May 20, 2026

Harvard University is ending this academic year under mounting scrutiny over antisemitism, facing federal lawsuits, public criticism, and growing questions about whether its leadership is willing to confront the campus culture many Jewish students say has become increasingly hostile.

The latest development came this week, when Harvard asked a federal judge to dismiss the Department of Justice’s antisemitism lawsuit against the university, arguing that the government’s claims were legally deficient and based on outdated allegations.

The legal battle has become one of the clearest examples of the growing national conflict between elite universities and federal authorities over antisemitism and institutional accountability. But beyond the courtroom, it has also forced a broader question into public view: How did one of the world’s most influential universities allow concerns about antisemitism and ideological intimidation to escalate to this point in the first place?

The DOJ Lawsuit Put Harvard’s Campus Climate Under National Scrutiny

In March, the Department of Justice formally sued Harvard University, accusing the institution of failing to adequately protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment and discrimination following the October 7 attacks and the subsequent campus unrest that spread across American universities.

According to the federal complaint, Jewish and Israeli students faced exclusion from social spaces, disruption of campus life, and an environment in which university policies were enforced inconsistently. The lawsuit further alleged that Harvard failed to meaningfully discipline some of the most disruptive conduct that emerged during the protests.

The lawsuit intensified concerns that Harvard’s response to antisemitism has been largely reactive, driven more by external pressure than by a willingness to confront the campus culture that allowed tensions to escalate. Those concerns deepened further after a federal judge allowed the DOJ lawsuit to proceed, rejecting Harvard’s effort to distance the case from earlier antisemitism-related litigation.

Alan Garber Acknowledged the Problem Without Fully Addressing Its Source

Harvard President Alan Garber recently expressed concern about what he described as widespread “ignorance” among students debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But ignorance does not emerge in a vacuum.

For years, parts of Harvard’s academic and activist ecosystem have contributed to an increasingly politicized environment surrounding Israel and Zionism. Faculty-backed events, petitions, and public statements have often blurred the line between scholarship and activism while retaining the legitimacy of academic discourse.

The result has been a campus climate where many Jewish students feel rhetoric directed against Israel, Zionism or Israelis is normalized in ways that would likely trigger far greater institutional concern in other contexts.

This is precisely the contradiction Harvard still appears reluctant to confront directly. The administration has acknowledged rising tensions and concerns about antisemitism, yet it has largely avoided addressing how parts of the university’s own intellectual and institutional culture may have contributed to those conditions.

Faculty Controversies Continue to Fuel Debate Over Harvard’s Campus Climate

Concerns about campus culture have also been amplified by a series of faculty-linked controversies that many Jewish students and alumni believe Harvard has failed to address seriously or consistently.

Among the most debated figures are Diana Buttu, who said that Hamas had no real “choice” in launching the October 7 attacks and framed the war almost entirely as Israeli “genocide”; Karameh Kuemmerle, who has faced scrutiny for promoting highly contested genocide accusations while minimizing Hamas’ responsibility for the conflict; and Vijay Iyer, who portrayed Israel and its supporters as “the most powerful people on the planet” engaged in “evil, deranged state-sponsored terror.”

The issue is no longer simply about individual faculty opinions. At the center of the debate is whether Harvard has developed an institutional culture in which certain forms of ideological activism are increasingly treated as professionally insulated from scrutiny, even when many students view the resulting rhetoric as intimidating, exclusionary, or openly hostile.

At a university as globally influential as Harvard, institutional silence does not remain neutral indefinitely. Over time, the absence of visible accountability can begin to shape the broader campus culture itself.

Harvard’s Reputation Is Now Tied to How It Handles This Crisis

Harvard has long positioned itself as a global symbol of intellectual rigor, academic leadership, and moral credibility. But over the past two years, the university has increasingly become associated with federal investigations, lawsuits, campus unrest, and growing public concern over antisemitism in higher education.

The university now finds itself in a position where statements of concern are no longer enough.

The university now finds itself in a position where statements of concern are no longer enough.

What many students, alumni, and outside observers are waiting to see is whether Harvard is willing to confront not only isolated incidents, but also the broader academic and institutional environment that allowed these tensions to deepen in the first place.

That is the real challenge now facing Alan Garber and Harvard’s leadership. How Harvard responds may ultimately shape not only its own reputation, but also the national debate over antisemitism, academic freedom, and institutional accountability in higher education.

Since Nicholas Kristof charged in The New York Times that there’s “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence” against Palestinians, many analysts have questioned Kristof’s sources, uncovered their biases, tracked how some testimonies changed. The most egregious act of journalistic malpractice, however, was the Times’ editorial failure to question – let alone prove – what veterinarians say is a biological impossibility: that a “dog mounted” a prisoner, as part of an intentional IDF campaign of canine rapes. Kristof clearly wanted to make history; he did. His dog-rape libel will long resound as the latest despicable chapter in a 1,000-year history of Jew-hating rape culture, wherein falsely charging Jewish perversion rationalizes abusing Jews perversely.

The aversion to Jews runs deep. Traditionally, many pious Christians and Muslims, stung that Jews rejected the “true” faith, decided that Jews must be particularly sinister. And with so many Jews looking like their neighbors – yet believing and acting differently – bigots project onto these strange intimates their sickest fantasies, then commit those very crimes against Jews.

Like so many prejudice-driven slanders, the Jew-haters’ most infamous medieval accusation, the blood libel, had a sexual dimension. The lie about Jews drawing Christian blood for matzah was absurd enough. But the alleged victims were often young boys – with claims of castration and other forms of genital mutilation reflecting many medieval Christians’ circumcision anxiety.

Antisemitic sculptures in churches and castles, stretching back to 13th-century Germany, the Judensau – the Jews’ sow – depicted Jews coupling with pigs, symbolizing the devil.

The philosopher Jonah Cohen calls centuries of depictions of Jews “as perverse, predatory, pornographic, horny vampires of the Orient,” the “lust libel.” These slurs are “likely rooted in a mental process known as ‘projective inversion’ whereby ‘A accuses B of a misdeed which A really wishes to carry out him or herself.’” The brutal accusations — no matter how false – rile up the haters to act out their sick thoughts.

Tragically, these and other mainstreamed-lies unleashed many pogroms over centuries – mixing mass rape with mass murder. In the April 1903 Kishinev Pogrom – which scandalized Americans – brutes on Russian Orthodox Easter Sunday slaughtered 49 Jews, while raping dozens, possibly hundreds. Accounts describe sadistic gang-rapes of neighbors, frequently perpetrated in front of husbands, children and parents.

Characteristically, the Nazis took these perversions to a mass scale. Their obsession with Jewish impurity and deviance reeked of sexual anxiety. Germany’s Race Defilement Laws offered to protect Aryan “maidens” from Jewish men caricatured as sexual predators, debasing the women – and their race. Paradoxically, the Nazis’ dehumanizing contempt for their victims didn’t stop them from raping Jewish girls, even forcing them to be mistresses and prostitutes, on an inconceivable scale.

Rapes during anti-Jewish riots were not only a European affliction. The Damascus Blood Libel imported medieval Christian lies about the Jews to Syria in 1840, decades before Theodor Herzl launched the formal Zionist movement.  This June will mark the 85th anniversary of the Farhud of 1941 in Iraq, particularly Baghdad. “Farhud,” the historian Edwin Black explains, is Arabized Kurdish for “violent dispossession,” although “some translate it as ‘mass rape and killing.’” Pro-Nazi Iraqi soldiers and policemen spearheaded the riots, murdering at least 128 Jews, injuring 600 others and raping hundreds. In his 2010 book, “The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust,” Black details: “Women were defiled everywhere. Arabs broke into the girls’ school and the students were raped – endlessly. … One young girl was raped – and then her breasts [were] slashed off – an all too typical crime that day.”  Those horrors effectively ended the proud history of Jews in Iraq, stretching back 2500 years to the Sixth Century, BCE.

In their century-long struggle against Zionism, the Palestinian national movement has embraced and updated this revolting mix of often sexually-charged blood libels and barbaric sex crimes. Oct. 7, 2023, and these latest lies, are the culmination of this growing sexual obsession and glorification of gendered violence against the Jews.

On Aug. 24, 1929, stoked by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, crying to avenge “the honor of Islam,” rioters ended centuries of peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence in Hebron. They massacred 67 Jewish residents, while raping, castrating, brutalizing others. The journalist Pierre van Paassen, a Unitarian minister, would recall in his best-selling 1939 autobiography, “Days of Our Years,” entering a home that “looked like a slaughterhouse,” with “severed sexual organs” and “cut-off women’s breasts … lying scattered over the floor and in the beds.” The house was looted.  Not “a single item has been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Around the picture’s frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman.”

Some historians speculate that such violence hastened the Jewish timetable in campaigning for a state, years before the Holocaust. The viciousness also helped build the Zionist cult of the muscular, unapologetic New Jew. Exorcising European Jewish cowardice, Zionist pioneers refused to be intimidated by their new Arab neighbors – many of whom were flocking to Palestine from other Arab and Muslim lands, as it flourished.

In the Middle East too, Jew-haters used the calumnies against Jews to justify the worst kind of anti-Jewish violence. “Rape culture” acknowledges the sometimes hidden messages, disrespectful assumptions, “boys will be boys” apologetics that greenlight sexual violence. As the Arab-Israeli conflict intensified, Arab and Palestinian sexual accusations and calls became increasingly bellicose. The traditional antisemitic rape culture fueled a Palestinian rape mania.

Israel’s founding spawned one of the Palestinians’ founding lies, their Ur-Blood Libel: Deir Yassin. In the 1970s, when Palestinian terrorists butchered schoolkids and Olympic athletes, they – and their supporters – cried “remember Deir Yassin!” It’s true, Jewish irregulars attacked that village in April, 1948. But Arabs then accused the Jews of massacring 254 Arabs, including 25 pregnant women, 50 breast-feeding mothers, 60 other women – while raping and mutilatingmany others. In their still-defining book on 1948, “O Jerusalem,” Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre described Jews cutting open a pregnant woman’s stomach “with a butcher’s knife,” and slashing at least two people “from head to toe,” as they “killed” and “looted,” then, “finally they raped.”

In 2021, however, Professor Eliezer Tauber published “The Massacre that Never Was: Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.” Tauber, who founded Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, backed 208 pages of text with nearly 100 pages of Arab, Israeli and British sourcing.

After describing fierce fighting from both sides, Tauber meticulously counted 101 Arab deaths, most “killed under battle conditions.” Ayish Zeidan, who was a teenager living in Deir Yassin in 1948, told a reporter 50 years later: “I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters.” As for the rape accusation, Zeidan insisted: “this is not true.”

Tauber quotes members of the Arab Higher Committee urging colleagues to give the battle “the utmost propaganda possible.” They coached villagers saying: “We want you to say that the Jews slaughtered people, committed atrocities, raped and stole gold.” When the Arab Higher Committee published photos of mutilated bodies, Tauber reports, a “Haganah intelligence man identified the bodies as actually being Jewish victims of mutilation by Arabs.”

The rape libel backfired. Rather than undermining the Jewish state five weeks before its establishment, the sexual allegations touched “a raw nerve in the Palestinian psyche,” the Arabic editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, Hazim Nusayba, admitted. Choosing their women’s honor over land, most Arabs fled. “This turned out to be the highest, most expensive, mistake that we made,” Nusayba realized. An estimated 60,000 Arabs in Palestine fled their homes before April 9. More than 350,000 would flee in the ensuing five weeks. Adil Yahya, a Palestinian researcher who interviewed many refugees in the late 1990s, concluded: “the Deir Yassin affair was the main cause for the 1948 exodus.”

The Deir Yassin lie tried balancing out the actual horrors inflicted on “The Lamed Hey” – 35 Jewish volunteers for the self-defense forces murdered in January 1948. Their bodies were so badly mutilated – with severed body parts – that many of them couldn’t be identified physically. The Deir Yassin Massacre myth also reflected the mass Arab feeling that Israel’s existence insulted Arab honor – and manhood. Israelis – like Jews for millennia before them – were called “germs,” “vermin” and a “cancer” who deserved to be “slaughtered” amid this anticipated Arab “cleansing.”

Over the decades, as exaggerated stories about these supposedly-victimized Patient Zeroes justifying Palestinian rape mania inspired thousands of terrorists, many Arabs committed antisemitic sexual crimes, roused by a culture of antizionist rape-lust. During the tense build-up to what became the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab cries to annihilate Israel did not just promise dhabh – slaughter – but I’tidaa’ – violation or assault – and tathir, purging. Radio Cairo and government-organized demonstrations vowed to “violate the honor” of Zionist women while offering victorious soldiers the “honor” of Jewish women. 

Indeed, after the 1967 War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, surviving Israeli prisoners reported searing torture, including sexual abuse, especially by the Syrians. Some bodies of fallen Israeli soldiers were found stripped. In December 1973 Israel submitted a formal complaint to the U.N. Security Council “regarding crimes of murder, torture, acts of brutality and other serious breaches of the Geneva Convention.” The report noted: “According to the testimony of some of the prisoners of war, sexual assaults, unnatural acts and sodomy were committed on a number of Israeli prisoners. There are attested cases of sharp objects having been inserted into the anus of Israeli prisoners of war.”

Perversely, because antizionists believe Israel can do no right, Israeli soldiers have also been accused of anti-Arab bigotry – precisely because of  “the lack of organized military rape,” as one academic argued in 2007.

As the Palestinian movement became increasingly Islamist, new tropes warned about the Zionists defiling the Islamic family and undermining Muslim morals. Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a founding ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood and modern Islamism, claimed “The Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society.”  That sensibility shaped Hamas’ 1988 founding charter. Article 28 claimed “The Zionist invasion” aims “at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam.”

Tragically, gendered violence spikes during wartime. And anyone claiming that no Israeli ever acted abominably is lying to themselves or others. But there’s a distinction between instances of deviant rape and the systematic intentional violence – nurtured throughout history, inflaming fanatics – that Hamas inflicted on Oct. 7 – and on many hostages for months thereafter.

Accusations of sexual violence must be taken seriously. But they should be conveyed judiciously, with the seriousness such crimes deserve. The Times’ sloppiness, imagining a systemic rape culture, makes it harder to investigate whatever incidents of deviant rape that may have occurred.

Such sloppy demagoguery reveals that antizionists aren’t seeking Israeli reforms or accountability. And the way this dog-rape libel mocks journalistic standards once again reflects the antisemites’ triple double-cross. Bigots hate Israel so obsessively, they betray the Jewish people and liberal values — but they also betray themselves. Feminists excusing the mass rapes of Oct. 7, or journalists acting like “churnalists,” churning up propagandists’ lies, undermine their core identities, their defining ideologies and professional standards to champion antisemitic antizionism.

It’s tedious to keep repeating the mantra: Israel’s not perfect because no country is, and it’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel. But after decades of antizionists’ demonizing Israel with old-fashioned Jew-hating tropes – then targeting Jews abroad – the burden of proof is on any antizionists to prove they’re not antisemitic too. They – and their Palestinian allies – keep merging the two hatreds.

This time, these shoddy, poorly-sourced lies should have died on the editor’s desk or what we might call the “OR” – the Operating Room for dissecting any bigot’s lies. If accusations reflect an Obsessive hatred, while tapping into a long-standing reservoir of images about the targeted group, the accusers fail the most basic smell-test.

As someone who won’t abandon standards as The Times did, I have no proof illuminating Kristof’s motivation. Nor can I confirm conclusively that the Times published this article just in time to upstage the detailed, substantive report issued by the “Civil Commission on Oct. 7,” an independent Israeli NGO. Reasonable suspicions aren’t hard facts. Nevertheless, The Times should retract at least the dog-rape riff in Kristof’s article – if not the entire mess. Alas, in this anti-Israel atmosphere of verdict first, facts afterwards, these accusations will keep resonating, echoing centuries of Jew-hatred too.

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred.” Next month, he will publish “The Essential Guide to the U.S-Israel Partnership, the 250th Edition.”