Harvard creates task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia

BOSTON — Harvard University, struggling to manage its campus response to the Israel-Hamas war, announced task forces on Friday to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

“Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic acts on our campus have grown, and the sense of belonging among these groups has been undermined,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president, said in a letter to the school community. “We need to understand why and how that is happening — and what more we might do to prevent it.”

The separate task forces follow the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay, who faced a backlash over her congressional testimony on antisemitism as well as plagiarism accusations.

Some Jewish students filed a lawsuit against Harvard this month, accusing the school of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” Arab and Muslim students around the country have also said they feel they’re being punished for their political views on the war.

The war erupted after the October 7 attack in Israel, in which 3,000 Hamas terrorists burst into southern Israel from Gaza and slaughtered 1,200 people, mainly civilians massacred amid brutal atrocities, and abducted around 240 others. Roughly 130 hostages are believed to remain in Hamas captivity.

In response, Israel declared it would destroy Hamas’s military and governance capabilities in Gaza and attain the release of the hostages. According to Hamas health authorities, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, which has caused widespread destruction and uprooted over 80 percent of the territory’s 2.3 million people from their homes. The death toll from the terror group cannot be independently verified, and is believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of the terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 9,000 terror operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. Almost 200 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza fighting.

The fallout has roiled campuses across the US and reignited a debate over free speech. College leaders have struggled to define the line where political speech crosses into harassment and discrimination, with both Jewish and Arab students raising concerns that their schools are doing too little to protect them.

The issue took center stage in December when the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT testified at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. A Republican lawmaker asserted that support for “intifada” equates to calling for the genocide of Jews, and then asked if calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus policies. The presidents offered lawyerly answers, declining to say unequivocally that it was prohibited speech.

Their answers prompted weeks of backlash from donors and alumni, ultimately leading to the resignation of Liz Magill at Penn and Claudine Gay at Harvard.

Garber said the goals of the task forces are to explore why Harvard is seeing a rise in antisemitism and anti-Arab sentiments and propose recommendations to counteract it.

“Strengthening our ties to one another will take considerable effort and engagement across the university,” Garber wrote. “I have asked each task force to undertake broad outreach, and I encourage you to share your perspectives and your experiences with equal measures of care and candor. We have before us an opportunity to meet challenges with far-reaching implications.”

The antisemitism task force will be co-chaired by Derek Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Raffaella Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The task force on anti-Arab bias and Islamophobia will be co-chaired by Wafaie Fawzi, the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School.

Gay had created a committee to advise university leaders on antisemitism during her short tenure, but her testimony prompted one Harvard Divinity School rabbi to resign from that effort. Rabbi David Wolpe said in an email Friday that he’ll reach out to those involved with the antisemitism task force, hoping it “will be able to create and implement policies and that will change the campus climate.”

Penslar, one of the co-chairs, was a leading figure in defending Gay.

In August, he signed an open letter that denounced Israel for imposing an “apartheid regime” on the Palestinians.

The open letter, which is titled “The Elephant in the Room” and has nearly 2,900 signatories, also denounced the controversial judicial overhaul advanced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and asserted it had a “direct link” to Israel’s “illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians.”

“American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid,” states the letter.

The letter also stated that “as Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it. Meanwhile, American Jewish billionaire funders help support the Israeli far right.”

Penslar’s signature on the letter was flagged by the conservative news site the Washington Free Beacon, which said neither he nor Harvard responded to requests for comment.