Harvard University has been sued by Jewish students alleging it “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment”.
The complaint alleges the Ivy League school is violating the civil rights of its Jewish students by tolerating and enabling discrimination on its campus.
It comes just over a week after its president, Claudine Gay, resigned in part over her handling of antisemitism.
Harvard has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
The complaint, filed on Wednesday night, argues that Jewish students have been “subjected to a severe and pervasive antisemitic hostile educational environment” that have worsened since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
It claims that Harvard students and faculty members have harassed, intimidated and assaulted Jewish students in classrooms, in on-campus activities and on social media, including by calling for the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
“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,” the complaint states.
The claimants - a student at Harvard Divinity School and a group called Students Against Antisemitism, which include students at Harvard’s law and public health schools - allege that antisemitism on campus “manifests itself in a double standard”.
Harvard, they say, “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”, while disciplining those who engage in racism, transphobia and other forms of discrimination.
The complaint seeks monetary damages and an injunction to stop Harvard’s alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars those who receive federal funds from allowing discrimination based on race.
The court filing was made by the Kasowitz Benson Torres law firm, which has launched similar lawsuits at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Harvard has been under fire in the months since the Hamas attack, with the US education department and the House of Representatives both opening investigations into its handling of antisemitism on campus.
Last week, Claudine Gay - the university’s first black president - resigned following criticisms of her response to anti-semitism on campus, and allegations that she plagiarised parts of her academic work. She faced a firestorm of criticism over her December testimony before Congress, in which she failed to explicitly say that calls for the genocide of Jews violated university policy.
Yeah, OPs summary says they’re doing it to multiple schools.
If their claims are true, then yeah, Harvard (and the other schools) should be held accountable.
But we’ll probably never know if a settlement happens.
That’s my assumption–it’s basically legal extortion.
I will say that I believe that there is antisemitism in most places because there are humans in most places. Whatever happens at Harvard is probably not exceptional or notable in any way.
Universities encourage critical thinking. For a lot of young adults, it’s the first time being exposed to a lot of new ideas in their infancy. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was higher simply because they are processing new concepts and sometimes come to unfortunate conclusions.
And it doesn’t help that, as of late, the term “antisemite” is aggressively being expanded to include those who show any criticism whatsoever of the current Bibi administration.
It’s crazy to me. On October 6th, 2023, the Bibi administration was largely viewed as a far right, antidemocratic, religiously extreme collection of intensely corrupt lunatics. On October 7th, so many otherwise totally-reasonable people just forgot how they felt the day before.
That’s how people respond to terrorist attacks. Look at what America did after 9/11, rallying behind Giuliani and Bush to attack Iraq because… Then you had bigots attacking Sikhs on the streets, Freedom Fries because France opposed indiscriminate bombing, and just about the most ridiculous performative security measures for people wanting to travel in a plane.
History will remember. We will look back on this time as a dark period of bigotry, violence, oppression, and genocide.
Your last paragraph can describe almost any time period in human history.
It’s true. And we didn’t fix anything, we just made travel so much more miserable and put in laws to let the government spy on people. As we saw with both 9/11 and Oct 6, high surveillance isn’t the answer. We need to move beyond security theater and retribution.
I forgot about the spying! That’s another good example, further emphasized by the fact that I forgot about it entirely.
It took 20 years for the GOP to realize that the PATRIOT Act was used mostly against them and not brown people lol.
Speaking of which, he was apparently a slow learner.
I’m not sure why you’re specifically mentioning one man’s administration.
The main conflation of anti-Semitism has been with anti-Zionism, which dates back far before Bibi came into power.
I have also found that some people become very angry when you point out that Palestinians and Arabs in general are actually Semites. There were actually a whole lot of Semitic groups in history.
Antisemitism has nothing to do with whether or not someone is of an ethnicity related to the Semitic language group. My guess would be that you are upsetting people not by pointing out that Palestinians are Semites, but by incorrectly claiming that antisemitism is in any way connected to the - very real - discrimination against and hatred of Palestinians and Arabs.
Thank you.
I don’t have the patience or tact to offer thoughtful and gentle explanations (as you did) when it’s “pointed out” that many people from the region could be considered Semitic.
It’s very much the sort of argument my clever nephew might make. He’s a smart kid, but he hasn’t gotten to the point where he can understand that a clever fact is not necessarily in any way relevant to a complex problem. And certainly not a devastating argument that can simply stop everyone in their mad mutual desire for destruction.
“Well, shit. We were all Semites the whole time???”
In any case, thanks.
Critical thinking doesn’t make people racist, though. I work at a university and have seen many people be edgy. Some do it for effect because they are, frankly, very immature and like that attention. Most who are actually racist were brought up that way or went down the rabbit hole sometime in high school.
Not to mention that Harvard will likely settle just to avoid going through discovery simply because they know there is an entire political movement looking for ANY excuse to go for blood with them.
They do not really give any details at all about the claims so it is kind of hard to have any sort of opinion on it.
The entire complaint is linked in the third paragraph. It goes into some detail about specific incidents of harassment of Jewish students and some of the ways that the university is systemically hostile to Jewish students, particularly those who express support for Israel, which, “is a crucial component of Kestenbaum’s and SAA members’ Jewish identities, and many of them are descendants of survivors of the Nazis, with family and friends in Israel.”