Jewish students have filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that the institution has permitted a rise in antisemitism on its campus that has effectively turned it into a “bastion” of such behavior. The complaint, lodged on Wednesday night, accuses the university of selectively applying its anti-discrimination policies, failing to shield Jewish students from harassment, and employing professors who endorse anti-Jewish violence and disseminate antisemitic propaganda.

Among the plaintiffs in the Harvard lawsuit are Alexander Kestenbaum, a master’s degree candidate at Harvard Divinity School, and five unnamed students from Harvard’s law and public health schools, along with the nonprofit organization Students Against Antisemitism. The students argue that Harvard’s justification of free expression does not excuse the university from its inaction in the face of growing antisemitic sentiments and actions.

The lawsuit notes that Harvard’s approach to these issues would not be tolerated if any other group besides Jews were targeted similarly, and suggests that Harvard would not remain passive if students and professors called for the destruction of any country other than Israel.

The lawsuit accuses the 388-year-old Harvard of violating federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination. It was filed eight days after Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned amid criticism over her handling of antisemitic attacks and incidents following the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7. Gay was also facing multiple plagiarism allegations – and it appears that the university did not force her out because of her stance on antisemitism, but rather because of the plagiarism allegations. .

Similar lawsuits have been filed against other institutions, including New York University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The lawsuit reads, in part:

Antisemitism at Harvard is hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1920s, it was official Harvard policy, implemented by President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and complete with
quotas on admissions to “diminish the Jews” and restore Harvard as a “Gentile” college. Over the last decade in particular, Harvard’s tolerance for, and enabling of, antisemitism has caused a surge in antisemitic hate and harassment culminating in the current intolerable anti-Jewish environment at Harvard following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack. Rather than discipline the perpetrators of antisemitism on campus, Harvard has enabled antisemitic abuse and harassment to intensify, forsaking its Jewish students to a hostile environment that deprives them of the educational experiences other students enjoy.

Over the past ten years, Harvard Jewish students have been subjected to numerous antisemitic incidents, of which the following are examples. On October 15, 2015, Harvard
College Palestine Solidarity Committee (“Harvard PSC”)—a Students for Justice in Palestine (“SJP”) affiliate and Harvard-recognized student group—hosted a “die-in” in front of Harvard Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, to protest an event featuring an Israeli soldier—according to Harvard Hillel Executive Director Jonah C. Steinberg, the “first time in my five years at Harvard that I have seen an effort to interfere with the event of another organization.” Although Harvard’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities proscribes such interference with campus activities, Harvard not only failed to discipline Harvard PSC, but its administrators and faculty members, including Dean Stephen Lassonde and Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations Director S. Allen Counter, attended and supported the violations. On November 5, 2015, three weeks after the die-in, a swastika was discovered on a Harvard Law classroom desk.

SJP—which has a recognized chapter at Harvard Divinity in addition to its affiliate, Harvard PSC—is one of the most vitriolic antisemitic networks on college campuses. SJP was founded by the chairman of American Muslims for Palestine (“AMP”), the leadership of which overlaps with the leadership of organizations that have been shut down by federal authorities, whose assets were frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department, or that were found liable in civil actions for providing material support to Hamas. SJP receives funding and training from AMP as well as from universities. SJP and its affiliates sponsor antisemitic events, host antisemitic speakers, and are leading organizers of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (“BDS”) campaigns against Israeli businesses. They use confrontational tactics to target Jewish students, including disrupting Jewish events, constructing mock “apartheid walls,” and disseminating antiJewish propaganda laced with falsehoods and blood libels. A recent study by the Network Contagion Research Institute, an information verification think tank, found the presence of SJP on campuses “significantly correlated with antisemitic activity.” Several leading universities, but not Harvard, have banned SJP and other such hate organizations from their campuses because of their harassment of Jewish students and support for Hamas.

Harvard PSC, SJP, and similar groups have harassed Jews on campus for years without consequence, exemplifying Harvard’s deliberate indifference to its severe antisemitism
problem. For example, on April 14, 2016, Harvard Law held an event featuring a speech by Tzipi Livni, a leading Israeli politician. At the event, a student SJP leader accosted Livni, asking her, echoing anti-Jewish stereotypes promoted by, among others, the Nazis: “How is that you are so smelly? It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.” Harvard did not discipline this student, but, instead, the then-dean of Harvard Law—while recognizing that “[m]any perceive [the incident] as anti-Semitic”—responded “that speech is and should be free,” notwithstanding that the conduct plainly violated policies including Harvard’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.

Groups like Harvard PSC are notoriously active during “Israeli Apartheid Week,” an annual world-wide program organized by virulent anti-Israel activists, which promotes BDS and targets Jewish students for harassment. During the April 2017 Israeli Apartheid Week, a Harvard dormitory was covered with mock detention notices targeting Jewish students for their alleged mistreatment of “Palestinians in Israel-Palestine.” The mock notices were orchestrated by Harvard PSC, and co-signed by Harvard Concilio Latino, Harvard Islamic Society, and Harvard Black Students Association. Jewish students reacted with shock and fear, but Harvard took no meaningful steps to discipline the groups responsible.

In October 2017, Harvard’s student-led Phillips Brooks House Association granted Nihad Awad its “Call of Service” Lecture and Award, designated for a “significant leader in public service” invited to speak at Harvard to inspire a “deeper engagement with critical social issues on campus and in the wider community”—notwithstanding that Awad had long been an open supporter of Hamas. Awad most recently said that he was “happy to see” the people of Gaza “break the siege . . . on October 7,” a statement the White House “condemn[ed]” as “shocking” and “antisemitic.”

On May 10, 2018, a swastika was discovered on a bulletin board at Harvard Public Health. Harvard took no disciplinary action in response and, a few months later, on December 2, 2018, a man intentionally toppled the menorah at Harvard Chabad, a center of Jewish life and faith. Harvard did not condemn or punish the perpetrator.

In March 2019, the Harvard Undergraduate Council held a meeting to vote on whether to award University funding to Harvard PSC for its upcoming Israeli Apartheid Week. During the meeting, Jewish students, in the words of Harvard Hillel’s president, were met “with angry interjections and unfounded accusations, as well as references to age-old tropes of prejudice and bigotry,” leaving her “shocked and disappointed by the way in which students were prevented from expressing their very real concerns.” The council voted to award the funding to Harvard PSC through the Open Harvard College grant, even though such grants are designed to fund student initiatives on “mental health, race, culture, [] faith relations, . . . harassment prevention, social spaces, and financial accessibility.” Harvard did not take disciplinary action against Harvard PSC, the council, or anyone who spewed antisemitism during the meeting, and it did not prevent the use of Harvard funds to support the antisemitic Israeli Apartheid Week.

On April 2, 2019, during Israeli Apartheid Week, Harvard PSC hosted several speakers, including Boston College Professor Yamila Hussein, who declared that Zionism is a “white supremacist, European, patriarchal, heterosexist, you name it, movement . . . when you read Zionism, it is white supremacy,” and Marc Lamont Hill, a former CNN commentator whom CNN fired for saying “from the river to the sea”—a genocidal call for the destruction of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants—and who is well known for his antisemitic views. Harvard allowed these influential speakers and audience members, on campus and at Harvard’s expense, to spew unchecked antisemitic vitriol. A member of the audience went so far as to demand discussion of the antisemitic trope that European Jews are not “real Jews” but Turkic Khazars, a nomadic European tribe, and that the Holocaust is a “myth.” Harvard took no disciplinary or remedial actions and did not condemn the event’s antisemitism.

In August 2020, Harvard PSC posted a graphic on Instagram calling Zionism, the belief in the right of Jews to self-determination in Israel, a “racist, sectarian, exclusionary, Jewish-supremacist political ideology,” using a phrase coined by Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

In May 2021, in response to a Jewish Israeli student’s post in a WhatsApp group, a Harvard Law student, Shayaan A. Essa, messaged, “We shed your blood with stones.” A group of Jewish Israeli students reported the incident to Dean Jessica Soban, Deputy Dean I. Glenn Cohen, and Assistant Dean-appointee Catherine Peshkin. In a meeting with the deans, the students explained how this violent threat left them “heartbroken and humiliated” and “no longer feel[ing] comfortable,” and asked the deans to denounce Essa’s call for violence. The deans refused to do so, instead downplaying the message and telling the students to ignore or respond directly to such harassment. Harvard chose to do the former, and Essa graduated without consequence. Two of the Jewish Israeli students, who are still enrolled at Harvard Law, report that they feel unsafe and have trouble focusing as a result of Harvard’s clearly unreasonable response to antisemitism, including Essa’s conduct, and the increased anti-Jewish hostility on campus following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack. One such student told his young children not to speak Hebrew outside their home, out of fear they will be targeted by antisemitic Harvard community members.

Also in May 2021, Harvard Hillel’s building was vandalized twice. Two masked individuals tied a Palestinian flag emblazoned with an anti-police slogan to Hillel’s door, after which Hillel’s windows were shattered. While Harvard purports to have investigated these incidents, nothing came of it—no one was arrested or disciplined.

In October 2021, the Harvard Law Program on Law & Society in the Muslim World and numerous Harvard student groups co-sponsored a pro-BDS event, “Law and Violence in Palestine,” at which a speaker was Mohammed El-Kurd, who notoriously espouses antisemitic views, has repeatedly and publicly announced his fantasy of murdering Jews, and claims that Israelis and Zionist Jews eat Palestinians’ organs, a vile antisemitic blood libel.

In December 2021, SAA Member #4, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, observed to Professor Bram Wispelwey that his winter semester course, The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health, in Harvard Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population, contained disturbing antisemitic topics and materials, including required readings propagating antisemitic claims and Hamas propaganda, by denying Jewish ethnic identity (which one reading calls an “invented transnational ethnic identity”), calling Jewish history a “mythology,” denying Jewish indigeneity to Israel, and downplaying antisemitism and the Holocaust. Wispelwey dishonestly dismissed these concerns in an emailed response, as “demonstrably false.” SAA Member #4 emailed Department Chair Marcia Castro to raise their concerns. Castro, like Wispelwey, was dismissive of the student’s concerns, but proposed a three-on-one meeting that would include Wispelwey and Professor Jackie Bhabha, who Castro said was leading the development of a new program on Palestine at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights (“FXB Center”). SAA Member #4 made a formal complaint in Harvard’s bias reporting system and sent their concerns to Dean for Education Erin Driver-Linn and Chief Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (“DIB”) Officer Amarildo Barbosa. The student met with Barbosa later that month and reported this and several other incidents of antisemitism on campus.

Harvard took no steps to prevent Professor Wispelwey from promulgating antisemitism in his course or to otherwise discipline him, but instead recently promoted his course from a truncated winter-term course to a full-length spring-semester course, which, according to Harvard Public Health’s website, entailed Harvard approving the course content. Following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, SAA Member #4 followed up with administrators, providing resources to explain the bias in Wispelwey’s course—as Chief DIB Officer Barbosa admitted that his office did not have sufficient expertise in understanding antisemitism.

SAA Member #4 also raised concerns regarding Harvard’s continued partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, which openly discriminates against Jews and promotes Hamas and its terrorism. Among other things, Birzeit’s buildings and events are named after convicted terrorists; military parades on campus feature students wearing mock explosive vests while waving Hamas flags; in May 2022, Hamas won the majority of Birzeit student government seats; and, two weeks before the October 7 massacre, eight students were arrested with weapons and plans to carry out a terrorist attack. Rather than end its affiliation with this antisemitic, terrorism-supporting university, Harvard touts its Birzeit partnership. In fact, since October 7, Harvard’s FXB Center co-sponsored a webinar with Birzeit on December 11, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Birzeit University Museum have organized at least fourteen “teach-in” sessions to put “Gaza in context”—which include discussions on “Israel’s onslaught against Palestinians”—and the FXB Center recently opened applications for its Summer 2024 Palestine Social Medicine course at Birzeit.

Harvard Out of Palestine (“HOOP”), another student group, led a relentless campaign against retired Israeli Major General Amos Yadlin, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government (“Harvard Kennedy”). For example, on February 1, 2022, HOOP organized a disruptive rally outside Yadlin’s first study group of the semester. As HOOP posted on its Instagram page, the harassment “continue[d] despite [the study group’s] efforts to change rooms every week.” HOOP also shared a video that showed its members standing in two parallel rows just outside the open door of Yadlin’s classroom, holding large banners and flags, so that anyone entering or exiting would be forced to walk through the gauntlet. The video also depicts protesters chanting and disrupting Yadlin’s discussion with students in the classroom.

On April 7, 2022, HOOP marched through campus, including in and out of buildings, banging on drums and using a megaphone to shout further accusations at Yadlin, charging him with personal responsibility for alleged “genocide.” Throughout the semester, Harvard did nothing to prevent HOOP from severely and pervasively harassing Yadlin and his students, notwithstanding, among other policies, Harvard’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities proscribing such conduct as “unacceptable” violations of Harvard policy.

The April 2022 Israeli Apartheid Week included a display in Harvard Yard, which read: “ZIONISM IS RACISM SETTLER COLONIALISM WHITE SUPREMACY APARTHEID.” Harvard did nothing in response to these inflammatory antisemitic tropes. Similarly, when a swastika was once again found shortly after Israeli Apartheid Week—this time in the undergraduate residence Currier House—Harvard failed to publicly condemn it outside of a statement to the Currier House community or take any other steps.

That same year, Harvard PSC members placed stickers on Sabra hummus (a common target for BDS) throughout Harvard’s dining halls, which accused Israel of being an apartheid state and murdering Palestinians. Rather than discipline the perpetrators, Harvard pulled Sabra products from the dining halls. Later, when questioned at the December 5, 2023 hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” (the “House Antisemitism Hearing”), thenHarvard President Claudine Gay refused to say whether the stickers violated Harvard’s policies or to explain Sabra’s disappearance from the dining halls.

In August 2022, Harvard PSC members disrupted Harvard’s convocation—a ceremony for incoming students that is supposed to “provide[] an understanding of the values, history, and traditions” at Harvard and help new students “develop a sense of belonging and class unity [through] inspirational messages from a current student leader and University officials”— by chanting and displaying a banner that read: “Veritas? Here’s the Real Truth: Harvard Supports Israeli Apartheid.” Harvard later shared on social media images from the convocation that prominently displayed the banner.

In October 2022, Harvard PSC and other student groups brought El-Kurd back to speak on campus. Kestenbaum, who was present for the event, wrote in a February 2023 article published on Aish about his shock and dismay that “El-Kurd’s casual comparisons between the State of Israel and Nazi Germany,” and his insistence that “Jews have begun ‘internalizing the ways of the Nazis,’” did not preclude his appearance on campus.

In spring 2023, Harvard PSC carried out its annual boycott campaign against Israel Trek—a ten-day trip to Israel sponsored by Harvard Hillel designed for non-Jewish students to learn more about Israeli history and culture and speak with high-ranking Israeli and Palestinian officials—during which participants and prospective participants are harassed and intimidated, with no response by Harvard.

Harvard PSC organized another protest at the September 4, 2023 convocation, at which one of its members—who on October 7 would justify that day’s massacre by saying the
“oppressed have the right to resist”—interrupted Dean Rakesh Khurana mid-speech, shouting: “Here’s the real truth: Harvard supports, upholds, and invests in Israeli apartheid, and the oppression of Palestinians.” Harvard did not discipline that or any other protester; instead, the student who interrupted Dean Khurana was later selected as a Rhodes Scholar, after receiving Harvard’s endorsement.

At the 2023 convocation, which Kestenbaum attended, where protesters encircled the seated freshman class and screamed “boycott Israel,” “stop supporting genocide,” and
“boycott Israel Trek,” among other things. Harvard did not make any attempt to stop the protesters, who interrupted multiple speakers in addition to Dean Khurana. Kestenbaum’s friend, a Jewish freshman who wears a kippah, got up and left the convocation, telling Kestenbaum he was extremely uncomfortable with his introduction to Harvard.

On September 21, 2023, Harvard Divinity invited former Palestine Liberation Organization spokeswoman Diana Buttu to speak in Harvard Divinity’s main building at a screening of Israelism, a film that argues American Jews raise their children with pro-Israel indoctrination. Buttu claimed that Jews are trained to mistreat Palestinians, a behavior she said they learned facing Nazi extermination at Auschwitz. Antisemitic tropes displayed during that screening drew applause rather than denunciation. Kestenbaum, who attended the screening along with Harvard Divinity Interim Dean David Holland and nearly all of Harvard Divinity’s Religion and Public Life Department faculty, was caused to have anxiety and gross discomfort as a result of that Harvard-sponsored antisemitic event.

The increasing antisemitism over the last decade has coincided with a dramatic decrease in Harvard’s Jewish student population—from, in 2013, approximately twenty-five percent of the undergraduate student body, to, in 2023, less than ten percent—a drop of nearly sixty percent in a single decade that could only evince a deliberate effort by Harvard to minimize its Jewish student population.

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