What It’s Like Being Jewish at Harvard

An alumni report on antisemitism on campus includes startling testimony from students and faculty

WSJ editorial. 

"Antisemitism has emerged on America’s college campuses recently in a way that might seem sudden, but it has been growing for years. The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance last week published a report that compiles testimony, much of it anonymous, from 50 current and former Jewish students and faculty. Here are a few of the disturbing things they said:

“Harvard signals that Jews are only acceptable so long as they don’t fully embrace Judaism.” The only way to cope is “not to dress ‘too Jewish,’ request the university accommodate Jewish holidays, speak Hebrew, or, God forbid, actually support Israel’s right to exist.”

• “It’s so much harder for the students who are visibly Jewish. I have a friend who wears a kippah who was physically cornered by a group of students demanding he denounce the so-called genocide.”

• “Because of my Jewish and Zionist identity, people think I am a monster. I have heard people say, ‘Zionists should be slain.’ I have heard people say, ‘You can’t possibly believe an Israeli, they are all settlers.’”

• “It’s pretty scary to walk around campus,” and pretty much all the Orthodox guys “have started wearing baseball caps.”

The report says bullying of Jewish students took place well before Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred Israelis civilians and precipitated the current war in Gaza. But since then, the problem has become “louder, prouder, and more visible.” While fellow students have been responsible for much of the problem, the Jewish alumni also document how it’s fueled by the Harvard professoriate and the school itself.

This year 112 Harvard faculty and staff called for a boycott of Israel and all companies that “sustain Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and systematic human rights abuses.” A visiting professor in 2022-23 offered a course called “Jihad, War and Peace in Islamic Law and Practice.” Required reading, according to the alumni report, included such insight as: “The suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a liberal tradition of armed conflict.”

Harvard’s School of Public Health has a partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, which the report says “prohibits Israeli Jews from campus” and “hosts military parades for Hamas.” While students were reluctant to speak on the record, the authors say that faculty were even more so, because they worried it “could get them fired or undermine a promotion.”

The report also reminds readers that after Hamas’s brutality on Oct. 7, the protests at Harvard began long before Israel launched a single response in Gaza. On Oct. 8 more than 30 student groups signed a statement saying that they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The ink was dry before Israel had buried its dead and counted the hostages.

Progressives claim to draw a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but the two are impossible to disentangle in these student encampments, amid the chants about freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea.” As one student put it: “Zionist is a code word for Jew.” Harassment is the same no matter the language."

The Radicals Getting Your Tax Money

The EPA awards $50 million to a group that says Palestine is a ‘climate justice issue.’

WSJ editorial. 

"The Biden Administration is showering far and wide more than $1 trillion in climate largesse from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Still, who could have thought that taxpayer funds would flow to a left-wing group that thinks “climate justice” involves everything from freeing Palestine to dismantling capitalism?

That’s the discovery made by West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s office. Democrats appropriated $3 billion in the IRA to the Environmental Protection Agency for “environmental justice” grants, including $600 million for a “national grantmaker” program. In December the EPA awarded $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance, a network of nearly 90 affiliates, which plans to use the money to “resource community-based organizations (CBOs) to address past, current, and future environmental health and justice challenges.”

What else does Climate Justice Alliance do? Last November it helped to coordinate a “March on Washington,” where protesters waved the banner “Free Palestine Is a Climate Justice Issue.” Other slogans included “Our Government Funds Palestinian Genocide” and “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.”

The group’s website includes a “Free Palestine” section, with a video that uses “an anti-colonial framework to show how Climate Justice and the liberation of Palestine are connected.” It doesn’t disappoint. “Climate change did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels,” the narrator says. “It began with settler colonialism, imperialism and extractivism.” He asks viewers “to demand that we cut military funding to Israel and begin the process of demilitarization, so that we can all be free.”

Climate Justice Alliance’s website also offers a collection of anti-Israel art “that you are invited to use for Palestine solidarity protest actions.” One shows a bulldozer tearing down an Israeli fence. Another has a man waving a Palestinian flag standing atop a tank, with the quotation: “Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.” That line is attributed to Assata Shakur, who fled the U.S. to Cuba after being convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. A third poster says: “Abolish Prisons Everywhere.”

The group has echoed calls to shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, such as in a 2020 blog post. “Why is it important, as we figure out how to stop contributing to climate change and how to adapt to climate change, to also figure out how to abolish ICE or dismantle racist institutions?” it asks. “The key is, they all work together to support this broken system and the status quo.”

In disbursing the EPA’s $50 million, Climate Justice Alliance plans to work with the NDN Collective. That group published a manifesto in 2022 that argues: “We should not treat the struggles we face against zionism, white supremacy, and imperialism as separate from one another, because they act as one to oppress and eliminate us.”

Climate Justice Alliance has a member called Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. It includes a working group called DemilitaRISE, which aims to “move resources away from police, prisons, the Pentagon, and war, and invest in Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led restorative justice, reparations, community leadership, and collective healing.”

A Global Justice Alliance video of a 2022 protest at the United Nations COP27 climate confab shows a sign saying, “Militarism is the # 1 polluter, killer, colonizer.” A speaker argued the military “is the avenue through which indigenous peoples are dehumanized,” and it protects “capitalism and colonialism, and capitalism and colonialism cause climate change.”

In other words, banishing fossil fuels won’t be enough to arrest rising temperatures and sea levels. Israel, the military, the police, immigration enforcement, prisons, and capitalism all will have to go, too. The EPA is funding radicals whose aim is to sow division and dismantle U.S. institutions.

***

Climate Justice Alliance’s website says that “more than $3 trillion will move through federal agencies” from the IRA and Congress’s 2021 infrastructure law, and “now is the time for grassroots organizations to influence the direction of, and step into governance of, these monies.” It’s no surprise that radicals are trying to get the money, but it’s disturbing that the Administration would give it to them.

The charitable explanation is that the Biden Administration, in its rush to hand out taxpayers dollars, isn’t scrutinizing the recipients. More worrisome is the idea that federal officials might agree with them."