Harvard No Longer Is “Proud” of Its Antisemitism Response, New Court Filing Says

Plus, Harvard denounces the Supreme Court; Biden should have a Parkinson’s smell test; Ivanka Trump interview

An anti-Israel protest at Harvard Law School, October 2023.

Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum and the other students suing Harvard for failing to remedy what they say is an “antisemitic hostile educational environment” have filed new court documents pointing out that the university has dropped from its own motions a claim that it was “proud” of its effort to combat antisemitism.

“What Harvard is doing shows no sign of working; its antisemitic hostile environment has only worsened,” says the new court filing before Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. “After Harvard argued on its first motion to dismiss, as it does now, that this case should be dismissed because it should be trusted to deal with its antisemitism problem, Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard were met with an even greater onslaught. Harvard has all but admitted this. On its first motion, Harvard said it was ‘proud’ of its efforts in a sentence it now has wisely but tellingly dropped.”

“Since October 7, students and faculty at Harvard have been rallying to support Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose charter and spokesmen call for the destruction of Israel, the sole Jewish country in the world, and the murder of Jews everywhere,” the Kestenbaum memorandum says. “Nor is so-called ‘academic freedom’ an excuse—as plaintiffs also allege, when it comes to discrimination (or even ‘microaggressions’) against other groups, Harvard does not give a fig for academic freedom.”

The memorandum says, “Harvard faculty regularly espouse antisemitism, e.g., including, for example, a course an SAA [Students Against Antisemitism] member attended in which the professor taught that, among other things, Jewish history is a ‘mythology,’ Jewish ethnic identity is ‘invented,’ and Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel. A speaker at a Harvard-sponsored event stated that ‘American Jewish immigrants have always been a foundational building block for the white supremacist infrastructure.’”

It also quotes Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers, saying publicly that he had “lost confidence” in Harvard as a “place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.”

The eight lawyers Harvard is paying to defend the case had previously argued in court that Harvard’s Jews were being unreasonably fearful. They have argued that the case is not ripe for hearing by the court, that the issues at Harvard don’t meet the legal standards for a violation set by civil rights law, and that the remedies the Jewish students are asking for would interfere with academic freedom. 

A hearing on Harvard’s motion to dismiss and strike the complaint is set for July 24 at 10 a.m. in Boston before Judge Stearns. The case is Kestenbaum v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Failed responses to campus antisemitism and unrest have been a national political issue and have contributed to toppling the presidents of Harvard and of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Harvard denounces the Supreme Court: Harvard’s central administration publishes an official university newspaper called the Harvard Gazette. It sends a daily email with articles to a large audience of Harvard-related people. Yesterday’s The Editors mentioned a Gazette profile of a Harvard economist who Harvard says is “addressing several major social and economic problems, including economic inequality, rising incarceration rates, and, of course, climate change,” with a recommendation that news reporting focus on “generating…public support” or “telling us how to act.”

Today’s Gazette email had the subject line “SCOTUS” and linked to a piece headlined “Evaluating the Supreme Court: Harvard Law faculty weigh in on 2023-2024 SCOTUS term.” There are seven “faculty” represented in the article. They are:

Kenneth Mack

Martha Minow

Richard Lazarus

Sharon Block

Laurence Tribe

Nancy Gertner

Noah Feldman

There are conservative faculty at Harvard law school—Stephen Sachs is faculty sponsor of the Federalist Society chapter, former dean and current interim provost John Manning clerked for Judge Bork, Adrian Vermeule is hard to pigeonhole but certainly isn’t “progressive,” Jack Goldsmith is vehemently anti-Trump but served in the George W. Bush administration and has managed to write about the court without demonizing it. Strangely, the conservative faculty weren’t included in the Gazette article, but Tribe, who is retired, and Gertner and Block, who aren’t ladder faculty, were.

The level of hyperbole that the included faculty do bring to assessing the Supreme Court term is astonishing. 

Mack: “a very conservative Court….reinforces the perception among many in the American public that, more than in any other period of modern American history, law — whether it be the law of statutory interpretation, administrative law, or constitutional law — as reflected in the Court, is simply politics by other means.”

Minow: “Accountability, impartiality, clarity, and durability, key attributes of the rule of law, have taken big hits.”

Lazarus, who helped with the Biden transition: “a convulsive shock to the legal system…it’s going to affect the federal government’s ability to protect public health, the environment, all kinds of issues.”

Block, a professor of the practice: “a project to destabilize public agencies’ ability to carry out the mission given to them by Congress where that mission involves protecting the public from corporate harm.”

Tribe: “the Court left no doubt that it intends to continue restricting personal freedom as well as voting rights without paying serious attention to its own precedent.”

Gertner, a senior lecturer who was a Clinton-appointed judge: “An unpopular, ethically challenged Supreme Court …It is Dred Scott, or Plessy, or any other decision that is manifestly inconsistent with a constitutional democracy.”

Feldman: “an outcome that would have astonished the nation’s founders.”

Anyway, Harvard can talk all it wants about “institutional neutrality” and how it’s going to stop sending official emails from the president of the university or the deans responding to news events. But when the university central-administration-published organ is emailing the community telling the students and faculty and alumni that the Roberts Court is Dred Scott and Plessy all in one, and it’s basically a seven-person consensus with not a single countervailing voice to be found, reasonable people can start to wonder about the sincerity of the supposed effort to allow for “productive argument among divergent points of view.” Where are the “divergent points of view”? Nowhere to be found, alas, in this Harvard Gazette roundup of left-leaning law faculty.