In the Trump administration’s year-long battle with Harvard University threatening federal funding over alleged antisemitism, its precise concerns have emerged in fuzzy and piecemeal fashion — in comments from White House officials, administrative agency findings and letters to the university as a pressure campaign and negotiations dragged on.

That changed Friday with a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which levels specific allegations of how the government contends Harvard violated the rights of Jewish and Israeli students.

The government claims in its federal court complaint that these students had been “harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon,” and relies heavily on the report produced by Harvard’s own antisemitism task force, which found many Jewish students had experienced painful social isolation but stopped short of alleging that the university itself had engaged in antisemitism.

The lawsuit goes further, though, presenting its specific allegations alongside strident arguments popular with political opponents of the campus demonstrations that swept Harvard and other higher education institutions across the country after Oct. 7.

Harvard was not only too lenient toward protesters who violated school rules, but the protests themselves sought to intimidate and threaten violence toward Jewish students — the lawsuit claims — through the use of particular language.

Offensive terms

In laying out their case that students’ civil rights have been violated, lawyers for the federal government detailed offenses that Harvard allegedly permitted or allowed against Jewish students, and cited testimony from students who told the antisemitism task force that they had been assaulted and were afraid to display wear Jewish symbols on campus.

The complaint also provides examples of Harvard responding to claims of bias and discrimination lodged by other minority groups, that it says were not taken when community members raised concerns around antisemitism.

While stating that “peaceful protests that annoy Jewish and Israeli students” are not the target, the DOJ goes on to detail demonstrations that it asserts crossed a line, using slogans such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “globalize the intifada,” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.”

The DOJ stated: “to a Jewish or Israeli ear, these chants are racial slurs.”

After summarizing the Hamas attack against Israel — including a graphic allegation that Hamas terrorists cut open a pregnant woman’s womb and stabbed her fetus — the lawsuit said that the violence was “representative of what is meant by ‘intifada.’”

And the complaint also stated: “‘Intifada’ was the name given to a pair of wars waged by Palestinian groups against Israeli civilians” and that the only “reasonable” way to interpret the terms used by protesters was “as calls to kill Jews, rather than metaphors expressing political opposition to Israel.”

Prevailing on this point won’t necessarily be easy.

“Intifada,” in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, refers to two periods of political unrest that combined widespread protests against Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza with violent attacks on Israeli civilians. Palestinian militants killed around 1,000 Israelis during the second Intifada, which took place between 2000 and 2005, while Israeli soldiers killed an estimated 3,000 Palestinians.

“Globalize the intifada” has become an especially controversial slogan because it invokes this history of violence for many Jews.

But proponents of the slogans, including some Jews in the campus protest movement, have embraced them as an expression of solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

The lawsuit similarly states that “from the river to the sea” is similarly not a political slogan but a call to expel the Jewish population of Israel.

Potential precedent

Legal precedent on the slogans don’t work in Trump’s favor.

In October, a panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals — which oversees the Massachusetts district court in which the government filed its lawsuit against Harvard — rejected

the argument by student plaintiffs and StandWithUs that protesters at MIT were engaged in antisemitic behavior when they used similar slogans.

“Plaintiffs say that we should construe chants of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘intifada revolution’ as calls to wipe out the Jewish people as such,” the judges wrote in their ruling. “But neither slogan says as much on its face, nor do plaintiffs allege facts suggesting that either chant was commonly so constructed by the protesters.”

Ken Marcus, who ran the Education Department’s civil rights division during the first Trump administration, acknowledged that ruling could create a “controlling precedent” compelling the judge assigned to the Department of Justice’s case against Harvard to reject claims that the slogans were de facto antisemitic.

But he said other judges in the district had rejected attempts by Harvard to dismiss on free speech grounds other lawsuits that claimed that the school tolerated an antisemitic environment for Jewish students.

And some courts elsewhere in the country have reached the conclusions the Trump administration seeks. A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled in August that stealing an Israeli flag could be a hate crime because “targeting the Star of David is as racially motivated as the highly offensive racial slur, ‘‘n—.’” And the judge overseeing a lawsuit against the University of California, Los Angeles, that was ultimately settled ruled that anti-Zionist demonstrations required Jewish students to “denounce their faith,” declaring this “unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”

Marcus, who now runs the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said he supported the government lawsuit and was not worried that an unfavorable ruling — in which a judge rejects the notion that the campus protests were inherently antisemitic — would make it more difficult to bring similar cases against other universities.

“Even if the Justice Department loses its case, other universities aren’t going to want to be dragged through this sort of process,” Marcus said. “It will be expensive, it will be time-consuming — it’s just not the sort of thing that other institutions would want to risk.”

Latest salvo

The lawsuit is only the latest chapter in a campaign against Harvard that began almost a year ago when three federal agencies threatened to suspend $9 billion in funding to the venerable Cambridge institution unless it made a wide range of changes ostensibly intended to address antisemitism, including changes to academic departments and campus protest policies.

When the government made good on its threat to cut funds, Harvard sued and won a series of legal victories starting in June. Those, culminated in the fall, when a federal judge in Boston ruled that the funding freeze was illegal and that the White House had used “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

The government is appealing that ruling. But where the initial funding freeze relied on an untested legal theory in which the government claimed it was allowed to suspend grants for violations of civil rights law without following the standard procedure, Friday’s lawsuit follows the more conventional path and asks for judicial approval to revoke federal funding for Harvard and clawback three years worth of grants.

“In theory this process is what they should have been doing all along,” said Katy Joseph, who served as an Education Department official during the Biden administration. “But I think the conflict between the federal government and Harvard has gone far beyond vindicating the rights of Jewish and Israeli students — it’s more about proving a point than ensuring all students can learn.”

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Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Harvard University ignored antisemitism while extreme anti-Zionist activists subjected Jewish students to harassment and discrimination in violation of federal civil rights laws as well as the institution’s own purported commitment to anti-racism, the Trump administration alleged in a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts on Friday.

The complaint demands the recovery of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants and other federal support Harvard received during the years in which it allegedly neglected to correct the hostile campus environment.

The lawsuit marks a shift in the Trump administration’s previous strategy of confiscating Harvard’s federal money and then defending the action in court. That policy has yielded mixed results, making a strong political statement while leaving Harvard strong enough to mobilize its GDP-sized wealth to sidestep the worst potential consequences by issuing bonds or bringing the matter before judges who have been sympathetic to their case.

It has also alienated progressives, including some Jewish students, unwilling to validate the administration’s coupling addressing campus antisemitism with its parallel ambition of reforming higher education in a manner preferred by political conservatives. Others have said that they sustained collateral damage when funds were cut from their own departments and programs.

“Harvard has been and remains deliberately indifferent to what its own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias deemed the ‘exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities,’” US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued in the filing. “Harvard has failed to enforce its rules or meaningfully discipline the mobs that occupy its buildings and terrorize its Jewish and Israeli students. Harvard instead rewarded students who assaulted, harassed, or intimidated their Jewish and Israeli peers.”

In a statement, Harvard contested the government’s account of the facts, saying it “deeply cares about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.” It also argued that it enacted “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”

On Friday, Middle East expert and writer Alex Joffe told The Algemeiner that time will tell whether the government’s lawsuit is effective in addressing antisemitism at Harvard.

“The new filed lawsuit represents another volley in what has become a well-established pattern of federal allegations and Ivy League stonewalling,” he said. “Universities appear to have decided that the Trump administration is too preoccupied with other problems, not least of all Iran and battles with Congress, including Republicans, to pursue its reforms of the higher education industrial complex and are planning to wait it out.”

He added, however, that “the national security implications of the lawsuit come into focus,” noting that “the pro-Hamas movement is shown to be comprised of exactly the same protest groups and funders as the pro-Iran and anti-ICE movement, including the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, The People’s Forum, and others, all connected via personnel and Chinese Communist Party funders.”

There has been a major overlap between campus groups that participated in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests throughout the Gaza war and those that have been expressing support for the Iranian regime amid the current US-Israeli campaign against Iran.

Harvard University student Tejas Billas added, “This lawsuit largely copies Harvard’s own task force report, which found widespread discrimination against Jews and Israelis. It’s hard to say that Harvard has done all it can to combat antisemitism while many of Harvard’s proposed actions to improve the campus have yet to be implemented.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.

In a 300-plus-page report, the task force compiled a comprehensive record of antisemitic incidents on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s endorsement of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist atrocities in Israel, to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as murderers of people of color. The report identified Harvard’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups as a key source of its problem.

Throughout that time, according to a 2024 report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.

The committee charged that Harvard formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the controversial congressional testimony of former president Claudine Gay, in which the chief executive said choosing to punish antisemitism “depends on the context.”

The public has not learned anything new about Harvard, Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told The Algemeiner.

“The federal government is reaching conclusions drawn years ago but campus antisemitism at Harvard rages on,” she said. “The effort is appreciated, but the fight against antisemitism must not be reduced to a game of “Whack-A-Mole” — government should enact real enforcement mechanisms that correct both faculty and student conduct. This suit, if it succeeds, could achieve that, as it calls for an independent monitor of conditions at Harvard and other actions to correct the campus climate, but Harvard has proved adept at avoiding accountability. It may do so again.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

Philip Roth and Judy Blume were born five years apart in the 1930s. Both grew up in New Jersey, in the crucible of Jewish American suburban assimilation. Both were haunted by the Holocaust, news of which trickled stateside just as they were nearing adulthood. And both are literary icons.

But they’re icons of different kinds.

We see Roth as a giant of American Jewish literature, and Blume as a giant of American children’s literature. Within that distinction is a kind of tacit hierarchy. Roth was perceived as a writer for serious adults with serious concerns; Blume, as a writer for girls with girlish concerns. When Roth wrote about diaphragms (see Goodbye, Columbus) it was a bracing examination of shifting sexual mores at an inflection point in American culture. When Blume did, in Forever, it was sex education with a narrative twist.

I’ve been reading Mark Oppenheimer’s new biography Judy Blume: A Life, and thinking a lot about that hierarchy. I’ve read and loved a decent amount of Philip Roth, and a lot of Judy Blume. (I’ve written about both of them for this publication.) But I have a stronger relationship with her work than with his. One measure of a great novel is the dimensionality with which a reader experiences it. Do you see the characters as you read, smell their surroundings, hear their music? With Blume, my answer is always “yes.” With Roth, it’s “sometimes.”

So why have I, like many others, tended to think of Roth as an Important Writer, and Blume as merely an important writer to me?

This is a classic conundrum when it comes to children’s literature. As Alison Lurie wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs — which I am, by coincidence, also reading right now — children’s literature is the “stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated” in any English department. We must read extensively to grow up well, but there is a sense that anyone who stays overly attached to the things they read in those early years has somehow gone developmentally awry.

The book that has most influenced me is almost certainly Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, but for much of my adult life, I would never have named it if a stranger asked me about my favorite novel. Not just because doing so would have seemed like a bit of a faux pas — what if that stranger thought I was childish, rather than merely open to the joys of childlike wonder? — but because it felt private. Like the part of me that loves that red-headed orphan beyond measure was too personal to share.

Roth and Blume both made careers out of writing about things that felt too personal to share. Both were taboo breakers, who experienced the vicious backlash that can accompany such transgression.

But Blume broke taboos in what might be seen as safer ways. Roth engaged with the unspeakable; she attacked the impolite. By being open about the stranger parts of girlhood — the bleeding, the sexual experimentation, the friendships that collapse in ways neither party really understands — her work made it feel a little safer to be a girl. The intimate things could now be intimate, but shared.

A tragic literary paradox is that women writers often need to win male readers to be taken seriously. Once they’re known as a writer who women like, the spectre of “chick lit” attaches itself to their work, a phenomenon that predates the development of that label by centuries. Aphra Behn, one of the first professional women writers, broke boundaries in the 17th century only to be dismissed by the 18th as a lightweight who was too open about sex. I once spent a six hour drive from Chicago to St. Louis fighting with my progressive-minded college boyfriend about his reluctance to read Jane Austen. The fight wasn’t really about him; Persuasion was never going to be quite his style. It was about my sense that the things I liked lost respect in some vaguely defined public eye because people like me liked them.

On a certain literary level, it’s strange to argue that Judy Blume should be considered as great an American Jewish literary master as Philip Roth. Her sentences are simpler. So are her themes. Her approach to great American issues, like race, can be hamhanded. (To be fair, Roth’s could, too.)

But on another level, I think it’s not just reasonable but right to define great literature in part by its impact. Books are meant to deepen our connection to the world. They are meant to brighten our experience of life. They are meant to help us understand ourselves and our neighbors. Few American authors have done either of those things more powerfully, or for more people, than Judy Blume.

The release of Oppenheimer’s book has been clouded by the mystery of why Blume fell out with the author after reviewing his first draft. As a reader, I understand: Nothing is more enticing than a mystery. But I find it, frankly, sad that the first in-depth accounting of how Blume came to be a writer of such impact has been clouded by the desire for an accounting of what mysterious rifts opened between her and her biographer.

By 1964, Oppenheimer writes, Blume’s “specific milieu of suburban Jewish middle-class ease was nationally recognizable,” thanks to Roth’s work. When Blume had not yet started to write, Roth had produced a “shorthand for a kind of tacky, nouveau riche suburban Jewish experience.”

But he had done so for only a select portion of that populace: the young man on the come-up, the wealthy, bored girl trying to throw off her parents’ values without breaking herself off from their comfortable lifestyle.

The unspoken others in that vision — the basically good mothers, the mostly obedient daughters — needed their own chance to be recognizable, too. They were just as interesting, only, perhaps, in quieter ways. The literature of American Jewish life isn’t just more complete because Blume gave them voices. It’s better, too.

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