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Many Jews criticized Harvard’s Oct. 7 response. Fewer are applauding President Claudine Gay’s resignation.
(JTA) — The pressure that built on Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to resign began after what many thought was a tepid campus response to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. It mounted following a disastrous congressional appearance in which she and two other university presidents gave lawyerly answers in response to grilling about antisemitism on campus.
But by the time Gay actually did resign this week — following a flurry of plagiarism allegations that drained her support — the antisemitism debate was relegated largely to the sidelines.
Instead, thanks to outside political actors — and deep-pocketed insiders with an array of ideological axes to grind — the resignation of Harvard’s first Black president took on wider significance than a campus dispute over antisemitism and free speech. As a result, Jewish concerns about antisemitism receded — or have been attached to other issues in ways that are already heightening Black-Jewish tensions and drafting Jews into ideological battles many never signed up for.
As a result, some Jewish groups appear to be laying low lest they get drawn into the discourse.
“We didn’t call for her head,” Laura Shaw Frank, the director of Contemporary Jewish Life at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “What we want is to create campus spaces that are secure and positive experiences for Jewish students and Jewish faculty and Jewish members of the community. We are under no illusion that a president is the only person who dictates campus culture.”
AJC did not issue a statement on Gay’s resignation. “That doesn’t mean we like what happened at the congressional hearing, which was absolutely horrible,” said Shaw Frank. “But the fact that there have been people who are calling for her resignation doesn’t mean that the entire Jewish people should be labeled as fighting for her resignation.”
Among the Jews seeking Gay’s ouster — and shaping the discourse around her presidency — was Harvard grad Bill Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who tied her tenure to the fight against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, whose most vocal opponents are conservatives who say DEI programs instill a rigid leftist ideology. In a lengthy post on X after Gay stepped down, Ackman said Havard’s DEI office expresses a philosophy that is the “root cause of antisemitism at Harvard.”
“This is the beginning of the end for D.E.I. in America’s institutions,” agreed the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who played a lead role in spreading the plagiarism allegations, in response to Gay’s resignation. In a Wall Street Journal essay Thursday, Rufo boasted about the “reputational, financial and political” campaign he orchestrated to “squeeze” Gay out.
Defenders of Gay in turn fired back against a campaign they saw as racist, sexist and whipped up by the anti-woke right. “So they’re using the guise of pretending that this is about concern over antisemitism, which is, of course, something that all of us should be concerned about. It’s really just furthering their propaganda campaign against racial equity,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who faced conservative attacks in a tenure battle at the University of North Carolina, told CNN.
Perhaps because the discourse around Gay had become so muddied — involving plagiarism, charges of misogyny and racism, conservative attacks on DEI, donor pressure, questionable leadership and antisemitism — many of the major Jewish groups were either silent or muted in the wake of her decision. One of the few statements forthrightly welcoming her resignation came from a group that didn’t exist before the war: the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, launched in November to fight what it called “a toxic culture on campus.”
“In her repeated failures to condemn calls for complete and utter obliteration of Jews, Claudine Gay tacitly encouraged those who sought to spread hate at Harvard, where many Jews no longer feel safe to study, identify, and fully participate in the Harvard community,” spokesperson Roni Brunn said in a statement.
The most important of the groups fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League, issued a terse statement alluding to the plagiarism charges, saying “leaders at the highest level are accountable to the highest standards. Whoever emerges to lead the university must embody the highest ideals of integrity and demonstrate moral clarity and total commitment to fight antisemitism with #ZeroTolerance in a way we have not fully seen at Harvard.” (The ADL declined a request for further comment.)
Harvard Hillel was similarly circumspect in its statement.
“The most important priority for Harvard Hillel is that our university is a safe and inclusive environment for Jewish students and for all students,” Getzel Davis, whose title at Hillel is campus rabbi, said in its statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the next president of Harvard and the rest of the senior University administration, to ensure that Jewish students are able to safely express their identities on our campus.”
Davis said Thursday he did not have time in his schedule for an interview.
A woman prays aloud for the Israeli hostages outside the Harvard Divinity School, Oct. 25, 2023. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Such groups may have had good reason to be cautious in claiming Gay’s resignation as a victory, especially when some defenders of Gay were accusing Harvard of submitting to pressure from powerful Jewish and pro-Israel alumni, including Ackman, investor Seth Klarman, businessman Len Blavatnik and Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
“How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — Ackman, Blum, Summers and others — push out the first Black woman president of Harvard!” wrote the African-American philosopher and presidential hopeful Cornel West, a former member of the Harvard faculty, on X.
West appeared to be referring to Edward J. Blum, a conservative Texas legal activist, and former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers. Both are Jewish. Blum’s nonprofit led a successful challenge to Harvard’s affirmative action policies earlier this year but Blum has not appeared to weigh in on Gay’s current woes. Summers had tweeted on Oct. 9 that he was “disillusioned and alienated” over Harvard’s response to Oct. 7 but also did not call for Gay to step down. When she did, he issued a statement saying he admired Gay “for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment.”
West’s statement went on to connect charges of racism with support for Israel. “This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable!” he wrote. “I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large!”
Conspiratorial sentiments like West’s — accusing wealthy pro-Israel donors of “dictating” both university and foreign policy — may not represent the Black mainstream. But even Black leaders who often ally with Jews and against antisemitism were disturbed that legitimate concerns about antisemitism and speech on campus morphed into a challenge to DEI and the credentials of the first Black president and only second woman president in Harvard’s history.
“We start with the conversation about how to protect Jewish students and end up in a conversation about an assault on programs that benefit Black and brown people,” Cornell William Brooks, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former president and CEO of the NAACP, said Wednesday on CNN. “It’s really about an attack on higher education, anti-DEI, and the reason we know that is because her critics spend more time talking about DEI and affirmative action than they talk about the legitimate concerns about antisemitism.”
A Jewish communal leader who asked not to be named because they wanted to protect their relationships with colleagues in the community said they had heard similar comments from Black allies. Like Brooks, such allies are wondering where the defense of Jewish students ends and the attack on DEI begins, and are asking if Jews are more interested in a conservative agenda than the fight against antisemitism.
As a result, many see signs of yet another clash between two groups with a history both of cooperation and deep tension.
“We already are seeing the backlash,” said Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history who directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. “With so many reasons for Jews and Blacks to work together, it is tragic to see these kinds of wedges driven between them.”
Amy Spitalnik, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said people of color who have been allied with Jews believe that antisemitism was “weaponized” to bring down Harvard’s first Black president.
“That doesn’t take away from the ways in which [Gay] needed to be held accountable for Harvard’s failures,” said Spitalnik, whose organization’s affiliated Jewish “community relations” councils often do interfaith and intergroup work. “Two things can be true at the same time: The congressional testimony that the presidents gave was horrendous and certainly was indicative of a larger failure on their part in terms of protecting their students. And there were extremists who exploited this situation in a way that doesn’t make any of us safer.”
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec.5, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Jeremy Burton, who as CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston has advocated for Jewish issues on Harvard’s campus, said the focus on Gay — by donors, outsiders, DEI critics and Jewish activists — is a “false context” for addressing antisemitism.
“She was president for about a month before Oct. 7, if you count her actual time in office on campus,” said Burton. “The problems at Harvard have been building for years, if not decades.” Burton cited reports of Israeli faculty and visiting students being harassed, Jewish students in certain departments not being welcomed if they are “insufficiently anti-Zionist” and professors investigated for hostility toward Jews and Israeli students.
In her brief term, Gay gave gave a speech at Harvard Hillel saying “Antisemitism has no place at Harvard,” and on Dec. 8 attended an interfaith vigil, organized by the Harvard Chaplains, including Rabbi Davis, grieving for all those killed on Oct. 7 and the subsequent war. The same day she also apologized for the pain she caused in her congressional testimony, saying she should have made clear that “calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
“That’s not to say that she didn’t make serious mistakes,” said Burton. “But her departure does nothing to get at the root causes on campus.”
At the same time, many are convinced that one of those root causes is DEI — or at least an interpretation that doesn’t make room for Jewish concerns.
“I think buzzwords like DEI are a little imprecise,“ Jacob Miller, a math major and the Harvard Hillel president, told Fox News Channel. “But I do think that it’s true that there is a double standard when it comes to antisemitic hate speech at Harvard. I do think Jews are looked upon as the oppressors and our history of being oppressed is ignored.”
Others are wondering if the prominent role played by Jewish and pro-Israel donors will give fodder to antisemites.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of labor, wrote in The Guardian that pressure brought by wealthy donors at Harvard and other schools was “an abuse of power.” He also warned about the optics of Jewish and pro-Israel donors wielding their wealth and influence on campuses.
“As a Jew, I also cannot help but worry that the actions of these donors — many of them Jewish, many from Wall Street — could fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose, based on the age-old stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world,” wrote Reich.
Ruth Wisse, who during and after her long tenure as a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard criticized what she sees as the university’s tilt to the left, says such concerns are misplaced. “Antisemitism has nothing to do with the Jews. Antisemitism has to do with the antisemites,” said Wisse, author of the 2007 book “Jews and Power.” “Jews should never go on the defensive when they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s a great moral error.”
Wisse said donors were only reacting to a “war against Israel” in academia, where Israel’s legitimacy is questioned and where “it’s being taken for granted that the Arabs and the Muslims could not accept the principle of coexistence.”
Gay’s critics, Wisse continued, “are not the ones who brought in DEI and they’re not the ones who brought in foul teachings to replace American teaching. When they act to try to improve the university, they act as Americans. And if we [Jews] have a special role now it’s because of the war against us.”
Wisse is famously conservative, but across the spectrum of Jewish opinion there has been an emerging consensus that since the war Jewish students feel under siege. The political storm swirling around Gay’s resignation, however, threatens to sweep away that consensus and force potential allies to take sides.
“Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” said Penslar, who describes himself as “left of center.” “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.”
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The post Many Jews criticized Harvard’s Oct. 7 response. Fewer are applauding President Claudine Gay’s resignation. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, US, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Erica Dischino
Black Muslim leaders across the United States are calling on their supporters to withhold their vote from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, accusing the incumbent US vice president of facilitating a so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
In a letter published by the Middle East Eye on Monday, 50 black Muslim leaders called on members of their community to embrace the legacy of “black liberation” by only voting for candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms blockade on Israel. The coalition of Muslim leaders urged their followers to reject the notion that Harris would be better on domestic issues and that a Donald Trump presidency would pose greater danger to Palestinians.
“As black Muslims, we also know that the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is a war on Islam,” the letter read. “The Israeli government and its unhinged army of cowardly criminals have filmed themselves destroying mosques, burning Qurans, and slandering our sacred religious figures. The supremacist Israeli government has also destroyed churches and attacked the Palestinian Christian community.”
The black Muslim leaders condemned the Biden administration for supporting Israel’s defensive military operations against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza. The coalition also slammed Harris for not taking a more adversarial position against the Jewish state since she replaced US President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket.
“All of this has occurred under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration, which has provided steadfast military, financial, diplomatic, and rhetorical support for the Israeli government’s war crimes for four years, including at least $18 billion since the start of the genocide,” the group wrote.
The Muslim leaders lambasted Harris over her repeated refusals to implement an arms embargo against Israel. In recent months, anti-Israel activists have attempted to pressure Harris into agreeing to block weapons transfers to the Jewish state. In August, the her campaign released a statement denying any support for such a move and affirming Harris’s commitment to ensuring “Israel is able to defend itself.”
“Vice President Harris has explicitly opposed an arms embargo on the Israeli government even though US law requires it. She has refused to lay out any plan whatsoever to force [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal in Gaza that ends the genocide,” the letter stated. “She has validated the Israeli government’s efforts to spark a regional war with Iran, leading to instability in the region and the world at large. Just this week, she said that she would not have done anything differently than President Biden over the past four years.”
The coalition attempted to draw a parallel between the experience of black Americans and Palestinians, arguing that the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank are subject to brutal racial discrimination.
“As Muslims obliged to uphold justice and as black Americans whose ancestors experienced the worst of crimes, genocide must be our red line,” the letter added.
“There’s a false narrative that is being pushed that the majority of Muslims who are black are Kamala Harris supporters,” Imam Dawud Walid, a Muslim leader from Michigan, told the Middle East Eye. “There’s this narrative that is trying to divide the community to say that the majority of Muslims who aren’t black are supporting third party, but the majority of Muslims who are black are somehow divided from the rest of the community, and that’s not true.”
In the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election cycle, the Harris campaign has scrambled to coalesce support among Muslim voters. Despite aggressive overtures toward the Muslim American community, recent polls indicate that the vice president could experience a collapse of support among the demographic. Some polling data has shown Green Party nominee Jill Stein leading Harris among Muslim voters in the critical swing state of Michigan, while other polls show Harris and Trump tied with Muslim voters across battleground states.
Moreover, many Arab American leaders have continued to urge their community to withhold their votes from Harris, arguing that the Democratic party deserves “punishment” for supporting Israel. Groups such as “Abandon Harris” have encouraged Arab American voters to only throw their support behind anti-Israel candidates. Other groups such as the “Uncommitted Movement” have also pushed voters, especially in the Arab and Muslim communities, to refuse to cast a ballot in favor of Harris.
The post Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope
In his 2016 book Essays on Ethics, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “A people that can know insecurity and still feel joy is one that can never be defeated, for its spirit can never be broken nor its hope destroyed.”
This year, as Simchat Torah draws near, we are painfully reminded that joy and suffering often coexist. While it is a staple of the human condition for Jews, this paradox echoes relentlessly throughout our history.
In the Diaspora, we will feel this contrast differently. Shmini Atzeret — a day marked by solemnity with Yizkor and the prayer for rain — falls on the anniversary of October 7th. Only the second evening transitions into the joy of Simchat Torah.
In Israel, however, the two days merge into one, with the solemnity of Shmini Atzeret intertwined with the joy of Simchat Torah. This year, embracing the usual high spirits will be incredibly challenging for Israelis. The weight of national grief hangs heavy; indeed, no Simchat Torah will ever be the same again.
When we danced with the Torahs last year, despite knowing that a terrible attack was unfolding, the full extent of the horror was not yet clear. It was only after Simchat Torah ended that the devastating truth began to emerge: 1,200 people tortured, murdered, and mutilated; families torn apart; and hostages dragged into Gaza.
In the months since, every painful detail has come to light, making it nearly impossible to embrace the unrestrained joy that typically defines Simchat Torah. How can we celebrate when every smile is shadowed by memory, and every song tinged with sorrow?
And yet, my late mother’s story comes to mind — her first Simchat Torah after the Holocaust, celebrated in the city of her birth: Rotterdam, Holland. It offers a profound lesson for us today.
My mother was born in 1941, a year after my grandparents married during the Nazi occupation. The Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, and began deporting Jews to concentration camps in 1942.
Fearing for their lives, my grandparents went into hiding, spending more than two years in a cramped space behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend. My grandfather, active in the Dutch resistance, emerged only at night to carry out covert missions against the Nazis — knowing the risks but refusing to submit to despair.
Meanwhile, my mother was taken in by a Christian couple who raised her as their own, shielding her from the terrors outside. After the war, they returned her to her parents.
When the Nazis were defeated by the Allies in May 1945, Jewish life in Rotterdam began to re-emerge, although only a fraction of the community remained — 75% of Dutch Jewry, more than 100,000 people, had perished in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other camps.
That fall, the synagogue reopened, and Simchat Torah was celebrated once more. The Torah scrolls my grandfather had hidden with gentile friends were retrieved. Miraculously, Rabbi Levie “Lou” Vorst, who had survived Bergen-Belsen and the infamous “Lost Train,” stood at the helm of the diminished community.
But the celebration was bittersweet. Almost everyone in the synagogue had lost parents, siblings, spouses, or children. My grandparents had lost their parents, siblings, and their second child, my uncle Yitzchak, who had died of malnutrition during the war.
And yet, they danced. Survivors — many without homes or families — clung to the Torah scrolls as if their lives depended on it. My mother, only four years old, stood quietly in the synagogue, receiving candy from weeping survivors. With each piece placed in her open mouth, the message was clear: the future must be sweet, even when the past has been unbearably bitter.
When she was born in 1941, during the Nazi occupation, her parents named my mother Miriam Chana, but they also added a third name: Tikva — hope. Naming her Tikva was a bold act of defiance and a statement of faith that they would live to see better days.
Many Dutch Jews from Rotterdam later made their way to Israel, realizing the ultimate Tikva—the dream of building a new life in the Jewish homeland.
Today, some of my mother’s friends from Rotterdam reside at Beth Juliana, a residential retirement complex in Herzliya for Dutch immigrants. But even there, the echoes of violence persist. Just two weeks ago, during Yom Kippur, a Hezbollah drone from Lebanon struck the building.
Though no one was injured, the drone destroyed an apartment filled with precious heirlooms and decades of memories. Miraculously, the resident had sought shelter moments before the impact — a stark reminder that even now, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, the shadow of antisemitic hatred still looms over Israel.
As we mark the first anniversary of October 7th, I find myself returning to the image of those weeping survivors dancing with the Torahs in Rotterdam. If they could dance, surely we can too.
But just like them, our dancing this year will be different. Maybe it will be slower, or perhaps more enthusiastic — but whatever it is, it will be infused with memory, sorrow, and, most importantly, defiance. Our celebrations will not deny the pain but embrace it, just as my mother’s community did all those years ago.
The joy of Simchat Torah is not naïve happiness; it is the joy that comes from standing together, united in faith, knowing that despite everything, we are still here. Just as my grandparents emerged from hiding to rebuild, and just as the Torahs were salvaged from the ruins of Rotterdam, we too will lift the Torahs this Simchat Torah and say to our enemies: We are still here.
And we will hope. For without hope, there is no future. My grandparents named their daughter Tikva, believing in a day when evil would be defeated. We, too, must carry the torch of hope into the future. We will dance, and we will cry.
But above all, we will hope. Because even after the darkest of nights, the sun will rise again. And when it does, we will be ready to rebuild — one dance step at a time.
The post On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany’s Eurovision Contestant Calls Out ‘So Much Hate’ Against Israeli Singer Eden Golan During Competition
The representative of Germany Isaak at the Eurovision Song Cotest entering the main stage on May 11, 2024 in Malmo, Sweden. Photo: Sanjin Strukic/PIXSELL/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Germany’s representative in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest shared his thoughts in a recent interview about the hatred and booing that Israeli singer Eden Golan received while competing on behalf of Israel in the international competition earlier this year.
“I can definitely understand why everyone was booing, but I think the Eurovision Song Contest says we are all ‘united by music’ and I didn’t see no unity,” German singer Isaak, 29, said in an interview with Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie, referring to the official slogan of the Eurovision competition. He further said of Golan: “It’s a young musician performing quite well and everyone f—ked her off. There was so much hate in this room, and hate shouldn’t be a place in the Eurovision Song Contest.”
Isaak finished in 12th place in the Eurovision finals this year in Malmo, Sweden, while Golan finished in fifth. The Israeli singer competed with a song called “Hurricane,” a reworded version of her original song “October Rain,” which was disqualified for being too political since it referenced the Hamas massacre in Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023.
Golan made it to the top five of the Eurovision contest despite being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Golan also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the contest.
Isaak told Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie that he believes Golan was bullied during the competition. He then criticized people for wrongfully targeting Golan with hatred when they have issues with the state of Israel but not the singer herself. The German singer then said the animosity was misguided and it was wrong for Golan to face such abuse just for her affiliation with Israel. He said a personal experience like what Golan faced can deeply scar a musician
“Do you know how young she is?” Isaak asked about the 21-year-old Israeli singer. “This is your life goal and you wanna be part of Eurovision Song Contest and you’re going on that stage … just image Germany f—ks up in some point. And I’m German and I wanna be part of the Eurovision. And I’m just a random musician, I just wanna show them my music. I’m not the f—k president. I’m just a random musician, I just wanna make a small kid’s dream come true. And then I go on that stage and no matter how good I am, no matter how f—k amazing I can sing, the people just see my country and they just boo me out. I think that would be the most terrible thing that could maybe ever happen to me. I think that can definitely leave scars.”
Isaak also talked in the interview about his experience backstage with the other singers at the Eurovision competition. “You didn’t really have that feeling [that] we are all ‘united by music.’ It was a little bit sad behind the stage, that’s what I think. There could have been more love, more connectivity, and more passion,” he said.
The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Basel, Switzerland, in May. Bakel Walden, chairman of the Eurovision Song Contest Reference Group, discussed in a recent interview with Swiss media some changes to next year’s competition. He said the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the competition, “will pay more attention” to the well-being of artists in the future and stated that it is vital for the competition to maintain political neutrality. He insisted that “antisemitism has no place at the ESC.”
“The ESC stands for freedom of expression. The artists can comment on anything and also demonstrate in front of the hall. But on stage you need certain rules,” he said. “We want an ESC in which everyone puts their heart and soul into it. We cannot solve the many wars and conflicts in the world during the ESC. But it is a strong statement if we treat each other fairly, peacefully, and respectfully.”‘
Walden added that for next year’s competition the EBU will also have a crisis management team and “retreat rooms” for artists to relax where there will be no filming allowed.
The post Germany’s Eurovision Contestant Calls Out ‘So Much Hate’ Against Israeli Singer Eden Golan During Competition first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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