He is suing his alma mater for permitting and perpetuating antisemitism on campus, a Harvard University graduate said Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention.
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a first-generation American and Orthodox Jew, told delegates from the convention stage that after Hamas’ brutal terrorist attacks Oct. 7 inside Israel, he placed 1,200 Israeli and American flags on Harvard’s campus in honor of the dead.
The flags “were all vandalized within 24 hours,” his peers harassed him for being a Jew, and he received death threats online, Kestenbaum, 25, said in Milwaukee as one of the “everyday Americans” featured each night at the GOP convention.
“Students and professors [at Harvard] have openly called for new, Hamas-style attacks against the United States,” he said.
It was “perhaps most damning,” Kestenbaum said, that Harvard refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks “when Hamas terrorists butchered 45 American citizens” and “took 12 Americans hostage,” he said.
Having voted once before for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president, the Harvard graduate said, he now sees how the radical Left has abandoned both the Jewish people and most Americans.
Kestenbaum said the Democratic Party he registered to vote for on his 18th birthday “has become ideologically poisoned,” and that poison is contaminating too many American students.
He said he went to Harvard to study religion—the foundation of Western civilization—but found “not theology, but a contempt for it.” He said he was in an environment that was “anti-Western,” “anti-American,” and “antisemitic.”
His problem with Harvard “is not its liberalism, but its illiberalism” and the fact that Harvard students “are taught not how to think, but what to think,” Kestenbaum told the crowd in Fiserv Forum.
He said that “far-left, antisemitic extremism has no virtue, and the radicalism on our campuses and on our streets has no moral legitimacy.”
Kestenbaum proclaimed his support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his “policies to expel foreign students who violate our laws, harass our Jewish classmates, and desecrate our freedoms.”
Kestenbaum concluded his speech by encouraging Americans to elect a president who understands that Jews never will abandon the United States “because Jewish values are American values and American values are Jewish values.”