Feeling Alone and Estranged, Many Jews at Harvard Marvel What’s Subsequent

At Harvard College, the rabbi at a menorah lighting ceremony was unusually blunt.

“It pains me to have to say, sadly, that Jew hate and antisemitism is thriving on this campus,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad stated on Wednesday.

“Twenty-six years I’ve given my life to this community,” he stated. “I’ve never felt so alone.”

Simply the evening earlier than, he instructed the gathering, a girl passing by the Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony yelled that the Holocaust was pretend. When Harvard Chabad hosted a screening of an Israeli navy movie with footage from the Oct. 7 Hamas assaults, he stated the campus police suggested him to get safety for his household. Even the enormous menorah, prominently displayed in Harvard Yard, was packed away every evening, he stated, as in previous years to guard it from vandalism.

Claudine Homosexual, Harvard’s president, stood close by, ready to mild a candle. Because the rabbi spoke, she stared straight forward, wanting stricken.

The uproar over Dr. Homosexual’s congressional testimony — on whether or not college students can be punished in the event that they referred to as for the genocide of Jews — has uncovered the deep anxiousness, anger and alienation of lots of Harvard’s Jewish college students, alumni and religion leaders.

In interviews, many Jewish members of the Harvard group described their rising estrangement from campus. Protesters have disrupted lectures, shouting by way of bullhorns that the conflict in Gaza was a genocide. Antisemitic messages have been posted on social media. Some college students have determined to verify their Zionist beliefs within the classroom and within the residence corridor. A number of have traded of their kippas, or skullcaps, for baseball hats.

For college kids who’re feeling more and more remoted, it didn’t assist that lots of their Jewish friends had joined the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The autumn semester closed with extra pressure. The Harvard Company, the college’s governing board, deliberated for hours on Monday earlier than deciding to withstand calls to pressure Dr. Homosexual’s resignation.

Yesterday, as college students ready for closing exams, pro-Palestinian pupil teams staged a big, silent demonstration at Widener Library, occupying a studying room. Rows of protesters, many carrying kaffiyehs, the Palestinian scarf, sat at tables with open laptops, all displaying the identical flier: “No Normalcy During Genocide. Justice for Palestine.”

After one of the attempting weeks within the college’s current historical past, and because the campus emptied out for the vacations, some Jews within the Harvard group referred to as for Dr. Homosexual and the college to reset for the brand new yr. One thing must be accomplished, urgently, they stated, to repair the notion that the establishment had turned its again on Jews.

The difficulty is about greater than the Israel-Hamas conflict. Jews, who’ve had excessive admittance charges within the Ivy League, are declining in numbers. At Harvard, the decline has been particularly pronounced, falling to lower than 10 p.c of the coed physique at this time from roughly 20 p.c a technology in the past, in keeping with estimates by exterior students and surveys of the coed physique, together with one conducted by The Harvard Crimson, the coed newspaper.

These figures reminded some alumni of the college’s historical past of bias towards Jewish candidates. Within the Twenties, Harvard’s Jewish inhabitants accounted for a couple of quarter of the coed physique. However then the college instituted quotas geared toward limiting their admission, which lasted for many years. The proportion of Jewish college students dropped to roughly 10 to fifteen p.c of all college students, in keeping with Marcia Graham Synnott, whose ebook “The Half-Opened Door” examined discrimination within the Ivy League.

That legacy helped feed the unease over the present campus politics.

“To see newly resurgent antisemitism against this backdrop of fairly recent, wonderful acceptance is a very, very painful thing for a lot of Jews,” stated Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who has studied the Jewish expertise within the Ivy League. “We thought that these were institutions that were profoundly welcoming and were going to stay profoundly welcoming.”

Dr. Homosexual’s critics stated she was sluggish to condemn the Hamas assaults. Nor had she, of their view, been fast sufficient to talk out towards the pro-Palestinian pupil teams who stated they held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” within the battle.

In response, a Harvard spokesman on Saturday pointed to a half-dozen occasions on campus the place Dr. Homosexual had joined Jewish college students since Oct. 7, and he referred to her earlier assertion asserting the creation of an advisory group on antisemitism. The group, Dr. Homosexual stated, would intention to “intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology.”

Belief nearly utterly broke down after the Dec. 5 congressional listening to, when Dr. Homosexual; Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president; and Elizabeth Magill, of the College of Pennsylvania, appeared to dodge questions on disciplining college students in the event that they referred to as for the genocide of Jews. Ms. Magill resigned as president 4 days later.

Dr. Homosexual apologized for her testimony. “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she instructed The Harvard Crimson.

She nonetheless should lead a deeply divided campus and proceed to attempt to steadiness the liberty to protest with the fears of many Jews, who say sure slogans utilized by pro-Palestinian demonstrators — like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” — are antisemitic and a name for violence towards them.

However Ari Kohn, 20, a Jewish sophomore from Toronto, stated that whereas she “believes in the state of Israel,” she has not skilled the pro-Palestinian motion at Harvard as threatening.

“It’s important to understand when people call for intifada to ask them, ‘What do they mean by that?’” she stated. “We’re all using different definitions of the same word. Giving the benefit of the doubt to my peers, my faculty and my community is really important.”

To different college students, the campus has turn out to be an alien place.

“After Oct. 7, there was a very palpable, tangible shift,” stated Shabbos Kestenbaum, an orthodox Jew and graduate pupil at Harvard Divinity College.

He stated his classmates — “who I quite literally sit next to” — have printed messages on their social media “that explicitly praise Hamas, that deny the rape and abduction of Israeli women.”

He added, “I’m certainly not comfortable, and I wouldn’t even say welcomed, in many spaces around campus.”

As criticism rose, Dr. Homosexual introduced the advisory group to fight antisemitism.

There has already been a defection. After Dr. Homosexual’s congressional testimony, Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity College, resigned from the committee.

In an interview after the Harvard Company introduced its assist for Dr. Homosexual, he stated that he discovered her to be “smart, thoughtful, genuinely curious.” However he stated that he give up as a result of antisemitism at Harvard was rising worse and he was not satisfied the committee would make a distinction.

“I remain hopeful — but unconvinced — that Harvard will change in the ways that I wish it would,” he added.

In a response to his resignation, Dr. Homosexual stated she was “committed to ensuring no member of our Jewish community faces this hate in any form.”

Some have resisted the outline of a campus rife with antisemitism.

Noah Feldman, a authorized scholar and director of a program on Jewish and Israeli regulation, stated he had “never once” skilled antisemitism on Harvard’s campus, even in the course of the years when as an observant Jew, he repeatedly wore a kippa.

transfer forward in such a stalemate? Rabbi Getzel Davis of the Harvard Hillel chapter stated there have been sensible issues to be accomplished.

He famous that till current modifications instituted by Dr. Homosexual, the college’s varied range applications had not made Jews a spotlight of their work.

However now college students reporting bias incidents are having bother navigating Harvard’s range, fairness and inclusion forms — a lot in order that Hillel employed a part-time employees member to help with the method.

Rabbi Davis stated the college ought to do a greater job implementing its guidelines towards hateful speech and actions. He want to see extra occasions for interfaith reflection and sharing. And he stated the college ought to educate college students concerning the historical past of antisemitism.

Which may assist some college students.

Maya Bodnick, 19, a Harvard sophomore from Atherton, Calif., stated that she was cautious about sharing her liberal Zionist views on campus, as a result of many on the left had been merely not open to her perspective. Many of those college students, she stated, categorized Jews as oppressors, with out acknowledging their struggling by the hands of others for millenniums.

“It has been very disappointing,” she stated. “I worry that my peers have a very skewed understanding of Judaism and antisemitism.”