Jewish Harvard students say they don’t feel safe on campus

Jewish students at Harvard say that they do not necessarily feel safe and that the university is not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, testifies before a House committee in Washington. Picture: Getty Images

Jewish students at Harvard University say that they do not necessarily feel safe and that the elite institution is not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.

The allegations come a day after Harvard’s governing board backed its president, Claudine Gay, to stay in her job after an appearance before a congressional committee last week when she refused to say that calls for a genocide against Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

“Jews here don’t necessarily feel safe,” Alex Bernat, a second-year student and a member of Harvard Chabad and Students for Israel, told the New York Post during a Hanukkah menorah lighting ceremony on campus.

“I think the university can be doing a lot more to start to quell some of the anti-Semitism and try to teach people why it’s wrong.”

Mr Bernat said he didn’t believe that Dr Gay was anti-Semitic but that the problem was “far more systematic than one person, one university or one department”.

“I think there’s a much deeper problem in all American universities when it comes to anti-Semitism,” he said. “I really just want to emphasise the pervasive and systemic nature of this, as opposed to any one action.”

Tensions have been growing on university campuses across the US since the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on October 7, and the subsequent war in Gaza. More than 1000 people – most of them Jewish Israelis – were killed by the Hamas attack. According to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, 18,400 people have been killed in the territory since the start of the war.

Pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protests have since become commonplace on university campuses, including at elite colleges such as Harvard.

The university has established an anti-Semitism committee in response to protests, many of which include calls for a third intifada, or Palestinian uprising, and chants that are widely considered to be anti-Semitic.

David Wolpe, a rabbi, resigned from the committee last week in light of Dr Gay’s testimony before congress. He alleged that Harvard had become anti-Israeli under her leadership.

In a separate development, Harvard has been accused of covering up an investigation into whether Dr Gay plagiarised part of her 1997 PhD thesis.

It said on Tuesday that citations and quotation marks would be added to the thesis after originally being “omitted”.

Dr Gay had defended her academic record in comments to the Boston Globe. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”

In a statement on Tuesday, issued to “members of the Harvard community” by the university, it said that the investigation began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of allegations about Dr Gay.

Harvard declined to comment on either allegation that it was not doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism on campus, or on Dr Gay’s academic record.

THE TIMES