Harassment against Jewish students at Harvard University has been a serious obstacle to students’ ability to engage in academic or social pursuits, the university’s task force on antisemitism reported this week after performing an investigation into Harvard’s anti-Israel bias.
When one Jewish student, a fellowship recipient, was asked to share their story at a conference, they “planned to describe how their experiences as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors inspired their career goals,” the report said. The student shared their remarks with the forum’s student organizers beforehand, describing how their grandfather “survived the Holocaust by migrating to the then-British Mandate of Palestine, and ultimately helped tens of thousands of others find refuge in territory that is now part of the modern State of Israel.”
The Jewish student was told that they could “not mention my grandfather’s rescue missions in my speech, because his rescue missions involve Israel,” the report said. “Nowhere does my speech mention the current war or Zionism. It is strictly about the Holocaust. [The two student organizers] told me that my family’s Holocaust narrative is not ‘tasteful’ and . . . I asked ‘what is not tasteful?’ [One of the students] laughed in my face and said, ‘oh my God.'”
Such stories, of Holocaust erasure masquerading as respect for “inclusivity,” were common in the task force’s report. The “ease with which ‘anti-Zionism’ slips into what is effectively antisemitism” was a hallmark finding in the investigation, the task force reported.
Pro-Palestinian Harvard students, staff, and faculty, for example, sent around an antisemitic cartoon in February 2024 that depicted “a white hand with a Jewish star holding a noose around the heads of a Black man (Muhammad Ali) and an Arab man (Gamal Abdel Nasser).” The cartoon originated out of the 1960s black student activism movement and was condemned as antisemitic decades ago — pro-Palestinians at Harvard repurposed the cartoon on social media after Hamas’s terror attack on October 7, 2023.
Israel is an “intensely politicized” topic, students told the task force, and some Jewish students choose to hide their identities on campus as a result, a faculty member said. One student took a leave of absence from Harvard after “chants from the protests shattered their sense of safety.” Pro-Palestinian activists bullied a graduate student because he was Israeli. An Israeli student’s non-Jewish friend was bullied for being friends with a Jew.
“The social exclusion and shunning of Israeli students lies at the core of the Harvard experience for many. From my first days on campus, I noticed students in pre-orientation avoiding conversation with me, simply out of fear of being associated with an Israeli,” one student told the task force.
“My friend has been told that others would not attend social gatherings if I was present, as they couldn’t risk the social consequences of being seen with an Israeli,” the student added. “Students have also chosen not to join an organization I led simply because I served in the IDF . . . Israeli students at Harvard are not merely subjected to implicit bias but instead face explicit, deliberate discrimination.”
At Harvard, activists try to “inject discussion of the Palestinian cause wherever possible,” including at a first-year convocation program where activists discussed the “question of Palestine”; at a student-led conference where activists gave students a “virtual tote bag” with an “action toolkit” that gave advice on how to support Palestinian activism; in classes that ordinarily had no connection to political issues in the Middle East; and during Harvard-run privilege trainings that taught students that their Jewishness made them a privileged class.
The conceptual framework undergirding Harvard’s pro-Palestinian activism is the idea that “Israel is not a sovereign state so much as a ‘settler colony’ created and sustained by Western colonial powers and that, for all its military strength, can be broken and dismembered,” the task force identified. The task force’s analysis was based on a comprehensive review of how, with what language, and when pro-Palestinian activists responded to the October 7 attack — though the force was adamant Harvard’s antisemitism problem arose decades before 2023.
For example, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, a student group, said on October 8, 2024, that “[Israel] is a genocidal regime [that] has exposed itself as an illegitimate state with no concern for life, its very foundation being the dehumanization and subjugation of Palestinians, aided and abetted by our own government’s and University’s callous disregard for Palestinian life … Make no mistake: The Zionist entity is crumbling and grasping for regional war as its only path towards survival.”
One of the earliest examples of harassment came hours after the October 7 attack, when the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), drafted a statement supported by 33 other student organizations that said “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … The apartheid regime is the only one to blame … We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
Although Harvard leadership “tried to manage the campus turmoil,” they were ultimately unsuccessful. After October 7, Harvard students, staff, and faculty organized and participated in 70 campus protests. Jewish students reported feeling that they “have lived in an increasingly hostile atmosphere in their residences, classes, organizations, and clubs, as well as in the public spaces of Harvard Yard and the Science Center Plaza.”
Students occupied University Hall in November 2023, calling on the university to “globalize the intifada.” When students remained in the building overnight, a faculty dean “brought them burritos for dinner,” the report said.
Harvard attracted national attention for its failure to address campus antisemitism. Then-President Claudine Gay was called to testify before Congress, where she couldn’t say for sure if activists’ calls for genocide against Israel violated Harvard’s code of conduct. Gay resigned soon after her hearing.