At Harvard University, the rabbi at a menorah lighting ceremony was unusually blunt.
“It pains me to say, unfortunately, that Jew hatred and anti-Semitism thrive on this campus,” Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said Wednesday.
“Twenty-six years I gave my life to this community,” he said. “I’ve never felt so alone.”
Just the night before, he told the gathering, a woman walking through the Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony shouted that the Holocaust was fake. When Harvard Chabad hosted a screening of an Israeli military film featuring footage of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, he said campus police advised him to provide security for his family. Even the giant menorah, prominently displayed in Harvard Yard, was packed every night, he said, as it had been in previous years to protect it from vandalism.
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, stood nearby, waiting to light a candle. As the rabbi spoke, she looked straight ahead, looking hurt.
The uproar over the testimony of Dr. Gay in Congress — over whether students would be punished for calling for the genocide of the Jews — has revealed the deep concern, 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 the campus. Protesters disrupted lectures, shouting through bullhorns that the war on Gaza was genocide. Anti-Semitic messages have been posted on social media. Some students decided to test their Zionist beliefs in the classroom and in the residence hall. Some have traded their kippas, or skullcaps, for baseball caps.
For students feeling increasingly isolated, it didn’t help that many of their Jewish peers had joined the pro-Palestinian protests.
The winter semester ended with more intensity. The Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing board, deliberated for hours Monday before deciding to resist calls to force Dr. Gay.
The day before, as students prepared for final exams, pro-Palestinian student groups staged a large, silent demonstration at Widener Library, occupying a reading room. Lines of protesters, many wearing kaffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf, sat at tables with open laptops, all displaying the same pamphlet: “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 asked Dr. Gay and the university to reset for the new year. Something must be done urgently, they said, to correct the perception that the institution had turned its back on Jews.
The issue is more than the Israel-Hamas war. Jews, who had high admission rates to the Ivy League, are dwindling in numbers. At Harvard, the decline has been particularly sharp, falling to less than 10 percent of the student body today from about 20 percent a generation ago, according to estimates by outside scholars and surveys of the student body, including one conducted by The Harvard Crimson. the student newspaper.
These figures reminded some graduates 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 aimed at limiting their admission, which lasted for decades. The percentage of Jewish students dropped to about 10 to 15 percent of the total student body, according to Marcia Graham Synnott, whose book “The Half-Opened Door” examined discrimination at the Ivy League.
This legacy has helped fuel concern about current campus politics.
“Seeing the newly resurgent anti-Semitism in this context of relatively recent, wonderful acceptance is a very, very painful thing for many Jews,” said Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who has studied the Jewish experience at the Ivy League. “We thought these were institutions that were deeply welcoming and were going to remain deeply welcoming.”
Critics of Dr Gay said she was slow to condemn the Hamas attacks. Nor, in their view, was she quick enough to speak out against pro-Palestinian student groups who said they held Israel “entirely responsible for all the violence that is unfolding” in the conflict.
In response, a Harvard spokesman on Saturday pointed to half a dozen events on campus where Dr. Gay had joined Jewish students since Oct. 7, and referred to her earlier statement announcing the creation of an anti-Semitism advisory group. The group, Dr Gay said, would aim to “intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology”.
Confidence nearly collapsed after the December 5th congressional hearing, when Dr. Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT. and Elizabeth Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, appeared to dodge questions about disciplining students if they called for the genocide of the Jews. Ms Magill resigned as chairman four days later.
Dr. Gay apologized for her testimony. “When words amplify heartbreak and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but sadness,” he told the Harvard Crimson.
He must still lead a deeply divided campus and continue to try to balance the freedom of protest with the fears of many Jews, who chant some of the slogans used by pro-Palestinian protesters — such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalization of the intifada” — they are antisemitic and call for violence against them.
But Ari Cohn, 20, a Jewish sophomore from Toronto, said that while she “believes in the state of Israel,” she did not see the pro-Palestinian movement at Harvard as a threat.
“It’s important to understand when people call intifada to ask, ‘What do they mean by that?’ he said. “We all use different definitions of the same word. Giving my peers, my faculty and my community the benefit of the doubt is really important.”
For other students, the campus has become a foreign place.
“After Oct. 7, there was a very tangible, palpable change,” said Shabbos Kestenbaum, an Orthodox Jew and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School.
He said his classmates – “who I’m literally sitting next to” – have posted messages on social media “expressly praising Hamas, who deny the rape and kidnapping of Israeli women”.
He added, “I definitely don’t feel comfortable, and I wouldn’t say welcome, in a lot of places around campus.”
As criticism mounted, Dr Gay announced the Anti-Semitism Advisory Group.
There has already been apostasy. Following Dr. Gay’s testimony to Congress, Rabbi David Wolfe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned from the committee.
In an interview after the Harvard company announced its support for Dr. Gay, he said he found her “smart, thoughtful, frankly curious.” But he said he resigned 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 way I would like it to,” he added.
In response to his resignation, Dr Gay said she was “committed to ensuring that no member of our Jewish community faces this hatred in any form”.
Some resisted the description of a campus rife with anti-Semitism.
Noah Feldman, a legal scholar and director of the Jewish and Israeli Law Program, said he had “never” experienced anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus, even during his years as an observant Jew who regularly wore a kippah.
How to proceed in such an impasse? Rabbi Getzel Davis, campus rabbi at the Harvard Hillel chapter; he said practical things had to be done.
He noted that until the recent changes instituted by Dr. Gay, the university’s various diversity programs had not made Jews central to their work.
But now students who report incidents of bias are having trouble navigating Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy — so much so that Hillel hired a part-time staff member to help with the process.
Rabbi Davis said the university should do a better job enforcing its rules against hate speech and acts. 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.
This may help some students.
Maya Bodnick, 19, a Harvard sophomore from Atherton, Calif., said she was wary of sharing her liberal Zionist views on campus because many on the left simply weren’t open to her perspective. Many of these students, he said, categorized Jews as oppressors, failing to recognize their suffering at the hands of others for millennia.
“It was very disappointing,” he said. “I worry that my peers have a very distorted understanding of Judaism and anti-Semitism.”
