My Year at Harvard

The first day of the holiday of Sukkot was a week before the Oct. 7 attack. Each year the Divinity School at Harvard, to its credit, erects a Sukkah. Remarkably, the only ceremony marking the holiday was run by a group that called itself “Jews for Liberation.” As a Visiting Scholar I was new to campus and decided to attend my first Divinity School event. There was no lulav or etrog, traditional symbols of the holiday. Hebrew prayers were omitted in favor of English songs.  But before even this exiguous ceremony began, we were told by the student coordinator for whom the ceremony was intended:

“This is a safe space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists and those who are struggling with Zionism.”  Wow, I thought. My first Divinity School event is a Jewish one in which there is no safe space for people like me. 

Like many people, I had a somewhat idealized image both of Harvard and of the position of Jews in the United States. I stood in the Divinity School chapel and marveled that this was the spot where Emerson had delivered his famous address, “The American Scholar.” Here was a plaque to the great American Preacher Theodore Parker whose sermons Emerson called “a streak of rockets all night long.”   I passed by storied halls and pictures of illustrious alumni.  But as the days passed, in the pit of my stomach was a gnawing sadness mixed with dismay. I began to understand, as I visited these places with my kippah on my head, that I might be the kind of Jew that this place was not eager to see.   

Like many people, I had a somewhat idealized image both of Harvard and of the position of Jews in the United States … I expected a year of family, quiet study, teaching and writing. Nothing turned out to be quite what I thought it would be.

Then came Oct. 7. As the world knows, campuses exploded into protests and became a focus of worldwide attention.  The Divinity school was swept up in the maelstrom. The “apartheid wall” — an art installation claiming Israel is an apartheid state and calling for divestment from any business or institution associated with the State — was removed from Harvard Yard, where it had stood in previous years, and found a congenial home on the grounds of the Divinity School. The explosion and its implications, of course, went far beyond that corner of the university. 

When I packed my bags in September and moved across the country, the air was still warm and I felt a little like a student again. After 26 years as the Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, I retired and was serving for one year as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School. The move promised a reunion across the generations. My parents grew up in Boston and we used to come here when I was a child to visit my grandparents. Although I had not returned here as an adult, and never attended Harvard, it was a kind of homecoming. Cousins appeared whom I had never met nor knew existed. I expected a year of family, quiet study, teaching and writing. Nothing turned out to be quite what I thought it would be.

The Divinity School has a very strong Protestant tradition, but is nonsectarian. Today you will find self-identified pagans, Buddhists, Sikhs, syncretic faiths, as well as Judaism, Islam Christianity, and many others. The notice boards are a pastiche of workshops in psychedelics, gender studies, ancient languages and slam poetry.

I was aware that the Divinity School had a reputation for being politically left even among the leftist bent of higher education.  The usual explanation was that graduates, unlike those in other departments of the university, did not have to enter corporations or businesses that moderate any ideological excesses. Additionally, the Divinity School was both geographically and ideologically the most distant from the business school. These were the avatars of Harvard idealism. Or, as one professor wryly put it, “The Woodstock of Cambridge.”

During orientation we all stood before the students and presented our classes for the coming year. The dean who ran the session with skill and wit, told us all where her office was located. Later that day I happened to wander by her office. Her front door was dominated by a poster reading “Democracy is not Occupation” in Hebrew, English and Arabic. For the curious, no, I don’t recall during my time seeing a poster or protest concerning the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs, the Syrian treatment of the Yazidis, the oppression of the Rohingya in Myanmar, or even a forlorn hope that Tibet might be restored. With hundreds of millions of literal slaves in the world from North Korea to Mauritania to Eritrea, America’s racial problems, gender questions and the plight of the Palestinians seemed to be the only issues that gripped the conscience of students and faculty.

With hundreds of millions of literal slaves in the world from North Korea to Mauritania to Eritrea, America’s racial problems, gender questions and the plight of the Palestinians seemed to be the only issues that gripped the conscience of students and faculty.

The day after Hamas’ brutal massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, 33 campus organizations issued a statement blaming Israel for its citizens having been raped, brutalized and burned alive. The following day I received a call from the Harvard President, Claudine Gay. She was clearly shaken by the events. Only two months into her term, the University was suddenly facing what one old hand told me was “undoubtedly its greatest crisis.” Gay was contemplating possible responses.  We spoke for a while and it was a good conversation:  I suggested some resources to acquaint her with the history of the conflict and the story of antisemitism. She asked if I would serve on an antisemitism committee. I said yes without thinking — why wouldn’t I? I felt proud to have stepped onto campus two weeks before and suddenly have a way to contribute something meaningful.  

The day after Hamas’ brutal massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, 33 campus organizations issued a statement blaming Israel for its citizens having been raped, brutalized and burned alive.

To her credit, and the credit of the advisor to the committee, Provost (now interim President) Alan Garber, those appointed to the antisemitism committee were both committed to Israel and to free speech on campus.  We took the meetings — almost all on Zoom — seriously. I think it is fair to say we began under the impression that our advice would be heeded.  

The conversations of the committee were confidential, since it was advisory. Each of us was glued to the news day and night and much of the communication concerned the latest developments in the unfolding war and the world’s reaction to it. Our task was clear: To encourage Harvard to enforce university policies already in place, institute transparent punishments for those who broke the rules, set up a decent and responsive reporting system for infractions, and take antisemitic speech as seriously as racist or homophobic speech. We offered longer term suggestions in terms of hiring and administrative and policy changes. It took skill and will, but the solutions to the immediate problem were not that complex. Effecting deeper ideological changes would take longer. 

Yet day after day we received reports on the ubiquitous faculty and student WhatsApp groups of hostage posters defaced or torn down, students subjected to cruel and sometimes blatant antisemitic statements on internal channels of communication, protests that violated the school’s own policies, and in the favored inversion, defining Israelis as that which has most cruelly afflicted Jews, widespread Nazi imagery. 

More than one student showed me the vile images on Sidechat, the internal Harvard communication channel. When a Jewish student pushed back they were overwhelmed by a torrent of shame, abuse and accusation. Eventually many of the Jewish students went silent. 

In a place where discourse and argument should prevail, certain suggestive silences took their place. In silence and stealth, hostage posters were ripped down and defaced. Complaints from Jewish students to the administration were met with silence. On my way to class I saw a student published newspaper: “Harvard Daily: The Genocide Edition.” On internal Harvard messaging and on X, tutors in a student house were writing about “Judeonazis.”  

In a place where discourse and argument should prevail, certain suggestive silences took their place. In silence and stealth hostage posters were ripped down and defaced. Complaints from Jewish students to the administration were met with silence.

Some of us pushed back against the silence of course. We recognized what observers of hatred of Jews have long known. Repeatedly we witnessed the phenomenon of disparaging Jews with whatever crime the world particularly despises at the moment.  As I wrote on X: “Today colonial-settlerism is the evil of choice, so Jews are colonial settlers. Nazism is a perennial hatred, so Jews are Nazis. If you hate communism, Jews are communists, if you hate capitalism, Jews are capitalists. You can hate Jews because they are weak and stateless or because they are strong and ethno-nationalists. Because they wear ‘regular clothes’ and blend in or because they wear long black coats and side curls and refuse to assimilate. Because they are subhuman (the Nazis called them ‘vermin’) and because they are superhumans who control the world. Because they are resolutely secular or stubbornly religious. Because they went like lambs to the slaughter or because they fight too vigorously. The image of the Jew shapeshifts as a dark psychic threat in the hater’s mind. The one thing the antisemite is sure of, however, whether marching at a Klan rally or just hanging out on campus: There is a good reason. They would NEVER hate Jews just because they are Jews.”

Internally we kept pushing for a vocal and decisive response, and kept receiving assurances. Harvard, being Harvard, having existed before the founding of the country and standing with its laurels and crowns, assumed this would blow over. I had enough experience running a large institution to recognize that two factions in a dispute do not calm one another, they aggravate one another’s sensitivities. Also, taking a student leadership position as an agitator at Harvard is good for one’s resume in many parts of the world. All the incentives were for escalation. This was going to get worse. More times than I can count I went to administrators and insisted that what they were treating as a slow burn was, in fact, a five-alarm fire. I was reminded again of that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach: What I saw so clearly seemed shaded from the sight of those charged with fixing it.  

More times than I can count I went to administrators and insisted that what they were treating as a slow burn was, in fact, a five-alarm fire. I was reminded again of that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach: What I saw so clearly seemed shaded from the sight of those charged with fixing it. 

On Oct. 27, President Gay appeared at a Hillel dinner on the Sabbath and promised action to the students and their parents. Sitting near me was a student who had been in the IDF and nonetheless told me right after the attack that she was scared in her dorm room. I asked her if the President’s remarks had reassured her. “Nir’eh” she said in Hebrew — we’ll see.

As the days passed in fact, little changed and frustrations mounted. Masked protests appeared on campus and Jewish students were accused of supporting genocide and inventing the assaults on Israelis.  

Frustrated, five of us on the advisory committee wrote a letter saying we intended to resign. For the only time in the months I was on the committee, the chair of Harvard’s corporation (the governing body of Harvard, none of whom ever wrote to us or even greeted us), Penny Pritzker, showed up at the meeting. She assured us plans were in place for things to change, that to resign now would exacerbate tensions and help no one. Offering provisional assent, we shelved the letter and watched. We didn’t have to wait long.

We heard congressional hearings were being planned and offered to help. Privately I proposed sending some Jewish sayings or concepts to use to explain Harvard’s approach, believing that sprinkling in some Jewish knowledge or quotations would bolster the university’s genuine concern about Jewish heritage.  This is about antisemitism — you have a Rabbi willing to help you! All overtures were politely rebuffed, and the committee, all of whom had a vested interest in Harvard climbing out of the morass, wished the delegation well and held our collective breath. On Dec. 5 I watched as President Gay, along with the presidents of MIT and Penn, appeared before Congress. 

Five hours. Five long hours. After the first 10 minutes I turned to my colleague with whom I was watching and said, “This is a disaster.” As the world tuned in, the presidents of three of the most lauded educational institutions on the planet sat before a congressional committee and delivered lawyerly, timid responses to pointed ethical questions. I felt like a frustrated coach willing the player to take a swing, even if they miss — just try to hit the damn thing. I realized lawsuits were flying right and left and the university presidents were in a precarious position, because anything they said in front of the committee would be used against them. But in the immortal words of Harry Truman, sometimes you have to put your principles aside and do the right thing. 

The parade of evasions and circumlocutions started early and did not abate. There were painstaking, truth-adjacent answers about donations, the atmosphere on campus, the prevalence of antisemitism — it reminded me of diplomats saying we had a “full and frank” exchange, meaning nothing of substance was permitted to escape one’s lips. From all of the respondents, answers were on tiptoe, as if treading on coals, offering an image of pusillanimity instead of power. Many contended — justly — that the hearings were a setup to trap the presidents. Doubtless many in congress were out to get them. But the presence of hunters doesn’t mean you turn yourself into prey.  Not to recognize and plan for a predictable barrage was unforgivable naivete.  Or hubris. 

Almost immediately, the roof fell in. 

Headlines and outcry followed before the day was out. I felt enormous internal pressure between my public role and my private convictions. My loyalty was clear in my own mind — it was not to Harvard, but to the Jewish people. Parts of the university epitomized an ideology that I believe is injurious to higher education and devastating for Jews. The designation of Jews and Israelis into the facile stereotypes of the day, white oppressors who colonize the land of people of color, tying into old tropes about Jews who control (pick your arena: Hollywood, the banks, the media, the government …) was rife. Less than a century ago a third of the world’s Jews were murdered. Millions fled from Arab lands, the Soviet Union, Northern Africa. Yet now historical ignorance, hate and indifference combined to make Jews, in protests on campus across the country, the satanic forces in a profoundly warped scenario. It was impossible to believe that by staying on the committee I was not giving cover to a pernicious ideology.

I felt enormous internal pressure between my public role and my private convictions. My loyalty was clear in my own mind — it was not to Harvard, but to the Jewish people. Parts of the university epitomized an ideology that I believe is injurious to higher education and devastating for Jews. 

I assumed that leaving the committee would cause something of a stir. I could not foresee how much, but it didn’t matter: I knew that without immediate, drastic changes I couldn’t stay.

First I spoke to President Gay. I outlined what would have to happen, immediately, for me to be able to stay on. Then I spoke to the other members of the committee. I’ll only say that nothing in either conversation persuaded me I was making a mistake. 

As the former Dean of the law school, Martha Minow, who served on the committee with me, explained, her father once told her never to take a position that has accountability and no authority. I had done just that, and it was time to leave.

The post I wrote to explain my departure went viral, and many millions of people saw it on various platforms. The volume was a tribute to the enormous, pent-up frustrations people were feeling, and the sense of lethargy and indifference they experienced in the institutions they once trusted. Suddenly I was sought out by anguished students and media eager to explain Harvard’s paroxysms to the world.

As I wrote in my resignation post: “The ideology that works only along axes of oppression and oppressed places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.”

And I acknowledged that Harvard, along with other institutions, was in need of a “vast unlearning.”

By now the silences had distinct shapes. The silence of many Jewish students and faculty was that of grief. We were in mourning and like Aaron in the bible, silence seemed to fit the shocked and pained mood. But silences of other kinds prevailed as well: After the hearing not a single professor at HDS reached out to me or, so far as I know, to any of my Jewish colleagues. The fear of being seen as supportive of Jews seemed to cripple the eloquence of noted academics. There was a void where encouragement or even acknowledgment should have been. One student listened to her teacher devote an entire class, purportedly on ‘public health’ elaborating on the suffering of children in Gaza. Afterward, the student asked the Professor (who was Jewish) about the children of Israel. Why didn’t you ask during the class, I wondered? Because, the student explained, ‘I didn’t want to put a target on my back.’ I heard many stories of hiding, knowing all the while that there is more hiding than we know. Hiding and silence are not unfamiliar in Jewish history, but in 21st century America, at Harvard? 

There are faculty and administrators who simply do not believe Jewish students could be victims, or victimized. It didn’t matter that in the lifetime of people still walking this earth more than a third of all the Jews in the world were murdered. It is irrelevant that antisemitism is a hatred older than the Greeks and the Romans they study in ancient history classes and archives. No one seemed to take into account that this particular hatred was supercharged by the classical Christianity that founded Harvard or even that the brutality of the slaughter on Oct. 7 represented a desire to harm and violate Jews shared by far too much of the world. The Jewish kids at Hillel and Chabad appear white and privileged, rather than the children and grandchildren of refugees, heirs to a tradition that both created the West and was decimated by it. So apparently they could not be victims, human beings entitled to sympathy, support, understanding and protection.

Then there are Jewish students who know the safest silence is to join the chorus. How often could one spot wearers of multicolored kippot chanting “from the river to the sea” in the surreal parade of students advocating for their own destruction? Throughout Jewish history there have been Jews eager to embrace people who detest them; when Moses finally did lead the people out of Egypt, they clamored to return. 

After the hearings and again after the winter break, Harvard’s campus devolved into a mosaic of legitimate concern and hysteria. I took calls all the time from students and parents who were afraid. They wondered, in anguished voices, what the college they chose and the country they love had become.  

Hatred hid in plain sight and accusations of prejudice flew in all directions. Antisemitism, like racism, is the nuclear accusation, and I spent a good deal of time trying to help people direct it to those who deserved it, so as not to cheapen its importance, or to let genuine antisemites off the hook. In a resolute attempt to reach across the boundary I sat with Arab students and at the end of a conversation gave several of them my contact information and suggested we should initiate a dialogue. They never called. Apparently for some, even to engage with the other side is a betrayal. 

Media attention to Harvard’s campus began to wane, then came the encampments. They were as celebratory as they were indignant. On Passover I walked by the encampment and saw the “Jewish tent” filled with bread and crackers and cereal. The students posed in their kaffiyehs in front of the John Harvard statue and draped it in a kaffiyeh.  All the while we heard about terrible Islamophobia, but although I know Jewish students who removed their kippot, kaffiyehs were the “in” fashion statement, whether you were from Riyad or Greenwich. 

Throughout Spring semester, as the war continued to rage, the rot spread across the world of higher ed. A highly regarded professor at UCLA could write, in a prestigious publication, “American universities are perceived as supporting Israel’s objective, which appears to be the wholesale extermination of the Palestinian people,” recycling a blood libel with roots in the Middle Ages. Nazi images are still rife; one would think Harvard students would have the requisite historical knowledge to invoke other villains. But no, Torquemada and King Leopold II and Vlad the Impaler lie dusty on the shelf (not to mention Stalin or Mao). The only image for one you don’t like is Nazi and the only paradigm of evil is Hitler. We are stuck reliving WW2 night on the History Channel at each demonstration. As some have noted, there is a special, sick frisson in comparing the Nazis’ greatest victims, the Jews, to Nazis themselves. After all the purpose of a scapegoat is to clear one’s own conscience.

 Now that the school year is over and I look back with a bit of distance, a few things seem clear to me that are worth recording as a first draft of history:

Antisemitism on campus is not a new phenomenon. When the crisis first erupted President Gay in her speech to Harvard Hillel spoke about “Harvard’s long history of antisemitism.” That is entirely correct. Way back in 1922 the governing board of Harvard unanimously voted that there was a “Jewish problem” — referring to the necessity to limit the number of Jews admitted to Harvard.  https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/11/9/legacy-admissions-scrut/ Even before Oct. 7, there was widespread feeling among the Jewish students and faculty that current policies of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion were weighted against Jewish students, and ideological antisemitism that embraced a rejection of Israel had been growing on campus for decades. As several students said to me when I expressed dismay, “Welcome to my world.” They explained that the slights and subtle disparagements of their Jewish identity had been a long-time complaint and usually ignored. 

At the same time, many of the leaders and administrators with whom I met and spoke were people of both good will and genuine perplexity about how to address the problem. But as is often the case, they were the voices that remained quiet, or “worked behind the scenes” which here is a synonym for avoiding the whiplash of public positions. They were afraid of, or in thrall to, the very students whom they were supposed to teach.

Of course, some of the faculty had very little good will. I know of an eminently qualified student, festooned with the type of extra curriculars and record any university would prize, but also a self-declared Zionist, who upon applying was told by an Assoc. Dean renowned for her hostility to Israel, “We think of Israel as an occupier in this school.” (Again, HDS).  The statement was apropos of nothing. They weren’t discussing Israel. But it was said in the same smug, certain tone as one would say “we oppose serial killing here at Harvard.” 

The Jewish students went through channels, and channels can be as oblique and ineffectual as protests are direct and unignorable. One Dean said to me, privately in background deeper than a Hamas tunnel, “I can’t stand the protests, I think they are in bad faith, but I also can’t suspend an entire cohort of people, can I?” This was a few weeks before Vanderbilt did just that, in response to a protest that violated its rules.

What did not make the press was that the majority of students just want to get a degree and get a job. Repeatedly I would ask undergraduate students about their take on what was happening on campus only to get, if not blank stares, at least dismissals. Many were sad to see President Gay resign, since they held hope for an African American woman as President. Some might agree or disagree with the prevailing progressive views, but they were not the focus of their life as they were for the activists.  

For the zealots, hostility to the West was an animating force. In an unconscious echo of the leaders of Iran, some of the protesters would shout “down with America” with the same Che Gueveran gusto that they shouted “down with Israel.” The Mephistophelian pairing — little Satan and big Satan — is back, not from the Supreme Leader of a rogue nation in the Middle East, but from students, some of whom had grown up in the Middle East, and others of whom, it pains me inexpressibly to say, grew up in synagogues in Scarsdale.

The New England Protestant roots of Harvard shaped a picture of the Jew that is now bolstered by students from the Middle East where antisemitic tropes are imbibed with one’s mother’s milk. Even in countries ostensibly at peace with Israel like Jordan the most venal and familiar of antisemitic stereotypes are regularly shown. In countries where there has been no moderating influence at all, including Syria, Pakistan and others, the education about Jews is almost inconceivable to Americans, but it touches our campuses. The students who stood up to cheer for Hamas may not have been the majority, but they were not outliers either.

This matters because both in this country and abroad Harvard has an outsized influence. Many Harvard students, having waded in the murk of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric throughout their college (and sometimes high school) years, will now go on to positions of leadership within multinational corporations, global politics and media as well as academia. They will shape society worldwide. Ideological deformities and malignancies are preparing to infiltrate positions of power in the U.S. and abroad. 

 “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” one HDS student said to me about the university she once dreamed of attending. She loved some of the professors and many of the students. Harvard is a place of stupendous resource and fascinating people. But it had repeatedly given her the message that her passions were not just unshared, they were in some deep sense evil. Standing alone at a demonstration, praying for the hostages, she was accosted and chased away. To be a good Jew on campus was to disavow Israel which was genocidal, to disdain America, which was racist, and to be ashamed of whiteness which was her inexorable identity, Jew or not. 

Before the last term ended, my class wrote an appeal to the Dean of HDS to bring me back next year, desperate for a class that wasn’t tainted by ideological special pleading. Two alumni approached Harvard offering to fund my return. The resulting lack of response was unsurprising, although three other universities reached out to ask me to teach.  Some of the students will miss me, but HDS won’t. 

In his autobiography, Sartre comments that “like all dreamers, I confused disillusion with truth.” These students, along with their entire generation, have discovered the world is not frictionless, that authority figures are flawed, that politicians, the media, the clergy and the professorial class — none of them are the idealized specimens that we all once pretended to be. Alongside this is the first generation of young people who have essential life skills that their parents, digital primitives all, do not possess. There is a great deal of disillusion, which, mixed with an uninformed idealism, is a powerfully toxic combination. 

The vast unlearning has to start now. As a rabbinic sage said long ago, we do not have to finish the work, but we dare not desist from it.  

The vast unlearning has to start now. As a rabbinic sage said long ago, we do not have to finish the work, but we dare not desist from it. 

In my class we studied the Esh Kodesh, the remarkable Rebbe of Warsaw. In the midst of tremendous suffering, he wrote that pain can be a channel to God.  One beautiful result of this heartbreaking year is a reawakening in many Jews.  They have found through pain, as the Rebbe would have predicted, a path back to our tradition and our people.

And part of that renewal is the awareness that our children deserve a loud, sustained and serious response from the Jewish communities and our allies. For all the duplicitous distinctions between Jews and Zionists, we must be clear about the deep nature of this movement.

As a student in my class put it, after having walked through Harvard Yard and being screamed at by some of the protesters: “They don’t just hate what I believe. They hate me.” 

I wanted to contradict him. But I felt, as he said it, that sick feeling again in my stomach and this time I took it for what it was — the harbinger of truth.

Rabbi David J. Wolpe served on Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group before stepping down in early December.