Harvard Will Serve Three Kosher Meals a Day

Plus, Moderate Democrats win in N.Y.; IRS apologizes to Ken Griffin

Harvard University

Harvard will increase the number of hot kosher meals it makes available daily to three from one, the university’s interim president, Alan Garber, told donors.

The news comes as Harvard faces at least three federal civil lawsuits, a congressional investigation, and a civil rights investigation by the U.S. Department of Education over its response to an eruption of antisemitism on campus. Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, resigned under pressure in January after six months on the job, in part because of complaints about the university’s mishandling of Jew-hatred.

The most hopeful way to look at the news is that Harvard’s leadership isn’t abandoning the possibility of sustaining a flourishing Jewish community on the campus. When Harvard Hillel named its new executive director, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, the announcement included a quote from Garber praising Rubenstein for having the “commitment to ensure that Harvard’s Jewish students will feel welcome and well-supported.” Rubenstein identified that Harvard, serving one hot kosher meal a day to its Jewish students, was lagging behind Yale, which offered two, and Princeton, which offered three. In November of 2022, Brown University announced it’d open kosher and halal dining in its main dining hall.

The more cynical view is that the food adjustments, details of which are still being finalized, are among the easier changes to make. The few remaining Jewish students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will now be better nourished while their professors and classmates persist in falsely accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid. And, the observant Jewish student population at Harvard College has plunged to such sparse levels that the remaining member(s) may joke among themselves (joke to himself?) whether “three meals” refers, literally, to one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner for one kosher-keeping student. Getting those numbers up to sustain a viable, flourishing Jewish community may be a tougher lift than the kosher dining, though the recently admitted Class of 2028 will reportedly include a total of 10 students with Israeli citizenship.

For Harvard, upcoming changes to kosher dining are the latest development in a struggle that has lasted more than half a century against significant resistance, at a college where almost all the students are on a meal plan that includes three meals a day, seven days a week.

In 1992, the appearance of a toaster oven in the Dunster House dining hall designated for use by kosher-keeping students prompted a tutor affiliated with the house—who became known as the “toaster tutor”—to demand its removal on the grounds that its presence indicated “improper partiality towards one group.”

Gordon Tucker, who is now a rabbi and the vice chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, tells a story of arriving at Harvard in fall of 1967 as a 16-year-old freshman and meeting with the director of food services about the injustice of having to pay for meals that, because they weren’t kosher, he couldn’t eat. The reply from the pipe-smoking Harvard administrator? “Well, it seems to me that if you people didn’t want to eat Harvard’s food, you people didn’t have to come to Harvard.” 

Amherst rejects divestment: Amherst College’s president, Michael Elliott, and board of trustees chair, Andrew Nussbaum, and chair-elect, Chantal Kordula, have put out a statement announcing a decision not to divest the Amherst endowment from companies supplying military equipment used by the State of Israel in the current campaign in Gaza. They said there is no clear consensus within the Amherst community on the issue, with some who believe “any such action would effectively reject the sovereign right of Israel to defend itself, indicate support for Hamas, and contribute to a rising tide of global antisemitism”:

The Board believes that the proposed endowment action would amount to the College endorsing the moral and political position of some members of our community and rejecting the moral and political position of other members of the Amherst community. Such action would directly violate our principled responsibility to foster a forum for a broad range of positions and to offer opportunities for education so that students, faculty, and others can confront and debate evidence. Such action could chill dialogue and conversations throughout the College and deepen divisions at a time of profound conflict when no clear consensus prevails and when some of our colleagues and classmates would even find it threatening to their safety, as they have expressed. These are real consequences with a direct impact on the immediate and long-term wellbeing of our community.

The board also cited practical issues:

it would be unrealistic for us to seek to compel our current outside investment managers to remove these companies from their funds. We would, therefore, need to liquidate holdings at potentially poor valuations and either move our endowment capital to other managers whose current investments do not include these companies or directly manage the capital, which would not align with responsible practices for institutional investment. These actions could have significant immediate and long-term negative impacts on returns and—because the endowment directly supports 56% of the College’s annual operating budget—on financial aid, faculty and staff salaries and benefits, and operations.

Maybe I am missing something, but it looks to me like a pretty well-thought-out and well-articulated statement that could serve as a template for a lot of other institutions facing similar pressure from faculty and student and in some cases alumni activists. I guess you could say—I probably would say—the request is so outlandish and outrageous that it doesn’t deserve to be dignified with such a thoughtful response. But sometimes it’s helpful to set out an explanation, not so much to change the minds of the fanatics, but to reach people who might not have a well-developed view of the matter already and who might be susceptible to reason.

New York’s elections: The headline from today’s primary election in New York is George Latimer’s defeat of incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Bronx and Westchester district. Bowman was far left and anti-Israel and lost despite marshaling support from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and all the rest of the worst of the anti-Israel, anti-capitalist crew. Pro-Israel groups poured a lot of money into defeating Bowman. The significance goes far beyond one vote out of 435 in Congress. It also sends a message similar to the defeat of Senator Charles Percy by Paul Simon in 1984 in Illinois. If you are thinking about championing the anti-Israel cause in an extreme way, you face a serious risk of winding up like Percy and Bowman: a former member of Congress.

There’s good news for moderate messages in the Democratic Party elsewhere in New York tonight as well. On Long Island, in the first congressional district, my former New York Sun colleague John Avlon, a former aide to Mayor Giuliani, won an overwhelming victory against a self-funding progressive who ran to Avlon’s left on almost everything, including Israel. Avlon’s victory in the Democratic primary may increase the chances of the Democrats flipping the seat in the general election from Republicans, who now hold it.

In Central New York’s 22nd congressional district, the Democratic primary winner was John Mannion. His campaign website boasts “I accelerated Middle Class tax cuts and provided property tax relief to help families save money,” and “I created the first new police department in New York in half a century.” When Democrats are running on cutting taxes and creating new police departments, rather than on abolishing or defunding the police, it’s a positive sign.

I’m not a partisan Democrat by any stretch, but even as a right-leaning independent, I think it’s better for America and for New York to have a Democratic Party that’s centrist rather than extreme left. It may cost Republicans some seats in closely contested districts. And, ironically, it’s been successful Republican litigation against ridiculously partisan Democratic gerrymandering that has, arguably, yielded some of the more balanced districts that are encouraging Democrats to choose more moderate candidates who can win. John Faso, Ed Cox, Ronald Lauder, Misha Tseytlin, E.J. McMahon, and Adam Kincaid helped Republicans win the House in 2022 with their redistricting litigation push. The country has Faso and Cox to thank for Speaker Johnson. If their actions to create non-lopsided districts also accidentally generate some pro-police, pro-Israel, pro-tax-cut, pro-business, pro-America Democratic candidates or even members of Congress, that wouldn’t be the worst outcome, either.

IRS apologizes: The IRS has issued an apology to Kenneth Griffin and others whose tax information was leaked to the press by an IRS contractor. 

“The Internal Revenue Service sincerely apologizes to Mr. Kenneth Griffin and the thousands of other Americans whose personal information was leaked to the press,” the IRS said in a statement today. 

“Charles Littlejohn was a government contractor providing services to the IRS at the time he made the illegal disclosures. He violated the terms of his contract and betrayed the trust that the American people place in the IRS to safeguard their sensitive information,” the statement said. “The IRS takes its responsibilities seriously and acknowledges that it failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct and unlawful disclosure of Mr. Griffin’s confidential data. Accordingly, the IRS assures Mr. Griffin and the other victims of Mr. Littlejohn’s actions that it has made substantial investments in its data security to strengthen its safeguarding of taxpayer information.”

I wrote last month about this case, which affected the company that publishes The Editors, FutureOfCapitalism, LLC, for the Wall Street Journal (“I’m a Crime Victim—ProPublica Has My Tax Returns”). I’m grateful to Ken Griffin and his lawyers for extracting an apology from the IRS. 

I asked Booz Allen, the consulting firm that employed Littlejohn, whether it had any comment on the new IRS statement. I didn’t get an answer.

Thank you: The Editors is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate our coverage of Harvard, Amherst, the IRS, and American politics, please become a paying subscriber today, get full access, and help to sustain our editorial independence and continued growth.

And if you know someone who might enjoy or learn from The Editors, please help spread the world by sharing this newsletter with an invitation to sign up. Tell your spouse, or your kids, or your parents, or your friends, business associates, and neighbors.