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At Harvard and beyond, some students blame Israel for Hamas attacks, reigniting campus Israel debates
(JTA) – Hours after news broke that Hamas had murdered hundreds of Israelis in border towns near Gaza, students at Harvard University sat down to write a letter of protest.
The letter, titled “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” does not mince words. It opens, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Expressing no sympathy for the hundreds of Israeli victims, the dozens of student groups — including representatives of Palestinian, Arab, Black, Bengali, Pakistani, South Asian and Sikh student associations — instead focused on Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians and stated plans to retaliate against Hamas in Gaza.
“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” it reads, concluding, “The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
The student letter was joined by at least two others, at Columbia University and New York University, that targeted Israel for condemnation. Students at other schools made pro-Palestinian social media posts and held pro-Palestinian demonstrations this week, some linking Hamas’ actions to Indigenous Peoples Day.
Taken together, the activities — and the responses they generated — are a sign that the campus wars over Israel, already a lightning rod for controversy, are reigniting in the aftermath of Hamas’ attacks.
Antisemitism watchdogs say campuses are already a hotbed of anti-Israel activity, and a Palestinian culture festival at the University of Pennsylvania induced an early-in-the-semester flareup of debate last month.
Now, Students for Justice in Palestine, a national group with chapters at major universities across the United States, has declared Hamas’ operation to be “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and called for a “Day of Resistance” on Thursday.
The group is encouraging local chapters to hold demonstrations to “continue to resist directly through dismantling Zionism” and distributed a list of talking points that stated, “When people are occupied, resistance is justified,” declared that “settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law,” and framed Hamas’ actions as “Gaza broke out of prison.”
Some Jewish students have expressed concern about the group’s plans. “Although these are all non-violent tactics, they raise the real possibility of creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, and the confrontational spirit that permeates the toolkit raises the concern that these actions could lead to acts of harassment or vandalism targeting Jewish students and organizations,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement about SJP’s “Day of Resistance.”
Whatever happens on Thursday, it’s clear that the attack on Israel has given rise to a new third rail in campus discourse about Israel, around who deserves blame for Saturday’s unprecedented violence against Israelis. Here’s what has happened at three universities where the third rail has already been touched this week.
At Harvard, administrators leave 30 student groups’ letter unanswered for days
Even as Harvard and other schools have held numerous vigils and demonstrations for victims of the attacks, the letter has quickly prompted widespread condemnation from campus Jewish groups, influential Harvard alumni and beyond.
“In nearly 50 years of Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” Lawrence Summers, the Jewish former Harvard president and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, posted on X Monday.
One Jewish group, Harvard Jews for Liberation, also signed the letter; the group, which originated out of Harvard Divinity School, calls itself a “spiritual and political space for anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews at Harvard.” A Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment to a student listed as one of the group’s lead organizers was not returned.
Harvard and Columbia’s presidents did not immediately issue official statements about the attacks. Harvard President Claudine Gay and 17 other senior officials released a statement on the attack on Monday, two days after the student groups’ statement. Gay, the school’s provost and top deans did attend events marking the attack, including a “solidarity dinner” at Hillel, according to a report in the Crimson, the student newspaper.
The statement said administrators were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” It added that the violence “hits all too close to home for many at Harvard,” and expressed the hope that “we can all take steps that will draw on our common humanity and shared values in order to modulate rather than amplify the deep-seated divisions and animosities so distressingly evident in the wider world.”
But this statement was also criticized by alumni, with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, who is Jewish, denouncing it as “word salad approved by committee.”
The issue was particularly potent at Harvard, which has recently served as a flashpoint for different facets of the Israel campus debate. Last year, a range of alumni and community members also denounced the Crimson’s endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
And earlier this year, the Ivy League school extended a fellowship offer to Ken Roth, a fierce Israel critic and former Human Rights Watch director, after receiving broad pushback for earlier denying his appointment, reportedly for his views on Israel. (Roth, who remains a fellow at Harvard while also accepting a visiting professorship at Princeton, has denounced the Hamas attacks on Twitter, calling them “an egregious war crime” and adding, “War crimes by one side never justify war crimes by the other. Is either side listening?”)
“I think a lot of us were disappointed that our peers at Harvard Law School would sign such a letter,” Erica Newman-Corre, co-president of the law school’s Jewish Law Student Association and a Harvard College alum, told JTA. “In law school there’s a lot of focus on nuance and conversation, and we felt that the letter wasn’t consistent with those values of law students.”
Newman-Corre does not typically use her phone on Shabbat but turned it on when she heard news of Israel because she has family currently visiting the country. Her family is now safe, but the campus climate over the issue has upset many Jewish students, she said.
“Over my years at Harvard there’s been some anti-Israel sentiment, but it’s never pervasive and it’s never felt like I can’t go about my daily life without experience or noticing it,” she said. “This is obviously a more extreme moment.”
Frustrated Jewish Harvard student groups and alumni circulated a statement of their own condemning the one by the solidarity group.
“The statement signed by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and dozens of other student groups blaming Israel for the aforementioned attacks is completely wrong and deeply offensive,” reads a “Joint Statement on War in Israel” signed by more than a dozen Jewish Harvard groups, hundreds of faculty and staff and thousands of other individuals including several alumni.
“There are no justifications for acts of terror we have seen in the past days,” the letter continues. “We call on all the student groups who co-signed the statement to retract their signatures from the offensive letter.”
Among the signatories: Harvard Hillel, Harvard Chabad, emeritus professor and prominent pro-Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz, divinity school visiting scholar Rabbi David Wolpe, novelist and alum Dara Horn, Newman-Corre, and dozens of Harvard Medical School professors. Some public figures who are not Harvard alums, including New York Democratic Rep. Richie Torres, also signed.
“It’s kind of shocking to know that we’re sitting in classes with peers who are blaming our people for our people’s own murders and rapes,” Jacob Miller, the student president of Harvard Hillel and an initial drafter of the open letter, told JTA. “And I would say that this is very antisemitic. I don’t know how Jewish students are going to handle this. I don’t know how Jewish students are expected to move forward living in this campus environment and attending classes with students who are so callous.”
Following the oppositional letter, Gay issued a second statement about Israel Tuesday, which Harvard published online but did not immediately email to students. In it, she specifically condemned Hamas.
“Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region,” Gay wrote. Then, referencing the initial letter, she added, “While our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
By late Tuesday, several of the student groups had removed their names from the initial letter, with leaders telling the Crimson they had not been made aware their organizations had signed on, and some saying they hadn’t read the statement. Others issued statements of their own condemning Hamas. The college also said that students involved in groups that signed the letter were seeing their personal information leaked online, while Jewish hedge-fund manager and Harvard alum Bill Ackman wrote on X that other CEOs want Harvard to release names of every group participant “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.”
Student groups say Columbia’s support for Israeli students constitutes ‘discrimination against Palestinians’
Meanwhile at Columbia, a longer statement from student Palestinian solidarity groups said they would mourn “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” while also asserting, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid and settler-colonization.”
It adds, “If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out.”
The letter goes on to call on Columbia to end its connections with Israel, including its center in Tel Aviv and partnership with Tel Aviv University, and criticizes university statements to students about the attacks as “discrimination against Palestinians” for only mentioning Israeli students. (One such email was sent to the university’s School of General Studies, which is popular among Israeli military veterans.)
Two dozen student groups had signed the letter as of Wednesday morning, representing Palestinians, women of color, South Asian law students and queer and trans people of color, among others. As in the Harvard letter, an anti-Zionist Jewish group, the Columbia chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, also signed. Emails sent to the group via a listed email address bounced back.
Without referencing the letter, the president of Columbia’s law student senate issued his own statement condemning the Hamas attacks.
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, issued her own statement on the conflict Monday. “I was devastated by the horrific attack on Israel this weekend and the ensuing violence that is affecting so many people,” wrote Shafik, an Egyptian-born legal scholar and former World Bank executive who is in her first semester heading the university. The school hosted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a webinar Tuesday to discuss the situation in Israel.
A prominent NYU student leader blames Israel — and loses a post-graduation job offer
While the Harvard and Columbia letters were made up of smaller student groups, NYU’s originated with a more prominent student leader. On the front page of the law school student bar association’s newsletter this week, their president stated, “I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”
New York University School of Law, Nov. 6, 2021. (ajay_suresh via Creative Commons)
Refusing to condemn “Palestinian resistance,” Ryna Workman instead provided a long list of other things they condemned, including “the violence of apartheid,” “the violence of collective punishment,” and “the violence in removing historical context.” They concluded, “Palestine will be free.”
Workman’s statement upset Jewish law students at NYU, with some exploring whether they can be removed from their presidency. “The SBA President’s statement was shocking,” current law student Nathaniel Berman told JTA. “I am hoping for a forceful response from the administration, but not holding my breath.”
David Friedman, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel under President Donald Trump and is an NYU law school alum, called on his fellow alumni to “cut them off” and not to hire “a single one of their students” over Workman’s letter. “If this is their takeaway from the Hamas massacre of 1000 Jews, let’s hope their next organization is called ‘The Idiot Unemployed Lawyers Association,” he wrote on X.
Late Tuesday, the law firm of Winston & Strawn, which had extended an offer of employment to Workman, announced in a statement that it had rescinded the offer.
“These comments are profoundly in conflict with Winstron & Strawn’s values as a firm,” the unsigned statement read. “Winston stands in solidarity with Israel’s right to exist in peace and condemns Hamas and the violence and destruction it has ignited in the strongest terms possible.”
The dean of NYU’s law school, Troy McKenzie, also condemned Workman’s letter in an email to students Tuesday afternoon. The message, McKenzie wrote, “certainly does not express my own views, because I condemn the killing of civilians and acts of terrorism as always reprehensible.”
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The post At Harvard and beyond, some students blame Israel for Hamas attacks, reigniting campus Israel debates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Downgrades Diplomatic Ties With Brazil Amid Rising Bilateral Tensions
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/Pool
Israel announced on Monday it was downgrading diplomatic relations with Brazil after Brasília rejected its proposed ambassador, marking the latest escalation in tensions between the two countries.
“After Brazil, unusually, refrained from replying to Ambassador [Gali] Dagan’s request for agrément, Israel withdrew the request, and relations between the countries are now being conducted at a lower diplomatic level,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
“The Foreign Ministry continues to maintain deep ties with Israel’s many circles of friends in Brazil,” the statement read.
Israeli authorities also noted Brazil’s “critical and hostile line toward Israel” since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Jerusalem of committing “genocide” in Gaza, claiming the only historical parallel was “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” after which Israeli authorities declared him a “persona non grata.”
Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Brazilian government has positioned itself among Israel’s harshest critics, joining countries that seek to undermine its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Last year, Brazil recalled its ambassador to Israel and has not named a successor.
The South American country has also recently withdrawn from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a global coalition of nations committed to fighting antisemitism and preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
The Brazilian Israelite Confederation (CONIB), the country’s leading Jewish organization, sharply condemned the move, noting it comes “amid a sharp rise in cases of antisemitism and hatred against Jews worldwide.”
According to CONIB, the measure “represents a moral and diplomatic setback, weakens Brazil’s international commitment to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and paves the way for the undermining of global efforts in combating antisemitism.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also condemned the move, denouncing Brazil’s growing hostility toward Jerusalem in a social media post on Tuesday.
“[Lula] has now revealed himself as an outspoken antisemite and Hamas supporter by pulling Brazil out of the IHRA, the international body established to fight antisemitism and hatred toward Israel, aligning the country with regimes such as Iran, which openly denies the Holocaust and threatens the existence of the Jewish state,” Katz wrote in a post on X.
“As Israel’s Defense Minister, I affirm: we will defend ourselves against the ‘axis of evil’ of radical Islam, even without the help of Lula and his allies,” the Israeli defense chief continued.
“It is a shame for the wonderful Brazilian people and for the many friends of Israel in Brazil that this is their president. Better days for the relationship between our countries will still come.”
Quando o presidente do Brasil, Lula @LulaOficial, desrespeitou a memória do Holocausto durante meu mandato como Ministro das Relações Exteriores, declarei-o persona non grata em Israel até que pedisse desculpas.
Agora ele revelou sua verdadeira face como antissemita declarado e… pic.twitter.com/O0rzmTYqPA— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) August 26, 2025
Last month, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira confirmed that Brazil would join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
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UC Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian: Israel Wants to Conquer Mecca, Might Charge Admission Fee for Egypt’s Pyramids
Hatem Bazian, founder of American Muslims for Palestine and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Photo: Screenshot
A professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has also established himself as one of America’s most influential Islamist activists promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a lecture earlier this month at a California mosque, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley, co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has become notorious for intimidating Jews on university campuses, as well as American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit he now chairs which has sponsored a series of anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described AMP as being “at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.”
On Aug. 15, Bazian expressed the antisemitic conspiracism which has undergirded the Islamist movement since the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, with a stated goal of implementing Islamic law around the world.
“He [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] wants to make Gaza the Riviera, with Mr. Trump – he’s not satisfied with that. He’s not satisfied with annexing the West Bank, which Trump and the US administration is already giving on. He’s not satisfied with the Golan Heights. He’s not satisfied that he has already taken the Sharm El-Sheikh area,” Bazian stated during a lecture at the Muslim Community of Folsom, California.
“Netanyahu says: ‘I want Jordan.’ He wants Greater Israel, he wants Jordan, he wants Lebanon, and he wants Egypt – the Pyramids – because he wants maybe, if tourists are coming, maybe he will charge people to go up to the Pyramids,” Bazian continued in remarks flagged by MEMRI.
Bazian claimed that Netanyahu “wants Egypt and he wants Saudi Arabia, because the Mecca and Medina area – he says it is part of Greater Israel. He said this on the news, in an interview.” The UC Berkeley professor then added, “Now, all of the Arabs who are committed to the Abraham Accords, who do tawaf in the White House – they were just like saying: ‘We thought we were partners.’ They didn’t know that they were on the menu.”
The Abraham Accords were a series of US-brokered peace agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.
The United Arab Emirates, a leading driver in the Abraham Accords, regards the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, designating it as such in November 2014, and named the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) as components within its global influence network.
The longtime organizer of anti-Israel activism also accused Jews of exploiting antisemitism to make money.
“The whole monetization and weaponization of antisemitism is no longer working,” Bazian said. “I do believe that Zionism no longer has a standing globally. Now, between the end of Zionism as an ideology and as a genocidal policy versus the liberation of Palestine – it might take a number of years.”
According to MEMRI, in a YouTube video published on May 9, 2024, Bazian expressed his belief that Israel is a colonial project.
“We are not the one that have committed pogroms against Jews. History of Muslim, Arab, Christian relations in the East with Jewish population is not European history. Is not the Balfour history. Is not the French history. Is not the German history,” Bazian said. “Zionism was born in Europe because Europe is racist, was racist, continues to be racist, and has not recovered from its racism.”
Bazian described how the Islamists’ battle “for a free Palestine” is at its core “a fight against racism, against Islamophobia, against antisemitism as it has been articulated, and not according to ADL, Netanyahu, Biden, European racism, or anything of that history. So, our change is a change of a different future, a different world. What [inaudible] said, end of colonialism, a dying colonialism. What we are seeing today is a dying colonialism.”
Bazian has previously made comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany and defended Hamas. In 2015, he wrote that Gaza was “an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked up this time around” and that “the Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’”
Despite Bazian’s prominent academic stature at UC Berkeley, his activist network has come under legal scrutiny.
On May 9, a circuit judge in Virgnia ordered that AMP disclose its funding sources, following investigative efforts by Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares who said he “has a legal obligation to ensure that charitable organizations operating in Virginia are following the law.”
A second suit from earlier this year alleged that AMP constituted a rebranding of Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which had previously been found liable for $156 million due to its support for Hamas.
The suit stated that AMP comprised “largely the same core leadership as IAP/AMS” and that it “serves the same function and purpose; it holds nearly identical conventions and events with many of the same roster of speakers; it operates a similar ‘chapter’ structure in similar geographic locations; it continues to espouse Hamas’s ideology and political positions; and it continues to facilitate fundraising for groups that funnel money to Hamas.”
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Federal Lawmakers Launch Investigation Into Antisemitism at US Medical Schools
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect
Campus antisemitism at US medical schools is next in line to be examined by the federal government following the announcement on Monday of a major probe to be conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
US lawmakers announced an investigation into three institutions: the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed, ” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, a Jewish faculty group at UCLA’s medical school, titled Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg), first sounded the alarm about antisemitism on the campus in February, issuing an open letter which called attention to a slew of indignities to which they have been subjected since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The primary agent of anti-Jewish hatred identified by JFrg is the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism (AAAR), a university-created body that has allegedly violated its mission to promote pluralism by lodging defaming accusations at the pro-Israel Jewish community in a series of reports, one of which contained what JFrg described as intolerable distortions of fact.
JFRG’s letter went on to enumerate a litany of falsehoods spread by AAAR, including that Jewish faculty have conspired to undermine academic freedom with “coordinated repression, involving university and non-university actors,” aligned itself with conservative groups, and harmed minority students by opposing “racial justice.”
The letter listed nearly a dozen other incidents previously unknown to the public, including a seminar on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” which categorized Jews as white to disparage both groups and displayed images of “‘capitalists’ with long hooked noses”; a medical group engaging in atrocity-denial, issuing a statement charging that Hamas kidnapped no one on Oct. 7; and an administrator attending an event which glorified self-immolation and whose organizers attacked Jewish faculty as “anti-black racists” for criticizing Hamas.
Walberg said that choosing not to respond to such incidents may have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and requested a trove of documents from UCLA “related to reports or complaints of antisemitic acts” filed with administrative officials. He asked the same of the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he said Jewish students conceal their Jewish identities from medical workers for fear of being targeted for intentional malpractice and are denied the chance to hold public events to raise awareness of antisemitism.
Antisemitism in university medical schools is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, a study published by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department in May found.
Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study contained survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
The research was not StandWithUs’ first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In December, its Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. That study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, fearful of threats to safety.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author Alexandra Fishman said in May. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.