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Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs
(JTA) — As director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise says he leads a research institution, not an advocacy organization. Yet since Oct. 7, he says his research has been put on pause while he spends his time “just dealing with this.”
“This” refers to fallout from the deadly Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
“A lot of conversations have had to be had, educating both inside and outside the Jewish community,” Paradise said in an interview thismonth. “That happens daily. People want to know, should we respond and should we respond in an uproar? The donors are in an uproar. Administrators need context.”
At Minnesota, various academic departments issued statements on the conflict that Paradise calls “dismaying,” and others called actionable.
The university chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine plastered the doors of academic buildings with flyers bearing anti-Israel messages. A prominent Republican on the law faculty filed a civil rights complaint that this week resulted in a federal investigation. And the campus was roiled when a candidate for a senior position at the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion office gave a speech accusing Israel of genocide and denying reports that Hamas had committed sexual crimes in the Oct. 7 attacks.
The candidate is no longer being considered for the position, but the incident still ramped up concerns about DEI at Minnesota and beyond. When Paradise joined fellow scholars for a panel discussion about “Jews, Antisemitism and DEI: Campus Experiences” at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in San Francisco last month, emotions ran high.
“We have problems” with the campus DEI office, said Amy Simon, an assistant professor of Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University, where officials recently backed away from a project that would have addressed concerns about antisemitism. The office is known as the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, or IDI. “Sometimes they’re listening, but there’s never a real hearing from the top of the administration [or] the IDI either.”
DEI is a shorthand for a framework that says employers and institutions should be welcoming to diverse applicants, especially people of color, women and the LGBTQ community. Campus DEI offices offer training to students and faculty in how to be welcoming to marginalized groups, provide support groups for women, people of color and LGBTQ students, and work with the administration in promoting and identifying diverse candidates for faculty and administration jobs.
Members of the Association for Jewish Studies gathered for the organization’s 55th annual conference, held in San Francisco, Dec. 17-19, 2023. (JTA photo)
College campuses have had minority and multicultural affairs offices since the late 1960s and 1970s, focused largely on hiring more diverse faculty and staff and enrolling and retaining more students of color. In the mid-2000s, diversity officers who had been working in isolation formed the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. The organization’s membership has tripled to over 2,000 since July 2020, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, as universities reacted to the police murder of George Floyd and calls to address systemic racism.
As the offices have grown — more than two-thirds of all major universities have chief diversity officers — and as a backlash to the 2020 reckoning on race has deepened, criticism has mounted against DEI. In recent years, it has become a prime target of a group of activists — mostly conservative, and some of them Jewish — who blame DEI for an antipathy toward what they see as traditional American values and a misguided focus on identity over merit in academia.
One leader of the anti-DEI movement is Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who has argued that diversity initiatives undercut the values of the liberal arts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of the New College of Florida as part of an effort to remake it according to conservative values — and one of the first moves was to ax the DEI office. But it’s not just Florida: In 2023, Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states proposed more than 30 bills targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education.
Since Oct. 7, some Jews who would not normally feel at home on the right have found themselves joining the ranks of DEI’s critics. At the Jewish studies conference, many scholars said their schools’ DEI offices ignored Jewish concerns — either not recognizing Jews as a minority or seeing them as white and privileged, and therefore not subject to marginalization.
The seeming failure of many DEI programs to take Jews’ concerns seriously has led some Jewish leaders and conservative politicians to call for their dismantling. But others, particularly on the left, say the core values at the root of DEI initiatives are positive and the programs should be widened to include Jews.
No major Jewish group has called for abolishing the programs.
“We think it is an absolute mistake for anyone to say that DEI is the single cause of the explosion of anti-Jewish intolerance we are seeing,” Adam Neufeld, a senior vice president and chief impact officer at the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview. “It is a part of it, we’re sure, but it’s not the sole force. Antisemitism has existed for millennia.”
The ADL is working to improve rather than abolish DEI programs, he said, from privately consulting with campus administrators, to publicly calling out universities that don’t protect Jewish students and faculty, to supporting litigation in cases alleging schools have mishandled antisemitic incidents.
That approach is a mistake in the eyes of DEI’s most vociferous Jewish critics — many of whom view the campus convulsions after Oct. 7 as proof that they are right. Some of them pointed to the pivotal congressional hearing in December featuring three university presidents, who stumbled when asked whether calls for “the genocide of Jews” would violate their campuses’ speech codes. Two of the presidents, Liz McGill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, later stepped down. DEI is “the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard,” Bill Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who led the charge against Gay, said in a lengthy tweet cheering her ouster.
“For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity,” Bari Weiss wrote in a Tablet essay about how Jews should respond to Oct. 7. Weiss, who runs the news startup The Free Press, argued that under DEI, “equity” has come to mean that people are judged deserving according to their group identities. “If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation — and Jews are 2% of the American population — suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege.”
A protester carries a sign at a “Shut It Down for Palestine” rally outside the Foggy Bottom George Washington University Metro Station in Washington, D.C., Nov. 24, 2023. (Elvert Barnes Photography/Wikimedia Commons)
Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider that DEI “cannot be fixed,” saying that “efforts by communal Jewish organizations to include the Jewish community or soften its impact on antisemitism have failed.”
David Harris, the former CEO of the American Jewish Committee, also told Jewish Insider that he doesn’t believe that “outside efforts, however well-intentioned, that nibble around the edges or simply seek to add Jews to the DEI agenda, address the heart of the problem. DEI today poses a major challenge to liberal understanding of American societal aims.”
Other prominent Jews calling for the demise of DEI are Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer and pro-Israel activist; Mark Charendoff, president of the Maimonides Fund, and David L. Bernstein, a Jewish communal professional whose opposition to “wokism” led him to form the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.
“It’s not that we don’t want to make campuses comfortable places for people of color and gays and lesbians. God forbid,” Bernstein said in an interview. “Unfortunately DEI quickly evolved into an ideological framework that tells people in no uncertain terms who are the oppressed and who are the oppressors. It tends to divide people into racial affinity groups, which can be very divisive. It often imposes political litmus tests with DEI statements that applicants must submit for getting a job or getting promoted.”
Bernstein agrees with Weiss that DEI turns the relative academic and financial success of Jews against them by suggesting they are “riding on the backs of deprived minority groups.”
Bernstein and others also cite a 2021 report from the Heritage Foundation on the “public communications” of DEI professionals, saying they showed a disproportionate tendency to “attack Israel.”
“Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to see why so many DEI programs are loath to acknowledge the antisemitic nature of anti-Zionist behavior that so often leads to the harassment of Jewish students,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the pro-Israel AMCHA Initiative, wrote in a piece for Sapir, a journal of the Maimonides Fund.
At many campuses, DEI offices have staff who are trained in investigating and resolving complaints about discrimination, and are the main address for such complaints. However, in a college survey the ADL conducted before Oct. 7, more than half of all students surveyed said they had completed DEI training, but only 18% of those said those trainings included topics specific to anti-Jewish prejudice.
“That is a terrible and unacceptable situation,” said the ADL’s Neufeld. “It is dangerous, both in the sense that it excludes a historically persecuted people who are incredibly vulnerable and actually sends the signal that the exclusion is acceptable.”
Jewish critics of DEI frequently say this exclusion is the result of an “oppressor/oppressed” framework that considers Jews as white and privileged, but tend to provide little evidence. Instead, campus insiders say, there are other structural reasons for the exclusion of Jews and antisemitism from DEI offices.
“Judaism is seen as a religion, and DEI offices don’t touch religion in the sort of structural ecosystem of how the university works,” explained Samira Mehta, the director of Jewish Studies and an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, during a session at the AJS conference. “The university chaplains’ office is in charge of religion and religious diversity. DEI is in charge of racial and gender diversity. DEI is also not so welcome to Islamophobia, except to the degree that they keep their eye on what’s happening to brown students.
“And the people who come up through these offices do not have training in religious diversity and don’t know how to do it,” she continued. “Also the people who come up in those offices sometimes are coming up from queer and gender diversity standpoints.” Mehta referred to these as “all of those structural ways that antisemitism, while real, is not something they handle.”
Lauren Strauss, a professor of modern Jewish history at American University, said that was the experience of Jewish students on her campus who faced antisemitism in their dorms and classes after Oct. 7. They were told that “they should go see a chaplain because this is a religious matter, not racial, ethnic or social prejudice, and outside the DEI office’s mandate,” she said at the AJS panel on DEI. (This week, an activist law firm filed suit against A.U. over its handling of incidents affecting Jewish students on campus.)
Jewish faculty at A.U. have also pushed, with little success, for discussion of antisemitism, alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia, in a core curriculum course for first-year students and transfers known as the American University Experience. Even after agreeing to one session on the Holocaust, the university’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion said it was optional.
“The one bright spot in all this,” Strauss said, is the support she’s gotten from “a small group of Jewish studies and general studies scholars” and the campus Hillel director.
Yet Strauss and the other scholars did not say they favored abolishing the programs. While it may be satisfying to condemn the ideology underpinning DEI, they said, campuses need departments whose task it is to increase diversity and make the marginalized feel welcome.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs three higher education bills, including one prohibiting institutions from spending federal or state dollars on “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” programs, May 15, 2023. (Florida Governor’s Office)
Stacy Burdett, a consultant who helps corporations, colleges and nonprofits enhance DEI programming to address Jewish concerns, said calls to dismantle DEI offices also ignore the ways they in fact advance diversity.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a discussion of DEI that isn’t cognizant of the role that gender equity plays in the DEI movement,” she said, offering one example. “And also that the Jewish community itself is a place where there is a paucity of women leaders.”
Burdett said the current debate over DEI lacks the kind of nuance that Jewish groups brought to debates over a previous era’s civil rights issues, including quotas and affirmative action.
“There’s no question that some of the ideological underpinnings of DEI in some institutions are flawed, and sort people in categories that Jews don’t neatly fit into. I think everyone in the Jewish community wants the American public square to be a safer place for Jews, and there are just different ways of getting at that,” she said. “But we’re in a very polarized debate between two groups of people, one of whom sees diversity as a threat, and the other that sees it as the strength of a pluralistic society.”
At the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise shares many of the critics’ views of DEI’s shortcomings. But he is wary of joining in attacks that he sees either as politically motivated or hostile to the very idea of racial or gender inclusion.
“Those who want to dismantle DEI are acting in bad faith,” he said. “DEI does a lot of good. It does make a difference for students on campus. It could make more of a difference. It could make a better, more nuanced difference. But I think DEI plays a critical role on campuses.”
He prefers forming relationships with administrators at the university’s Office for Equity and Diversity, and said there have been successes, including a freshman orientation course that now includes discussion of antisemitism, and a change in how the campus Office for Equity and Diversity classifies antisemitism on its website.
“We are just not on their radar and we ought to be, and I have been working very hard at my institution to change that, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” he said about Jews on campus. “We have to be present in all the social justice initiatives, in order for us to be present when we need it. And when I mean relationships, that means being in the spaces with the people who are doing the work, so that they see you as an ally, and you can count on them as an ally. In too many instances, we just haven’t done it.”
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The post Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Police Officers Injured as Violent Clashes Erupt at Anti-Israel Nakba Day Rally in Berlin
A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator speaks to a police officer during a protest against Israel to mark the 77th anniversary of the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, in Berlin, Germany, May 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
Anti-Israel demonstrators clashed violently with Berlin police officers during a march on Thursday, resulting in injuries and heightened tensions throughout the German capital city.
More than 600 police officers were dispatched to contain the “Nakba Day” protest in Berlin’s central Kreuzberg district, where over 50 arrests were made. The demonstrators were recognizing the 77th anniversary of the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
According to local law enforcement, approximately 1,100 people took part in the pro-Hamas rally, which also protested against Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.
Demonstrators initially intended to march from Südstern Square in the southern part of the capital to the adjacent Neukölln district, but local authorities only allowed the protest to remain stationary.
Even though a local court had ruled that the anti-Israel protest couldn’t move through the city, demonstrators repeatedly attempted to march through the neighborhood. When police intervened to stop them, they were met with insults and violent attacks from the crowd.
Police officers stand guard in front of Pro-Palestinian demonstrators during a protest against Israel to mark the 77th anniversary of the “Nakba” or catastrophe, in Berlin, Germany, May 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
During the protest, one of the organizers addressed the crowd, declaring, “The nakba is a continuing campaign of ethnic cleansing that has never stopped.”
The demonstration was also marked by antisemitic rhetoric and inflammatory chants, including accusations that the Israeli government and military are “child murderers, women murderers, baby murderers,” as well as the use of the banned slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan is popular among anti-Israel activists and has been widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
When police intervened to stop the inflammatory rhetoric, they were met with significant violence from the crowd, who reportedly threw bottles, stones, and other objects, and sprayed officers with red paint.
After the incidents, police reported that one officer was pulled into the crowd, forced to the ground, and trampled until he lost consciousness. The 36-year-old officer sustained severe upper body injuries, including a broken arm, and remains hospitalized.
“The attack on a police officer at the demonstration in Kreuzberg is nothing but a cowardly, brutal act of violence,” Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner said in a statement. “Attacks against officers are attacks on law and order and therefore against all of us.”
“Those who misuse the right to demonstrate to spread hate, antisemitic incitement, or violence will face the full force of the law,” the German leader added.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators during a protest against Israel to mark the 77th anniversary of the “Nakba” or catastrophe, in Berlin, Germany, May 15, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Local authorities reported that 11 officers and an unspecified number of protesters were injured during the incidents, with the injured demonstrators receiving treatment from the Berlin fire department.
The German-Israeli Society (DIG) condemned the violence and hateful rhetoric, urging authorities to reconsider granting permission for such demonstrations.
“Often, these events are not demonstrations for the rights and the legitimate concerns of Palestinians but merely express outright hatred of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
Germany has experienced a sharp spike in antisemitism amid the war in Gaza. In just the first six months of 2024 alone, the number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin surpassed the total for all of the prior year and reached the highest annual count on record, according to Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS).
The figures compiled by RIAS were the highest count for a single year since the federally-funded body began monitoring antisemitic incidents in 2015, showing the German capital averaged nearly eight anti-Jewish outrages a day from January to June last year.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), police registered 5,154 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2023, a 95 percent increase compared to the previous year.
The post Police Officers Injured as Violent Clashes Erupt at Anti-Israel Nakba Day Rally in Berlin first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Signals Support for Future Iran Trade Deal if Regime Dismantles Nuclear Program
US President Donald speaking in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC on March 3, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect
US President Donald Trump on Thursday seemed to signal openness to striking a trade deal with Iran if the Islamist theocracy agrees to dismantle its entire nuclear program.
“Iran wants to trade with us. Okay? If you can believe that. And I’m okay with it. I’m using trade to settle scores and to make peace,” Trump said while speaking to Fox News anchor Bret Baier. “But I’ve told Iran, ‘We make a deal, you’re gonna be really happy.”
However, Trump underscored the urgency in finalizing a nuclear deal with Iran, saying there’s “not plenty of time” to secure an agreement which would dismantle Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
“There’s not plenty of time. You feel urgency? Well, they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon. And eventually, they’ll have a nuclear weapon, and then the discussion becomes a much different one,” Trump said.
The US and other Western countries say Iran’s nuclear program is ultimately meant to build nuclear weapons — a claim denied by Tehran, which asserts the program is only geared for peaceful nuclear energy.
Trump on Friday said Iran had a US proposal about its nuclear program and knows it needs to move quickly to resolve the dispute.
“They have a proposal. More importantly, they know they have to move quickly or something bad — something bad’s going to happen,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, according to an audio recording of the remarks.
However, Tehran denied receiving a US proposal yet. According to some reports, Oman, which has been mediating US-Iran nuclear talks in recent weeks, has the proposal and will soon give to the Iranians.
US lawmakers and some Trump administration officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, arguing that Tehran could use a nuclear bomb to permanently entrench its regime and potentially launch a strike at Israel. Some experts also fear Iran could eventually use its expanding ballistic missile program to launch a nuclear warhead at the US.
However, the administration has sent conflicting messages regarding its ongoing nuclear talks with Iran, oscillating between demands for “complete dismantlement” of Tehran’s nuclear program and signaling support for allowing a limited degree of uranium enrichment for “civilian purposes.” Many Republicans and hawkish foreign policy analysts have lamented what they described as similarities between the framework of the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran and the controversial Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2015 deal negotiated by the former Obama administration which placed temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of major international sanctions. Trump withdrew the US from the deal during his first term, arguing its terms were bad for American national security.
Trump indicated last Wednesday during a radio interview that he is seeking to “blow up” Iran’s nuclear centrifuges “nicely” through an agreement with Tehran but is also prepared to do so “viciously” in an attack if necessary. That same day, however, when asked by a reporter in the White House whether his administration would allow Iran to maintain an enrichment program as long as it doesn’t enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, Trump said his team had not decided.
Furthermore, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff drew backlash last month when, during a Fox News interview, he suggested that Iran would be allowed to pursue a nuclear program for so-called civilian purposes, saying that Iran “does not need to enrich past 3.67 percent.” The next day, Witkoff backtracked on these remarks, writing on X/Twitter that Tehran must “stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”
Iran has claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, reported last year that Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade at its Fordow site dug into a mountain.
The UK, France, and Germany said in a statement at the time that there is no “credible civilian justification” for Iran’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
While speaking to Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim al-Thani on Wednesday, Trump reportedly said that he would like to avoid war with Iran, “because things like that get started and they get out of control. I’ve seen it over and over again … we’re not going to let that happen.”
Trump has threatened Iran with military action and more sanctions if the regime does not agree to a nuclear deal with Washington.
The post Trump Signals Support for Future Iran Trade Deal if Regime Dismantles Nuclear Program first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Harvard, Jewish Activist ‘Shabbos’ Kestenbaum Settle Antisemitism Lawsuit
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum makes remarks during the fourth annual Countering Antisemitism Summit at the Four Seasons, Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect.
Harvard University and Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum have settled a lawsuit in which the former student turned widely known pro-Israel activist accused the institution of violating the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 by permitting antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
The confidential agreement ends what Kestenbaum, an Orthodox Jews, had promised would be a protracted, scorched-earth legal battle revealing alleged malfeasance at the highest levels of Harvard’s administration. So determined was Kestenbaum to discomfit the storied institution and force it to enact long overdue reforms that he declined to participate in an earlier settlement it reached last year with a group of Jewish plaintiffs, of which he was a member, who sued the university in 2024.
Charging ahead, Kestenbaum vowed never to settle and proclaimed that the discovery phase of the case would be so damning to Harvard’s defense that no judge or jury would render a verdict in its favor. Harvard turned that logic against him, requesting a trove of documents containing his communications with advocacy groups, politicians, and US President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign staff during a period of time which saw Kestenbaum’s star rise to meteoric heights as he became a national poster-child for pro-Israel activism.
Harvard argued that the materials are “relevant to his allegations that he experienced harassment and discrimination to which Harvard was deliberately indifferent in violation of Title VI.” Additionally, it sought information related to other groups which have raised awareness of the antisemitism crisis since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, demanding to know, the Harvard Crimson reported, “the ownership, funding, financial backing, management, and structure” of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Students Against Antisemitism (SAA), and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE).
Without the materials, Harvard claimed, it would be unable to depose witnesses.
According to the Crimson, the university and Kestenbaum failed to agree on a timeframe for producing the requested documents, prompting it to file in May a motion that would have extracted them via court order. Meanwhile, two anonymous plaintiffs who also declined to be a party to 2024’s settlement came forward to join Kestenbaum’s complaint, which necessitated its being amended at the approval of the judge presiding over the case, Richard Stearns. In filing the motion to modify the suit, the Crimson reported, Kestenbaum’s attorneys asked Stearns to “extend the discovery deadline by at least six months” in the event that he “rejects the motion.”
On April 2, Stearns — who was appointed to the bench in 1993 by former US President Bill Clinton (D) and served as a political operative for and special assistant to Israel critic and former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern — spurned the amended complaint and granted Harvard its discovery motion, which Kestenbaum’s attorneys had opposed in part by arguing that Harvard too had withheld key documents. Kestenbaum was given five days to submit the contents of correspondence.
On Wednesday, both parties lauded the settlement — which, according to the Crimson, included dismissing Kestenbaum’s case with prejudice — as a step toward eradicating antisemitism at Harvard University, an issue that has cost it billions of dollars in federal funding and undermined its reputation for being a beacon of enlightenment and the standard against which all other higher education institutions are judged.
“Harvard and Mr. Kestenbaum acknowledge each other’s steadfast and important efforts to combat antisemitism at Harvard and elsewhere,” Harvard University spokesman Jason Newton said in a statement.
In a lengthy statement of his own, Kestenbaum expressed gratitude for having helped “lead the student effort combating antisemitism” while accusing Harvard of resorting to duplicitous and intrusive tactics to fend off his allegations.
“Harvard opposed the anonymity of two of its current Jewish students who sought to vindicate their legal rights, and the Harvard Crimson outed them, even before the court could rule on their motion for anonymity. Harvard also issued a 999-page subpoena against Aish Hatorah, my Yeshiva in Israel that has been deeply critical of the university,” he said. “Remarkably, while Harvard sought personal and non-relevant documents between me and my friends, family, and others in the Jewish community, they simultaneously refused to produce virtually any relevant, internal communication that we had asked for during discovery.”
He continued, “I am comforted knowing that as we have now resoled our lawsuit, the Trump administration will carry the baton forward.”
Harvard’s legal troubles continue.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the university sued the Trump administration in April to request an injunction that would halt the government’s impounding of $2.26 billion of its federal grants and contracts and an additional $450 billion that was confiscated earlier this week.
In the complaint, shared by interim university president Alan Garber, Harvard says the Trump administration bypassed key procedural steps it must, by law, take before sequestering any federal funds. It also charges that the Trump administration does not aim, as it has publicly pledged, to combat campus antisemitism at Harvard but to impose “viewpoint-based conditions on Harvard’s funding.”
The administration has proposed that Harvard reform in ways that conservatives have long argued will make higher education more meritocratic and less welcoming to anti-Zionists and far-left extremists. Its “demands,” contained in a letter the administration sent to Garber — who subsequently released it to the public — called for “viewpoint diversity in hiring and admissions,” the “discontinuation of [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives],” and “reducing forms of governance bloat.” They also implore Harvard to begin “reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism” and to recalibrate its approach to “student discipline.”
Harvard rejects the Trump administration’s coupling of campus antisemitism with longstanding grievances regarding elite higher education’s alleged “wokeness,” elitism, and overwhelming bias against conservative ideas. Republican lawmakers, for their part, have maintained that it is futile to address campus antisemitism while ignoring the context in which it emerged.
On April 28, a Massachusetts district court judge, appointed to the bench by former US President Barack Obama, granted Harvard its request for the speedy processing of its case and a summary judgement in lieu of a trial, scheduling a hearing for July 21.
The following day, Harvard released its long anticipated report on campus antisemitism and along with it an apology from Garber which acknowledged that school officials failed in key ways to address the hatred to which Jewish students were subjected following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre
The over 300-page document provided a complete account of antisemitic incidents which transpired on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s (PSC) endorsement of the Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Jews as murderers of people of color — and said that one source of the problem is the institution’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups. It also issued recommendations for improving Jewish life on campus going forward.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community. The grave, extensive impact of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel and its aftermath had serious repercussions on campus,” Garber said in a statement accompanying the report. “Harvard cannot — and will not — abide bigotry. We will continue to provide for the safety and security of all members of our community and safeguard their freedom from harassment. We will redouble our efforts to ensure that the university is a place where ideas are welcomed, entertained, and contested in the spirt of seeking truth; where argument proceeds without sacrificing dignity; and where mutual respect is the norm.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Harvard, Jewish Activist ‘Shabbos’ Kestenbaum Settle Antisemitism Lawsuit first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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