Shabbos Kestenbaum
Tablet, June 5, 2024
“… although the reports found that a Jewish student was spat on, an Israeli student was asked to leave class as her nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” another Israeli was assaulted at the business school, a staff member taunted me with a machete and challenged me to debate the Jewish involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvard didn’t acknowledge these incidents publicly or failed to address them for months.”
“I was called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.”
Thus said Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa. Fittingly, her deployment of antisemitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families at graduation last week encapsulated the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for the last year.
Even as I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a newspaper, The Harvard Crimeson (a pun on the country’s oldest newspaper, The Harvard Crimson) which accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an intifada are a direct call for violence. The 10-page paper went on to defend chants of “from water to water Palestine is Arab,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, just the week prior, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “intifada, intifada, coming to America.”
This of course followed an almost monthlong illegal encampment of students and professors in the center of Harvard Yard demanding a complete and total divestment from “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants used bolt cutters in an attempt to break open Harvard’s gates, depicted our Jewish President as a devil replete with horns and a tail, violated all time, place, and manner restrictions, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews like me on our way to class, they were handsomely rewarded. … [To read the full article, click here]
