Jewish Students Sue Harvard for Antisemitism

A group of Jewish students sued Harvard University for antisemitism on Wednesday, alleging that it is violating Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act by allowing Jewish students to be subjected to bullying and harassment amid a storm of anti-Israel hostility.

The suit has been brought by Harvard Divinity School student Alexander Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism.

The complaint states (paragraph numbers removed):

Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people—including infants, children, and the elderly—antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive. 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. 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 and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object. What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it.

…

Subjected to intense anti-Jewish vitriol, including from their own professors and Harvard administrators, Kestenbaum and other Jewish students, including SAA members, have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully participate in Harvard’s educational and other programs and have been placed at severe emotional and physical risk. Moreover, over the past ten years, Harvard has instituted admissions policies that have severely reduced—by as much as sixty percent—the number of Jewish students, an enormous decline that evinces an intentional effort, much like Harvard’s quotas one hundred years ago, to exclude Jews. The severe and pervasive hostile environment for Jews on campus leaves Harvard’s remaining Jewish population even more isolated and unsafe against their abusers.

Harvard’s deliberate indifference to, and indeed enabling of, antisemitism on its campus constitutes an egregious violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Harvard must now be compelled to implement institutional, far-reaching, and concrete remedial measures, including, among other things: (i) disciplinary measures, including the termination of, deans, administrators, professors, and other employees responsible for antisemitic discrimination and abuse, whether because they engage in it or permit it; (ii) disciplinary measures, including suspension or expulsion, against students who engage in such conduct; (iii) declining and returning donations, whether from foreign countries or elsewhere, implicitly or explicitly conditioned on the hiring or promotion of professors who espouse antisemitism or the inclusion of antisemitic coursework or curricula; (iv) adding required antisemitism training for Harvard community members; and (v) payment of appropriate damages for lost or diminished educational opportunities, among other things.

Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned in early January, in part over controversy relating to her mishandling of the antisemitism issue, as well as over mounting concerns over a pattern of plagiarism in her sparse academic publications.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.