Richard Stearns, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ruled last week that Yoav Segev, a graduate of Harvard Business School, failed to prove in a lawsuit that he had experienced “severe and pervasive racial harassment” at Harvard University.
Segev filed the suit in July, alleging that he was assaulted for being Jewish on campus and that Harvard rewarded his attackers and obstructed investigations into the matter.
Stearns ruled that there was no evidence that the attack was motivated by anti-Jewish hate. The assault occurred when Segev was filming an anti-Israel “die-in” protest on campus in October 2023, the same month as the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. (Jason Torchinsky, a partner at Holtzman Vogel who is representing Segev, declined to comment.)
“At best, Segev notes that he was overtly wearing a blue bracelet symbolizing his support for Israel,” Stearns ruled. “But it is not clear that protestors understood the import of his bracelet or that, if they did, they were acting based on antisemitism rather than disagreement with the underlying political message.”
The judge added that “Segev also cannot rely on the fact that other individuals were permitted to film the protest without official interference,” and that the alumnus “does not allege any factual support for his contention that any official failure to intervene in either circumstance was motivated by antisemitism.”
Segev may not have been happy with the way that Harvard handled the matter, but he cannot point to an instance where it promised to take specific disciplinary action but didn’t, the judge wrote.
It is “a closer call” if it was antisemitic for a university administrator to separate Jewish students attending a campus event into “peaceful” or “protester” categories, the judge ruled. But he wrote that the administrator didn’t appear “to take further action or deny anyone access to the event.”
“The court need not decide the issue, however, because a single, isolated incident of antisemitism is insufficient to establish severe and pervasive harassment,” Stearns wrote.
