Some Jewish students at Harvard have had enough bullying, harassment, threats, and intimidation and are suing the school for its failure to protect Jewish students and faculty.
“Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel,” according to the lawsuit. “Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews.”
Not surprising considering the attitude of Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay. In testimony before Congress, Gay could say definitively whether threatening to kill Jews violated Harvard's speech policies.
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School student and a party to the lawsuit. says that antisemitism is systemic at Harvard claiming there is a “clear double standard when it comes to the treatment of minorities and Jewish students.”
“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 suit alleges that Harvard “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.
Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay, acted like a deer in headlights as the antisemitic violence swirled around campus. In the end, it wasn't her lack of action to protect Jewish students. It was a plagiarism scandal that brought her down.
The frightening prospect is that she'd still be in office if that plagiarism row had remained buried.
The students suing Harvard are 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.”
I'm afraid Harvard's idea of "equal treatment under the law" is a lot like the pigs on Orwell's "Animal Farm": "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
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