Harvard’s Antisemitism Begins in the Classroom

The university ignored a suggestion to review its courses and lectures for academic rigor

By Dara Horn. Excerpts:

"Harvard’s School of Public Health, for instance, has a partnership program with Birzeit University in Ramallah. Harvard is usually allergic to bigotry—so much so that it changed its official law school crest in 2021 to avoid connections with a slaveholder who died centuries ago. At Birzeit, buildings are named after antisemitic murderers and students host Hamas military parades. Why does Harvard maintain a partnership with Birzeit, of all the universities on the planet? (In July Harvard moved the partnership program from the West Bank to Jordan due to “security concerns”—though not, presumably, due to Birzeit’s institutional enthusiasm for murdering Jews.)"

"In the 2022-23 academic year, Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies hosted the same number of events about Gaza and the West Bank as it did about Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt combined. The Harvard course catalogue and events calendar frequently feature “Palestine” and “decolonization.” But students need to dig deep to find a course or lecture mentioning that Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies of Iran, or that Israel has been fighting a multifront war against Iran for decades. Harvard is a pipeline to the State Department, so that future diplomats are carefully studying the America-Italy conflict.

Harvard students are clearly fascinated by the intifada; they can’t stop screaming about it. How do they learn what the First and Second Intifadas were? Given Harvard’s minimal academic coverage of this topic, the answer is probably TikTok.

This spring, a Harvard student told me that in one of his classes, the instructor taught about the Dreyfus Affair without mentioning antisemitism or that Alfred Dreyfus was Jewish. Imagine if a Harvard instructor taught about the causes of the Civil War without mentioning slavery or that enslaved people were black. This is academic malpractice at the price of $80,000 a year."

"When Harvard and its academic departments are invested—via billions of dollars from autocratic Middle Eastern regimes—in the same old bogus story in which the villains are Jews and the heroes are federally designated terrorist organizations, there’s no incentive for anyone to disagree."