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Vilnius is celebrating its 700th anniversary. Lithuanian Jews are commemorating a darker one.
(JTA) — Legend has it that in the early 14th century, the grand duke of Lithuania set out on a hunting trip. One night, he dreamt of an enormous iron wolf, which a priest would later tell him was a sign that he should establish a city on the site where he had slept.
Whether or not the origin story is true, it’s uncontested that the present-day Lithuanian capital Vilnius was first referred to by its former name, Vilna, in documents and letters in 1323 — making this year, in the government’s eyes, the city’s 700th anniversary.
The city is marking the anniversary year throughout 2023 with various festivals, visual art exhibitions, lectures and more. The organizers of Vilnius 700 stress that they are including Jewish people and themes in the celebrations through a range of programming.
That’s because for a portion of the city’s existence, starting in the early 19th century, Vilnius was also one of the most important Jewish centers in the world, known as the Jerusalem of the North. Roughly half of the city was Jewish, and it was a Jewish cultural powerhouse, a deep well of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In 1910, the city had over 100 synagogues, along with Jewish schools, publications, and charitable and political organizations.
“The Jewish community is an integral part of Vilnius’ past and present, playing an important role in the city’s day-to-day life,” Tomas Gulbinas, Vilnius’ deputy mayor, wrote in an email.
Yet this weekend also marks a darker anniversary: 80 years since the final liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto that saw almost all of its over 50,000 Jews die at the hands of the Nazis.
On Saturday, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte joined others in a march from the city’s former Jewish ghetto to Paneriai, the forest site formerly known as Ponary where the Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 70,000 Jews, mostly Lithuanian, over three years during the Holocaust.
The twin anniversaries have brought into stark relief tensions over historical memory in Lithuania, where, as in neighboring Poland and Latvia, officials have downplayed the role of local collaborators in carrying out the Nazis’ murderous plans. Memorials to Lithuanians who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union are plentiful in the city, making that history loom both literally and figuratively over the 700th birthday party.
Soldiers hold the Vilnius flag during an anniversary event, Jan. 25, 2023. (Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
“There is an unresolvable tension between desire to celebrate and this history that is not much to celebrate,” said Laimonis Breidis, a Vilnius native whose book “Vilnius: City of Strangers” explores the city’s history through the insights of travelers. The biggest challenge, he said, is that “everything told about the city is compartmentalized.”
Almost all of the few thousand Jews living in Vilnius today have familial ties to people who died during the Holocaust, said Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community. She said in an interview earlier this year that the community was more determined to commemorate the ghetto anniversary than the city one.
“I promise you, we, the Lithuanian Jewish community, will not forget this date,” she said.
How Lithuania’s Holocaust history is remembered became an issue of high drama in 2019, after a Chicago schoolteacher named Sylvia Foti published a book recounting how her grandfather — Jonas Noreika, a general and formerly a national hero — had agreed with the Nazis about the extermination of Jews.
The book caused an uproar. Lithuania’s parliament then voted to remove the head of a national genocide research center, Adas Jakubauskas, after he insisted Noreika had tried to save Jews; 17 historians wrote to the center complaining that Jakubauskas was compromising the quality of their research. For his part, Jakubauskas charged that he was being pressured by Israel and Russia to indict Lithuanian participants without evidence.
Yet the country continues to memorialize the Holocaust without calling attention to the role that Lithuanians played in carrying it out. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, said this week in a special session of the Lithuanian Parliament that the country “must consistently acknowledge that many of the Lithuanian Jews massacred in the Holocaust died at the hands of their Lithuanian co-nationals and that Lithuanians also took part in the extermination of Jews in neighboring countries.”
Members of an international team of archaeologists work to unearth the bimah, the central prayer platform, at the archaeological site of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, July 25, 2018. (Petras Malukas/AFP via Getty Images)
Such an acknowledgement is not a centerpiece of the Vilnius 700 programming, in part because its emphasis on celebration is focusing attention to happier moments in local Jewish history.
Gulbinas listed the Jewish-themed projects the city has undertaken in conjunction with its 700th anniversary: city tours, put on by Undiscovered Vilnius, that highlight the city’s Jewish history; the city’s involvement in the reconstruction of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, which was mostly destroyed by the Nazis; the renovation of the grave of the Vilna Gaon, a hugely influential 18th-century rabbi, and the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries; and a graffiti art project, “Walls That Remember,” in which artists have painted images harkening back to the era when the city’s Jewish community was thriving.
“Simultaneously, Vilnius honors the present Jewish customs and traditions, for example, by celebrating Hanukkah together with the local Jewish community every year,” Gulbinas wrote.
A pavilion at the National Museum of Lithuania that is open until Oct. 15 recreates Vilnius as it stood 200 years ago — at the dawn of the city’s Jewish heyday.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community has held events tied to the ghetto anniversary outside of the Vilnius 700 umbrella. Earlier this month, in the courtyard of the former Jewish Council headquarters in the Jewish Ghetto, Šimonytė attended an exhibition and concert on the liquidation anniversary.
On Thursday, the city of Vilnius introduced a commemorative route — ”Panerių kelias,” or road of Paneriai, named for the site of a massacre of 100,000 people, many of whom were Jewish, during World War II — along which processions were organized on that same day and on the 24th. An additional exhibition, “Healing Soul Wounds,” which, per an official from the city, “reveals the traumatic experiences and dilemmas of young girls, teenagers and women in order to survive the brutal conditions of World War II and the Holocaust,” opened last week.
In a few cases, the histories — that of Vilnius and that of the Vilna Ghetto — were commemorated together in official Vilnius 700 events. At a concert outside the former Vilna Ghetto Jewish Council in July, Michael Gordon, the American composer and founder of the acclaimed Bang on a Can music collective, whose father grew up outside of Vilnius, debuted an original composition for nine trombones.
The courtyard was Gordon’s idea. The organizers of the music component of Vilnius 700 reached out to him, he said, and sent a list of sites where he could debut an original composition. In his reply, he said, he pointed out that “there’s a big and long and illustrious history of Jewish culture, both secular and sacred, in Vilnius, and none of these sites are Jewish sites. Can we consider a Jewish site? And they said yeah, great.”
Gordon chose the courtyard in part because of its connection to Jewish arts: on one side of the courtyard stood a Yiddish theater; on another, a Yiddish conservatory. And the city also has a personal connection to Gordon, whose father, a Litvak, lived in Vilnius in the 1930s. He called his composition “Resonance.”
Roughly 300 people came to the concert, said Gordon, who spoke a little about the event about “the presence of Jewish culture in Lithuanian history.”
“I was happy about that,” he said. “I kind of felt it was my responsibility…I felt, wow, I have this opportunity to go here and, in a certain sense, honor the Jewish history in this place, in this very important center of Jewish learning and Jewish arts and culture.”
That kind of attention was all too rare in the past, according to Laima Lauckaite, the curator of a collaborative exhibition between the Lithuanian Art Centre TARTLE and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City that is open now. Lauckaite did not grow up fully aware of her city’s Jewish history while a schoolgirl during the Soviet years near where the Great Synagogue of Vilna once stood. Soviet authorities had razed the synagogue’s ruins and erected a school; underground remains were not identified until 2015.
Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, and Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, examine holdings in the Strashun Rare Books Room at YIVO’s New York headquarters, Sept. 18, 2023. The room is named for a Jewish scholar in Vilna (now Vilnius) who collected nearly 7,000 volumes of Yiddish and other books before his death in 1885. (YIVO/ Melanie Einzig)
“I never knew about it, that there was the Great Synagogue,” she said. “I got to know about it only 30 years after.”
The collaborative exhibit in New York City displays an exhibition of Vilnius guidebooks that reflect the city’s 19th and 20th century history and “its multi-ethnic, multicultural landscape.” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda visited YIVO last week to pay tribute to the Jews who rescued rare books and documents from the Vilna Ghetto.
Dovid Katz, former professor of Yiddish Studies at Vilnius University, has spent the past 15 years editing Defending History, a site dedicated to fighting Holocaust distortion. He has also participated in numerous events to mark Vilnius 700.
“While it is very nice that authorities have included Jewish-themed programs in the year’s commemorations dedicated to the city’s history, it is shameful that they have not permanently taken down any of the state-sponsored public-space shrines to Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators,” Katz said.
He stressed that the narratives downplaying Lithuanian culpability in the Holocaust emanated from a relative few influential nationalists, not the mass of Lithuanians celebrating Vilnius.
“I love living here. The people of today’s Lithuania are terrific,” he said. “The problem is with a small ultra-powerful, state-funded ‘history fixing unit’ that dominates on these issues in politics, museums, media, arts and academia.”
Katz suggested, as well, that the Jewish community should have focused on a different anniversary — and that its attention to the September dates related to the ghetto’s liquidation reified the country’s Holocaust memory problems.
“Of the thousands of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors we interviewed over more than three decades, all felt that the appropriate day for commemoration of the Lithuanian Holocaust is June 23rd,” he said. On that day in 1941, “600 years of peace was broken by the outbreak of barbarity, humiliation, slaughter in hundreds of towns across the land. By the end of 1941, all the close to 250 or so storied shtétlakh (shtetls) were destroyed, as were the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews.”
Focusing only on the liquidation of the ghetto, he said, “reflects a state attempt to deflect from the primary narrative via one that focuses only on the Germans (the ghetto history) and not on the thousands of local participants all across the land.”
Vilnius 700 events are scheduled through the end of the year, ensuring that the tensions over history and memory in the city continue to simmer.
But not all see the need to bring up the city and Holocaust anniversaries in the same conversation. David Roskies, chair emeritus in Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote in an email: “I don’t see any intersection between the two anniversaries. It’s pure happenstance. Who can say with any precision when Vilnius was established?”
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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.