The U.S. Department of Justice expanded its civil rights lawsuit against Harvard University on Monday, adding new allegations that Jewish and Israeli students faced discrimination, harassment and unequal treatment on campus.
The amended complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, comes nearly a month after Harvard filed a motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit. The revised 59-page filing adds several incidents that were not included in the initial complaint filed on March 20.
Among the new allegations is a claim that Marshall Ganz, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, barred Israeli students from presenting a project on “liberal Jewish democracy” during a 2023 workshop.
“The Israeli students were forbidden by Professor Ganz to present their project of choice and were told that associating the word ‘Jewish’ with ‘democracy’ was offensive,” according to the complaint. They were also allegedly told that the project would make the classroom “unsafe for their Muslim and Arab peers.”
The filing cites an independent university investigation that found Ganz discriminated against the students on the basis of “Israeli national origin and Jewish ethnicity” and afforded preferential treatment to Arab and Muslim students whom he “deemed as ‘oppressed’ by Israel.”
The incident has also been cited in separate lawsuits against Harvard brought by former students Shabbos Kestenbaum and Yoav Segev, as well as one filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
The amended complaint further alleges that anti-Israel demonstrators blockaded Jewish students inside a study room during a campus protest on Oct. 19, 2023, and that a university employee “tore down posters depicting the faces of Israeli hostages that were on display on Harvard Chabad kiosks in Harvard Yard” in March 2025.
Additional allegations include the defacement of hostage posters with graffiti reading “Israel did 9/11" and the discovery of swastika stickers near Harvard Hillel in October 2024.
The Justice Department said the newly added incidents reinforce its claim that Harvard has demonstrated a pattern of discrimination and deliberate indifference toward Jewish and Israeli students, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The government alleges the university failed to protect those students from a hostile environment and selectively enforced campus rules following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
