Feeling lonely and alienated, many Jews at Harvard wonder what’s next
At Harvard University, the rabbi was unusually blunt during a menorah lighting ceremony.
“It saddens me to say that hatred of Jews and anti-Semitism is rampant on this campus,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said Wednesday.
“For twenty-six years I have given my life to this community,” he said. “I’ve never felt so alone.”
The night before, he told the gathering, a woman walking past the Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony shouted that the Holocaust was fake. When Harvard Chabad hosted a screening of an Israeli military film showing footage of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, he said campus police advised him to arrange security for his family. Even the giant menorah, prominently displayed in Harvard Yard, was put away each night, he said, to protect it from vandalism.
Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, stood nearby, waiting to light a candle. As the rabbi spoke, she stared straight ahead with a look of shock.
The fuss over Dr.’s testimony Gay in Congress – over whether students would be punished for calling for the genocide of Jews – has exposed the deep fear, anger and alienation of many Harvard Jewish students, alumni and religious leaders.
In interviews, many Jewish members of the Harvard community described their growing alienation from campus. Protesters have disrupted lectures and shouted through megaphones that the war in Gaza was a genocide. Anti-Semitic messages have been posted on social media. Some students have decided to examine their Zionist beliefs in the classroom and in the residence hall. Some have traded their yarmulkes or skullcaps for baseball hats.
For students feeling increasingly isolated, it didn’t help that many of their Jewish peers had joined the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The fall semester ended with more excitement. The Harvard Corporation, the school’s board of directors, deliberated for hours on Monday before deciding to resist calls for Dr. Gay to enforce.
The day before, as students prepared for final exams, pro-Palestinian student groups staged a large, silent demonstration in the Widener Library, in a reading room. Rows of protesters, many wearing kaffiyehs and the Palestinian scarf, sat at tables with open laptops, all with the same leaflet: “No normality during genocide. Justice for Palestine.”
After one of the most difficult weeks in the university’s recent history, and as the campus emptied for the holidays, some Jews in the Harvard community called Dr. Gay and the university to reset for the new year. Something urgently needs to be done, they said, to restore the perception that the institution had turned its back on Jews.
The issue is about more than the war between Israel and Hamas. The number of Jews, who have had high admission rates into the Ivy League, is declining. At Harvard, the decline has been particularly pronounced, from about 20 percent a generation ago to less than 10 percent of the student population today, according to estimates from outside scholars and surveys of the student population, including one performed by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
These numbers reminded some alumni of the university’s history of bias against Jewish applicants. In the 1920s, Harvard’s Jewish population made up about a quarter of the student body. But then the school instituted quotas to limit their admissions, which lasted for decades. The percentage of Jewish students dropped to roughly 10 to 15 percent of all students, according to Marcia Graham Synnott, whose book “The Half-Opened Door” examined discrimination in the Ivy League.
That legacy helped fuel unease about current campus politics.
“Seeing a new emergence of anti-Semitism against this backdrop of fairly recent, beautiful acceptance is a very, very painful thing for many Jews,” said Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who has studied the Jewish experience in the Ivy League. “We thought these were institutions that were very welcoming and would continue to be so.”
The critics of Dr. Gay said she was slow to condemn the Hamas attacks. Nor, in their view, had she been quick enough to speak out against pro-Palestinian student groups who said they held Israel “fully responsible for all the unfolding violence” in the conflict.
In response, a Harvard spokesperson on Saturday pointed to six events on campus where Dr. Gay had joined Jewish students since Oct. 7, and he referred to her earlier statement announcing the creation of an advisory group on anti-Semitism. The group, said Dr. Gay, would aim to “intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology.”
Confidence almost completely disappeared after the December 5 Congressional hearing, when Dr. Gay; Sally Kornbluth, MIT president; and Elizabeth Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, appeared to dodge questions about disciplining students when they called for the genocide of Jews. Ms Magill resigned as president four days later.
Dr. Gay apologized for her testimony. “When words magnify the sadness and pain, I don’t know how you can feel anything other than regret,” she told The Harvard Crimson.
She must still lead a deeply divided campus and continue to try to balance the freedom to protest with the fears of many Jews, who voice certain slogans used by pro-Palestinian demonstrators – such as “from the river to the sea’ and ‘globalizing the intifada’. ‘ – are anti-Semitic and call for violence against them.
But Ari Kohn, 20, a Jewish second-year student from Toronto, said that while she “believes in the state of Israel,” she has not found the pro-Palestinian movement at Harvard to be threatening.
“It’s important to understand when people call for the Intifada and ask, ‘What do they mean by that?’” she said. “We all use different definitions of the same word. It is very important to give my colleagues, my faculty and my community the benefit of the doubt.”
For other students, the campus has become a strange place.
“After October 7, there was a very palpable, tangible change,” said Shabbos Kestenbaum, an Orthodox Jew and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School.
He said his classmates — “who I am literally sitting next to” — have published posts on their social media “explicitly praising Hamas, denying the rape and kidnapping of Israeli women.”
He added, “I certainly don’t feel comfortable, and I wouldn’t even say welcome, in a lot of spaces on campus.”
As criticism mounted, Dr. Gay appoints the advisory group to combat anti-Semitism.
An apostasy has already occurred. After Dr.’s testimony Gay in Congress, Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned from the committee.
In an interview after the Harvard Corporation announced its support for Dr. Gay announced, he said he found her “smart, thoughtful and genuinely curious.” But he said he quit because anti-Semitism at Harvard was getting worse and he wasn’t convinced the committee would make a difference.
“I remain hopeful – but not convinced – that Harvard will change in the ways I would like it to,” he added.
Commenting on his resignation, Dr. Gay that she was “determined to ensure that no member of our Jewish community faces this hatred in any form.”
Some have taken issue with the description of a campus rife with anti-Semitism.
Noah Feldman, a legal scholar and director of a program on Jewish and Israeli law, said he had “never” experienced anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus, even during the years when he regularly wore a yarmulke as an observant Jew.
How to move forward in such a stalemate? Rabbi Getzel Davis of the Harvard Hillel Chapter said that practical things had to be done.
He noted that the university’s various diversity programs, until recent changes by Dr. Gay, had not made the Jews the center of their work.
But now, students who report biases have difficulty navigating Harvard’s diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy — so much so that Hillel hired a part-time employee to help with the process.
Rabbi Davis said the university should better enforce its own rules against hate speech and actions. He would like to see more events for interfaith reflection and exchange. And he said the university should educate students about the history of anti-Semitism.
That might help some students.
Maya Bodnick, 19, a Harvard sophomore from Atherton, California, said she was cautious about sharing her liberal Zionist views on campus because many on the left were simply not open to her perspective. Many of these students, she said, categorized Jews as oppressors, without acknowledging their suffering at the hands of others for thousands of years.
“It’s been very disappointing,” she said. “I’m afraid that my peers have a very distorted view of Judaism and anti-Semitism.”