Harvard Is Giving Up on Jews. Jews Are Beginning to Return the Favor

By Angelique Talmor

Wednesday, June 05, 2024

 

The hypocrisy of Harvard’s first-ever Jewish affinity celebration was encapsulated by the fact that the university’s chief DEI officer, Sherri Charleston, had the gall to give the closing remarks. Charleston also gave closing remarks at a concurrent Arab affinity celebration, which her office funded, where student speakers praised the “student intifada” and vilified the “normalization of Zionism” as well as the Arabs who “distanced themselves from the radical Palestinians” after October 7.

 

When the administration announced that it would be holding an affinity celebration for Jewish students, I suspected it would be a feeble attempt to redress the unwillingness of Harvard’s leadership to combat the hostility to Jews on campus. I also fundamentally rejected the idea that including Jews under the DEI umbrella could help — DEI drives inter-group division by design. Nonetheless, I decided to go. I was driven by curiosity and the slight hope that the celebration would prove to be a rare pleasant moment: an opportunity to celebrate my accomplishments without hearing jeers against the Jewish state.

 

But far from being comforting, the experience left me deeply unsettled. About 300 people, students, friends, family, and faculty, filed into a room in one of Harvard’s libraries. It was intimate — too intimate. There were only about 100 graduates and very few teachers — though this did include prominent professors Jason Furman and Steven Pinker, who gave the keynote speech. It was a stark reminder that Jewish enrollment at the Ivy League has plummeted in recent years, and that few people on Harvard’s payroll are willing to support us, at least in public.

 

I was also bothered by many of the presentations. The speakers did little to address antisemitism on campus, instead attempting to emphasize unity and solidarity within the Jewish community. The underlying message, it seemed, was that Harvard is still a great place to be a Jew. This could not be further from the well–documented truth: Today at Harvard, Jews are harassed, intimidated, ostracized, and even assaulted if they support Israel. At the end of the celebration, when I was given a stole that seemed designed to look as different as possible from an Israeli flag, my dejection was cemented. That night, I ordered an Israeli flag from Amazon to wear at graduation — and felt a sense of dread for what was to come during those festivities.

 

That intuition turned out to be even more correct than I imagined. Harvard’s specially selected student speakers were open about their antisemitism. In the undergraduate English address, Shruthi Kumar disingenuously cast herself as a victim by claiming that she and other “black and brown” students were doxed last fall, leaving their “jobs and safety” uncertain — as if it hadn’t been the result of their choice to serve as members of one of the student organizations that signed on to a vile letter on October 7 claiming that “Israel was entirely responsible” for the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. Kumar also received enthusiastic applause when she denounced the decision to not allow 13 of the leaders of Harvard’s campus encampment to graduate. She was apparently unbothered by their significant disruption of campus life or their countless calls for violence against Jews. There was also applause for her disingenuous bemoaning that “freedom of speech and expressions of solidarity had become punishable” on campus. Of course, the encampment was allowed to go on for weeks, and the numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus that parroted Hamas talking points went on with impunity all year.

 

In the following address, Harvard Law School student Robert Clinton called for a cease-fire in Gaza — an act that would allow the terrorist organization Hamas to stay in power and make it impossible for Israel to guarantee that events like those of October 7 will not happen again, as is Hamas’s ambition. Harvard’s keynote speaker, Maria Ressa, who previously compared Israel to Nazis, was no better. She received hearty applause for highlighting that Claudine Gay — the disgraced former Harvard president who affirmed in congressional testimony that it was okay to call for the genocide of Jews at Harvard — invited her. The Nobel laureate continued to play into antisemitic tropes, claiming “I was called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.” To top it all off, she parroted the lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, ironically all while making the central point of her speech the importance of seeking truth in an age of disinformation.

 

As I sat in my chair listening to these speeches, I was simultaneously disgusted and horrified. Until then, I had elected to wear my Israeli flag as a cape on my back. At that moment, however, I decided not to cower as a weak-kneed Jew and unpinned my cape to hold the Israeli flag high in protest. Of all the students in the Class of 2024, I was alone in doing so.

 

In those moments of holding up the Israeli flag in defiance, I felt relieved that I could stand for what I believed in, but I also felt terribly outnumbered. I held up the sole Israeli flag; there were hundreds of students and professors wearing keffiyehs and donning the Palestinian flag. As I sat in my seat next to the main aisle watching them walk out in protest, coming within a foot of me, I realized just how little I had in common with these people who were supposed to have constituted my intellectual community. I wasn’t thinking just about Israel or the Jews, but about those who have elected to align themselves with forces who wish to destroy Western civilization. A significant plurality of those around me who walked out and cheered at the deplorable statements I described have worked tirelessly to ensure that Harvard is a centerpiece in the effort to undermine the West. The silent majority around me who watched without resistance are complicit in allowing Harvard to devolve from one of the gems of our civilization to an active engine of its destruction.

 

As the ceremony ended, an older Harvard alumnus serving as a marshal came up to me and thanked me for standing up with my Israeli flag. Before walking away to return to his duties, he told me that “goodness will prevail.” But will it? At Harvard, I am not convinced. As I contrast my graduate experience at Harvard with my undergraduate experience at the University of Florida, I am even less sure significant resources should be expended attempting to revive “goodness” at Harvard when better alternatives exist. Schools like the University of Florida have the requisite leadership, moral fortitude, and resources to serve as training grounds for our nation’s leaders. As a graduate of both universities, I believe investing in and supporting the ability of institutions like UF to compete with Harvard through initiatives such as the Hamilton Center make it more likely that goodness will prevail in our society — even if it doesn’t survive at Harvard.

 

I remember my acceptance to the Harvard Kennedy School like it was yesterday. It was 11:00 p.m. and I was exhausted, having worked late at my consulting job in Paris. As soon as I read the first line with the word “congratulations,” I shrieked with joy, forgetting my fatigue. I celebrated into the night. As with every ambitious girl who had perhaps watched Legally Blonde too many times, attending Harvard had been my lifelong dream, and I had made it. Three years and a joint MBA later, I can’t begin to muster even a hint of enthusiasm for my Ivy League alma mater— but it’s still great to be a Florida Gator.