One of the six Jewish Harvard students who is suing the university for discrimination said it was their “last recourse” after they faced antisemitism for months following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the university’s “unwillingness… to intervene and protect us.”
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School student — the only one named in the federal discrimination lawsuit, told The Post how he was confronted one day on his way to class by anti-Israel demonstrators calling to “globally expand the intifada.”
The intifada refers to Palestinian uprisings, specifically those that ran between 1987 and 1993 and from 2000 to about 2005, which left thousands dead.
Kestenbaum said he was also forced to change where he studies for his classes because Weidner Hall, the Ivy League’s flagship library, was overrun by protesters.
Other Jewish students, Kestenbaum said, were physically accosted on campus.
He now says the antisemitism problems at the university are “systemic,” claiming there is a “clear double standard when it comes to the treatment of minorities and Jewish students.”
“We tried countless times getting the administration, [Harvard] Corporation, [former President Claudine] Gay, deans and others to help us, but to no avail,” Kestenbaum told The Post, adding that the lawsuit will now hold “Harvard to account.”
“Hopefully it will create fundamental transformations,” he said.
According to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Boston federal court, Harvard has allowed students and faculty accused of engaging in antisemitic acts to remain on campus — and once even plied a mob of anti-Israel demonstrators “with burritos and candy.”
It claims: “Harvard selectively enforces its policies to avoid protecting Jewish students from harassment, hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda, and ignores Jewish students’ pleas for protection.”
The lawsuit also argues that the university “permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews, and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world.
“Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in ‘sizeism,’ ‘fatphobia,’ ‘racism,’ ‘transphobia’ or other disfavored behavior.”
It further claims that Harvard officials have “been aware of its antisemitism for years, but its response has been, to say the least, clearly unreasonable and totally unacceptable in not just tolerating, but enabling antisemitism.”
As a result, Kestenbaum said Jewish students fear returning to campus for the spring semester in two weeks because nothing has changed at the university.
Meanwhile, Harvard is actively promoting a summer health program for its students at a university in the West Bank that called for “glory to the martyrs” in a social media post following Hamas’ brutal terror attack.
The Palestine Social Medicine Course at Birzeit University “is designed to introduce students to the social, structural, political and historical aspects that determine Palestinian health beyond the biological basis of disease,” according to the program’s website.
Over the course of the three-week program, students would hear from doctors, academics and activists on topics including “Settler colonialism and its manifestations in Palestine” and “Health and racism.”
The Post has reached out to Harvard for comment.
A spokesperson for Harvard told the Daily Wire the course it is offering was co-developed by the World Health Organization.
The spokesperson also said Birzeit “is a public institution governed by an autonomous Board of Trustees with no political, religious or sectarian affiliation” — despite the university describing itself on its website as a “thorn on the side of the occupation” that is “transforming Palestinian higher education through its impact on community awareness, culture and resistance.”
The students suing Harvard are now calling for any deans, administrators, professors and other employees who are “responsible for antisemitic discrimination and abuse, whether they engage in it or permit it” to be fired, and the suspension or expulsion of any student engaged in antisemitism.
They are also demanding that the university decline and return any donations “implicitly or explicitly conditioned on the hiring or promotion of professors who espouse antisemitism or the inclusion of antisemitic coursework or curricula,” and add antisemitism training for Harvard community members.
Additionally, the students are seeking damages “for lost or diminished educational opportunities.”
“We are not asking for special treatment under the law,” Kestenbaum insisted, “we’re asking for equal treatment under the law.”