Harvard Can Keep Its Jewish Community Safe — When It Wants To

I felt physically safe. Thirty minutes into the September 22, 2024, Summit on Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Crisis in Higher Education at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, I was pretty confident there would be no violence against us.

Surprisingly, no one tried to disrupt the event — even though there were almost 1,000 proud Jews there (students, faculty, parents, alums, and other Zionists) who believed in the right of Israel, an existing country, to continue existing.

Dozens of police officers guarded us both inside and outside the building. There was an established perimeter, metal detectors, bag searches, bomb-sniffing dogs, and printed tickets that we had to display, even when returning from the bathroom. With alums and presumably donors in the room, as well as a group of renowned speakers, including Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt (Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism), Harvard wasn’t taking any chances. Nor were the event planners — Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) with Harvard Hillel and Chabad.

It felt good to feel safe, and I was grateful to Harvard — until it fully sunk in that Jews now need a full security force to come back to our alma mater for an event about Jews and Israel.

And Harvard is the reason why this vast amount of security is needed.

Prior to the September 22 event, HJAA had already extensively documented the Jew and Israel hate on Harvard’s campus in its May 2024 report, which I co-authored. Its title is “The Soil Beneath the Encampments: How Israel and Jews Became the Focus of Hate at Harvard.”

Our research demonstrated that Harvard’s curriculum and education programs systemically planted and spread the seeds of this Jew-hatred well before October 7, 2023. Propelling this education were hundreds of millions in funding from Middle Eastern authoritarian countries and many hundreds of Harvard faculty members (and visiting instructors, fellows, staff, and graduate students), unified by little else than their virulent, obsessive hatred of the “Zionist, colonial state.” 

Dozens of students that HJAA interviewed after October 7th told us that they were afraid for their physical safety on campus because of their Jewish identity or their sympathy for Israel. A student who lived on Harvard Yard next to the protests and encampments had explained, “There were days I was afraid to leave my room because there were people outside chanting, ‘End the occupation’ and ‘globalize the intifada.’”

“It’s scary to walk through the protest,” another student told us. “I usually walk through the back doors [or the] side entrances at [the] science center.”

An Israeli student said that she felt “safer in Israel than here. I just think everyone knows my identity, and the only thing that protects me from people hurting Israelis is that they have too much to lose because they are Harvard students.”

We heard from dozens of Jewish and pro-Israel students who said that even before the October 7 massacre, bullying, harassment, and exclusion by classmates, faculty, teaching fellows, and proctors was the norm for them.

When students reported these offenses, some Harvard administrators suggested mental health support — presumably because not all Jews were afraid, and, therefore, those who were afraid needed counseling, instead of help combating the actual problem. We can’t imagine Harvard applying that standard to other minority groups.

Perhaps my concern that our Sept. 22 event would be violently disrupted was excessive. No one actually threatened violence. The online posts opposing our event the night before only said “as Palestinians continue to be murdered by the Zionist state, Harvard props up the genocide. Harvard Chabad and Hillel have invited speakers who have directly participated in mass murder onto our campus,” and “Harvard continues its unwavering support of the Zionist entity. We will not stand for genocidaires on our campus.”

Then again, as the great Einat Wilf, a speaker at the Summit, previously explained, societies obsessively embracing anti-Zionism have often devolved into violence against their Jewish communities, with the most respected voices and institutions (universities included) lending such attacks the imprimatur of rationality and respectability.

I wonder how many Summit audience members owe their lives to an ancestor who was very afraid. My husband does. His maternal grandmother not only believed what the Jew-haters were saying in Europe in the 1930s, but she was afraid enough to act. She fled her home in Poland in 1939, never to see her 150 relatives again.

Harvard and other campuses by no means resemble 1938 Germany. But it is hard to fault us for early pattern recognition.

Jessica Levin, a Harvard graduate, is the Vice President for Education of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) and the co-author with Zoe Bernstein of HJAA’s May 2024 report, “The Soil Beneath the Encampments: How Israel and Jews Became the Focus of Hate at Harvard.”

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