Harvard University, in the midst of its funding fight with the Trump administration, released its long-awaited anti-Semitism report on Tuesday. It provides a scathing account of life at the Ivy League institution in the wake of Oct. 7, finding that “politicized instruction” in four Harvard schools “mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism.”
The report raises particular concerns with the Graduate School of Education, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Divinity School, and Medical School, four schools that the Trump administration also targeted for “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias.” At those schools, Jewish and Israeli students were routinely ostracized and subject to instruction “that effectively made a specific view on the Israel-Hamas conflict a litmus test for full classroom participation,” according to the report.
In one example, a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” graphic disseminated to students in a required School of Education course stated that those who oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement are engaged in “coded genocide.” That portion of the pyramid was just one step removed from “overt genocide,” which included the KKK, “lynching,” “burning crosses,” and “bombing black churches.” When a Jewish student expressed concerns, the instructor did not remove the graphic from course materials and instead “referenced the ‘land acknowledgement’ made earlier in class.”
The report details similar incidents at the School of Public Health, where Jewish students raised concerns over anti-Israel webinars only to be asked, “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?” At the Divinity School, Jewish students were subject to “the embrace of a pedagogy of ‘de-zionization'” in which instructors “attribute to Jews two great sins: first, in the Levant, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba; and second, in the United States, participation in White supremacy.”
