America’s leading Ivy League educational institution has announced plans to push back against the rise of antisemitism on campus.
“Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard,” Harvard president Claudine Gay said Oct. 27 during a Hillel Shabbat dinner. “For years, this university has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.”
Gay said a new advisory board on antisemitism would “help us to think expansively and concretely about all the ways that antisemitism shows up on our campus and in our campus culture.”
Announced members of the panel include novelist Dara Horn, who has taught at Harvard and whose 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Rabbi David Wolpe, the Max Webb Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
The other six selected for the panel are Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine, vice chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers; Thomas Dunne, Harvard’s dean of students; Divinity School professor Kevin J. Madigan; Martha L. Minow, who formerly served as the dean of Harvard Law School; and government professor Eric M. Nelson.
On Oct. 16, the Wexner Foundation announced its decision to end a more than 30-year relationship with the Harvard Kennedy School, writing that it was “stunned and sickened at the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians by terrorists.”
Dozens of student groups at Harvard chose to blame Israel for the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
