Long-awaited Harvard antisemitism report shows intense campus hostility to Jews, Israelis
University’s president apologizes as task force urges reforms to admissions, curriculum, research and bias training; ‘being Jewish was largely irrelevant’ before Oct. 7, says student
Harvard University on Tuesday released its long-awaited internal report on campus antisemitism, depicting a hostile atmosphere toward Jews and Israelis before and after the October 2023 invasion of Israel.
The report came amid heavy pressure on the university from the Trump administration and outlines a series of recommendations the university should take to remedy the campus environment.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community,” Harvard’s interim president Alan Garbar said in a statement.
Jewish students, and especially Israelis, were often subject to harassment, social shunning and bullying, the report said.
The 311-page document opens with an anecdote that, the authors said, reflected many of the campus tensions. A Jewish student speaker at a conference had planned to tell the story of his Holocaust survivor grandfather finding refuge in Israel. Organizers told the student the story was not “tasteful” and laughed at him when he expressed his confusion. The story would have been seen as a way to “justify oppression,” the authors said.
“Perhaps the best way to describe the existence of many Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard in the 2023-24 academic year is that their presence had become triggering, or the subject of political controversy,” the report said, adding that Jews had landed “on the wrong side of a political binary that provided no room for the complexity of history or current politics.”
“No other group was constantly told that their history was a sham, that they or their co-religionists or coethnics were supremacists and oppressors, and that they had no right to the protections offered by antibias norms,” the report said.
The campus atmosphere caused Jews to hide their identities, turn down admission offers, leave academia, and withdraw from campus life. Friend groups broke apart and students pressured their peers to stop speaking with Israelis, solely due to their identity. Jews were implicated in atrocities due to their perceived “hereditary and collective guilt,” the report said.
In some of the incidents described in the report, student groups disseminated a cartoon that showed a hand marked with a Star of David holding nooses around the necks of a Black man and an Arab man. Commencement speaker Maria Ressa delivered off-the-cuff remarks that “appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” Another graduation speaker blamed Israel for genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Students sometimes walked away from Israelis mid-conversation when they found out they came from Israel, including Israeli Muslims and Christians. Other Jews were pressured to prove they were “one of the good ones” by condemning Israel. Jews were told they were privileged oppressors and hostage posters were defaced with antisemitic slogans. Israelis were pushed out of student clubs.
The controversy at Harvard erupted as the Hamas attack on Israel was still underway. Thirty-three Harvard student groups blamed Israel for the invasion. The task force said the letter caught Jewish students and faculty “in a moment of intense vulnerability and grief” and “appeared to be blaming the victims, whose blood was not yet dry, for their own deaths.”
Harvard saw 70 days of protest in the 2023-24 academic year, more than any peer institution, besides Stanford, the report said.
The report said 39% of Jewish students felt not at home on campus, 26% felt physically unsafe, 44% felt mentally unsafe, and 49% felt unsupported in their well-being, and 73% were uncomfortable expressing political opinions. Nearly 60% reported experiencing discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias.
“Before October 7th, being Jewish was largely irrelevant. It was not a barrier. I was proud to be Jewish,” one student said. “After October 7th, I experienced the following in this order: first there was pressure, then there was chaos, then hostility, and in certain spaces, the normalization of subtle discrimination.”
“The anti-normalization idea is that Jews on campus with ties to Israel must be anti-Zionist to be welcomed. I’ve lost friends who abandoned me,” another student said.
The report said on campus relations had deteriorated in recent years. In the 1980s and 1990s, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students held joint events, despite disagreements. Up until 2017, a Palestinian activist attended dinners at Harvard Hillel during a “different era in intergroup relations.” The Jewish student population is also much smaller than in the past, and discussions around the conflict have become “much more extreme,” the report said.
Anti-Israel activists became more aggressive as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed and activism pivoted toward building awareness for Palestinians, instead of collaboration. The tactics changed, too, as the activists worked to leverage academic groups against Israel, and inject the Palestinian cause “wherever possible,” such as lifecycle events and unrelated courses, and use disruptive tactics.
The protests are built on an ideological framework that sees Israel as an illegitimate settler-colony that can be destroyed. The activists target Western support for Israel, aiming to undermine the belief that Jews have a historical connection to the territory, the view that Israel is a democracy, and weaken the “post-Holocaust social prohibition on antisemitism,” the report said. Student activists protested against antisemitism training, for example.
The result is “totalizing rhetoric” that paints Israelis as “abstract figures intent on genocide.”
To compile the report, investigators met with hundreds of students, faculty and staff, as well as alumni, including non-Jews and Jews, and reviewed written documentation.
The university also released a 222-page report on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias. The reports depicted a wide gulf between the two sides, with Muslims complaining that Harvard had shut down an anti-Israel protest encampment that Jews said had subjected them to harassment. Pro-Palestinian students were subject to doxxing by off-campus groups, and said they felt “abandoned and silenced.” The antisemitism report noted, however, that pro-Palestinian rhetoric was widespread on campus, despite the perceived suppression.
Anti-Zionist Jews also reported hostility primarily from other Jewish students.
Harvard released the reports on Tuesday while the university simultaneously battles the Trump administration over demands to limit campus activism — reforms the government says are necessary to root out campus antisemitism. The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding and Harvard responded with a lawsuit in a clash that is being watched closely across higher education.
The report included recommendations for remedying the campus atmosphere. Recommendations included changes in admissions and student life; providing academic offerings on Jewish life, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Israel; monitoring student organizations; and implementing new complaint mechanisms.
In a list of “actions and commitments,” Harvard said it will review admissions processes to make sure applicants are evaluated based on their ability to “engage constructively with different perspectives, show empathy and participate in civil discourse.”
It pointed to a recently added application question asking students about a time they strongly disagreed with someone. The antisemitism task force called for that kind of questioning, saying Harvard should reject anyone with a history of bias and look unfavorably on “exhibitions of hostility, derision or dismissiveness.”
Still, it appears to fall short of the Trump administration’s demands around admissions, which called on Harvard to end all preferences “based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof” and implement “merit-based” policies by August. The Supreme Court has rejected the use of race in college admissions, but many colleges look at factors including students’ family income and geography to bring a diverse class to campus.
Responding to complaints that Harvard’s instruction had become too politicized and anti-Israel, the university said it will work to hold professors to new standards of “excellence.” Deans will make sure faculty promote intellectual openness and refrain from endorsing political positions “that may cause students to feel pressure to demonstrate allegiance,” the university said.
Courses and curriculum will also be reviewed to reflect those standards.
Other changes include required antisemitism training for students and staff, along with expanded academic offerings on Hebrew, Judaic, Arab and Islamic studies. Harvard will put money toward a research project on antisemitism along with a historical overview on Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians at the university.
The Times of Israel Community.