Nearly 60 percent of Jewish students at Harvard said they had experienced “discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to [their] views on current events,” according to the 311-page report. The report said that 73 percent of Jewish students expressed discomfort sharing their political opinions, while 75 percent believed there was an “academic or professional penalty” for expressing their views at Harvard.
Jewish students also said they had concealed their identity from classmates and been ghosted by longtime friends for expressing sympathy for Israel—or for appearing in Instagram posts with those who did. Jewish students at Harvard also reported choosing to “avoid certain degree programs, classes, and panel discussions sponsored by various departments and centers at Harvard because of antisemitism.”
The antisemitism report was based on what Harvard described as 50 “listening sessions” with a total of about 500 students, faculty, and staff, as well as 2,295 responses to an online survey, including 477 students, faculty, and staff who identified themselves as Jewish.
Harvard’s antisemitism task force had originally said it would publish its findings in the “early fall” of 2024. On April 19, Trump officials demanded that they be sent any reports written by the task force, any drafts of those reports, and the names of anyone involved in “preparing and editing the report,” The Free Press reported exclusively.
Harvard is suing the Trump administration to halt a $2.2 billion funding freeze after the university rejected demands for sweeping changes in governance, hiring, and admissions. It is the biggest clash in a growing showdown over academic freedom and federal funding of higher education.
The report was released on the same day as a separate, 222-page Harvard report on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias. That report cited a faculty member who said, “The idea of ‘antisemitism’ has been expanded so much that anything that even remotely expresses concern about the calamity that’s facing Palestinians is prohibited at Harvard.”
Ruth Wisse, a former Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, said that releasing the two reports at the same time revealed what Harvard really thinks about its antisemitism problem: It doesn’t have one.
“If they don’t see the two reports as a contrast, not a similarity, if they don’t see that, then what?” she said. “It is so preposterous to do these two reports as if there’s some kind of equivalency.”
In a letter released with the two reports, Harvard president Alan Garber said, “Harvard cannot—and will not—abide bigotry.” Harvard will launch an antisemitism research project, support a historical analysis of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at Harvard, and accelerate an effort “to promote and support viewpoint diversity,” among other changes, Garber said.
Examples of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias cited by Harvard include:
At Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a 2022 course titled Settler Colonial Determinants on Health required students to read material arguing that “Zionism manipulated Judaism as a religion to reinterpret history and redefine Jewishness in terms of ethnic belonging.”
At Harvard Medical School’s admitted students day, one student was told by another student that “Zionists are not welcome at HMS.”
In a transcript of a teach-in about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on October 23, 2023, settler colonial appeared in the transcript three times, apartheid appeared four times, and genocide appeared 13 times. Hostage did not appear even once. The event’s organizers included Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
At Harvard Divinity School, an Israeli doctoral student said that a professor began a class about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by telling students that “the discourse is saturated with the Israeli narrative” and that she had “decided, with a heavy heart, to remove Israeli sources from the syllabus.”
Since the October 7 attack against Israel, one student reported hearing people “mutter under their breath, ‘fucking Zionist.’ I don’t even know if I’m a Zionist. But I’m a Jew and I’ve learned that that is enough to make me no longer worthy of their friendship or even basic kindness at school.”
During listening sessions with the antisemitism task force, Jewish students spoke about Harvard-run “privilege trainings where they were told that they were deemed to be privileged not only by dint of being identified as White but also because of their Jewishness, which allegedly endowed them with an even higher level of privilege.”
Faculty in some parts of Harvard expressed fear that their colleagues would not vote to appoint a Zionist or an Israeli to a faculty position in their departments.
Students reported that when they voiced concerns about bias at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, they were asked: “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?”
Harvard’s report also details how antisemitism and anti-Israel bias shaped the social lives of Jewish and Israeli students, who described a culture of retribution and silence:
In response to a friend who knew two people who were killed at the Nova music festival, one student reported a close friend said, “I mean, I guess that sucks, but what did they expect?” Another person asked: “Do you believe in decolonization in theory or in practice?”
An Israeli graduate student reported that one of his friends was told that it would “hurt his career to associate with a Zionist and to be publicly associated with a Zionist.” The student reported that his friend “posted a picture of us studying together on Instagram and people attacked him for being with me. I never even did pro-Israel things—I just existed [as an Israeli and a Jew].”
After a student defended an Israeli student’s right to study on campus, they “noticed an uncomfortable distance between myself and all 13 of my friends. Invitations to hang out stopped, texts were not replied to, and one person had blocked me on Instagram.” The student also noted that his friends labeled him a Zionist and “made clear that they were not willing to meet with me or speak with me at all for that reason.”
Examples of anti-Muslim bias cited by Harvard include:
Unfair disciplinary action against pro-Palestinian students, “including suspensions and threats of expulsion, for their participation in protests and a notable encampment. These measures were perceived as selectively enforced, silencing pro-Palestinian voices and escalating tensions between students and the administration.”
Compared with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, “counter-protesters” or those “engaged in pro-Israeli or pro-Zionist activity faced less, if any, disciplinary action for disruption.”
One student said that “there is a rampant Palestine exception to free speech at Harvard. Double standards in how people who are advocating for Palestine are silenced, reprimanded, vilified in a way others aren’t currently or historically.”
A first-year Arab student reported that he was verbally harassed while walking down a street near campus by a woman holding a sign that said “Islam is dangerous.” The student said he was called “terrorist,” “baby-killer,” and “towelhead” for wearing a keffiyeh.
Some of the recommendations in the two reports seem contradictory when read side by side.
For example, the antisemitism report said that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism“will be used in applying Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying (NDAB)” policies. The anti-Muslim bias report said the same IHRA definition has “raised grave concerns and furthered their sense of being silenced,” referring to Harvard’s Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian community.
“The worry expressed in the community is that the IHRA definition and the examples provided alongside it, will conflate and equate protesting against Israel and its policies as antisemitism,” the anti-Muslim bias report added.
Meanwhile, the antisemitism report suggests improving “the incentives that Harvard’s faculties have to monitor academic programs,” while the anti-Muslim bias report calls for academic-freedom protections, especially in the curriculum.
Rabbi David Wolpe, who spent a year as a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, said that the antisemitism report details numerous “procedural fixes, but I’m not sure that it is possible to bring greater ideological harmony. I’m not sure that there’s anything that the report could have done to do [achieve] that.”
He said he resents that “the people who actually did the demonstrating, who took over Harvard Yard, who obstructed classes, who yelled at protests” now are “saying, ‘Oh, but we feel unsafe.’ ”
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