loeffler ’96, who teaches modern Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University, recalled certain moments when he felt “a sense of belonging and not belonging” at Harvard, particularly when he supported a student push for an ethnic studies concentration at the University. His fellow activists, he explained, included him in their campaign, but it became clear during a meeting with a University administrator that they also saw Jews at Harvard as separate from other ethnic minorities, viewed narrowly through the lens of religion or social privilege, and not considered fully a part of the same community as other minorities.
In 2017, Loeffler was on the faculty at the University of Virginia when white nationalists marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, shouting, “Jews will not replace us,” among other slogans. “What was also shocking to me,” Loeffler said, “was the silence afterwards about antisemitism and its place in what was happening.” The first public statement from the university president’s office denounced the “racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, misogynistic chants,” Loeffler recalled, but “did not mention Jews or antisemitism.” Public statements from 25 other universities, he added, made the same omission.
On the American right, Loeffler added, “the silence was also deafening,” particularly about “what it meant to see the far right erupt in this way. The most famous and infamous presidential statement came from President Trump, in which he could not bring himself to condemn the alt-right without equivocation, asserting instead that there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’ And his administration—even to the pain and discomfort and critique of Jewish officials in it—shrugged off any meaningful response to Charlottesville.”
More recently, Loeffler sees a shift that risks another kind of danger: “Fighting antisemitism became a policy…to the point of elevating it to a primary concern while simultaneously downgrading other hatreds and other concerns,” such as racism and sexism, he said. This action has instrumentalized antisemitism in a way that “reduced its credibility in the eyes of parts of society,” Loeffler argued, and undermined the campaign to fight violence and prejudice against Jews.
Yet Loeffler sees universities as a place where answers will be found—and where “reckoning with Jewishness” can be done. “The university is unfinished,” he said, “but the work of fearless inquiry, respect for difference, the pursuit of truth that unites rather than divides, that work continues.”
Dartmouth Jewish studies professor (and Harvard visiting professor) Susannah Heschel, M.T.S. ’76, also spoke about the perilous position for Jewish scholars and students of both belonging and not belonging. Heschel’s father came to the United States in 1940 as a refugee scholar from Germany, and she sees parallels between the current moment in American universities and nineteenth-century German universities, which were marked by what she called a profound “ambivalence” about Jews at the same time that Jewish studies had become a robust and growing field.
Arieh Saposnik, a historian and Jewish studies scholar who teaches at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, talked about Jews’ long experience of expulsion and exile, and the often vitriolic hostility to Jewish efforts to claim a place for themselves, whether in Europe or Israel.
Saposnik drew connections between that history and the campus demonstrations and public discussions sparked by Israel’s war in Gaza. Protest slogans like “From the river to the sea” as well as anti-Zionist critiques—both inside and outside the academy—that frame Israel as a settler colonial country, recapitulate that old hostility, Saposnik argued. They “assume the status of Jews as unequivocally foreign invaders who have no interest in Palestine that is in any way different from the interests of European imperial powers in the territories they captured,” he said, and ignore the “ways in which many Jews have understood their place in the world and their sense of belonging.”
Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the humanities, also saw a connection between some of the rhetoric at campus protests and longstanding antisemitic imagery. He displayed a photograph of a poster that was briefly hung up at Harvard’s encampment before being taken down amid criticism. It depicted President Alan Garber, who is Jewish, with horns and a tail, sitting on a toilet; the poster’s words read, “Alan Garbage funds genocide.” Quite possibly, Greenblatt said, the person who made the poster did not know about the ancient tropes linking Jews with “Satan, excrement, and the murder of innocents.” To Greenblatt, that made the poster even more striking, as if “a hidden pathogen” had shown itself again.
A scholar of English literature, Greenblatt is familiar with all those tropes. In his talk, he described some of his early encounters with them, in a first-year literature course at Yale in 1961. Reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, and other canonical authors, Greenblatt was at first shocked to find passages of sometimes virulent antisemitism. Those passages, he said, went unremarked on by his professor, whom Greenblatt said he later realized was likely hiding the fact that he himself was Jewish.
In the end, Greenblatt made what he called a “momentous” choice: “I would not avert my eyes from the spectacle of moral failure and narrowness, even in figures like Shakespeare, but I would not allow those things to turn me away from what I had come to love,” he said. “Instead, insofar as I possibly could, I would make the whole vast, messy enterprise of English literature my possession.”
Those kinds of choices still confront Jewish scholars and students. Summing up the day’s presentations, Beren professor of government Eric Nelson spoke about the need to balance competing realities and experiences. “Part of what makes this a vexing and difficult subject,” he said, is that “one can look around and see Jews as overrepresented, as coming from fancy schools, and as anything but a kind of oppressed minority.”
Nelson, too, went to “fancy schools,” he said, including Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1999. “And yet, my mother was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and most of my family died in the Holocaust.” He grew up among the survivors. “And so, there’s that neither-here-nor-thereness of being, in a very personal sense,” he said, “very fortunate and privileged by any measure, but very close to a world in which none of that would have been remotely possible.”
