Why We’re Founding Harvard Faculty for Israel

The Harvard community warmly welcomes students and faculty from all corners of the world, including countries whose governments often draw severe condemnation, like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. But there is one country whose nationals do not receive the same favorable reception: Israel.

Israeli students and faculty are targets of pervasive anti-Israel hatred. At Harvard, students have disrupted an Israeli professor’s lecture, an undergraduate has reported that a professor forced her to leave a classroom after she said she was Israeli, and an outside law firm engaged by Harvard found that another instructor discriminated against Israeli students on the basis of their national origin and Jewish ethnicity. In conversations, Israeli students have told us that they are routinely excluded from student organizations and social activities, and that some of their peers literally turn their backs on them.

The message is clear: Zionists are not welcome.

The situation was bad even before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. But it became much worse after. On that terrible day, Israeli students and faculty on campus frantically texted and called their friends and family to find out who had been tortured, raped, killed, or kidnapped. They then looked up from their phones to find a campus that not only lacked empathy, but actually blamed them for their own suffering.

The surge in anti-Israel sentiment has been accompanied by a rise in antisemitism. Since Oct. 7, Harvard students have complained on Sidechat, a campus social media platform, that “we got too many damn jews [...] supporting our economy” and decried “how much power the Jewish population has over the media.” Another post mocked an Israeli undergraduate with an antisemitic trope: “She looks just as dumb as her nose is crooked.”

A Title VI complaint filed against Harvard, which recently survived Harvard’s motion to dismiss, alleges in detail how multiple faculty have discriminated against pro-Israel Jews. And Jewish students have said to us that they must renounce Zionism — part of many Jews’ religious identity — if they wish to participate in progressive spaces.

We are both Jewish and have both spent many years at Harvard, as undergraduates (Class of ’85), graduate students, and then faculty. We cannot remember anti-Israel hatred or antisemitism at Harvard ever being this profound and widespread.

Some say that the current situation harkens back to antisemitic discrimination at Harvard and other American universities 100 years ago, when quotas were implemented to limit the number of Jewish students admitted. But Jews, especially Israeli Jews, may well face a far more hostile campus today than their co-religionists did a century ago.

The situation at Harvard reflects a larger, deeply disturbing trend in academia: the vilification of Israel and its people, with the goal of driving the intellectually and scientifically creative nation of Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, from campus.

To be sure, the situation of Israelis and Jews is even worse at other universities, both in America and around the world. Students have reported hearing chants of “Gas the Jews.” Several European universities have cut ties with Israeli universities.

But Harvard still must do better. Harvard bends over backwards to prevent individuals of any other religion or nationality from being singled out for harassment, discrimination, and shunning. The University should similarly have zero tolerance when the victims are Israeli or Jewish.

Treating every member of the Harvard community as an individual deserving dignity is the right thing to do, because it is kind. But it is also necessary to advance the University’s mission. A world-class university needs to draw the best students and scholars from diverse backgrounds, including Jews and Israelis, to learn and discover together, build intellectual bridges and advance human knowledge.

Harvard should also resist calls to boycott or to refrain from expanding ties with Israeli universities. Not only would such steps interfere with academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas; they would also represent a capitulation to bigotry.

We fondly remember a Harvard where Jews and Israelis were warmly welcomed, just like everyone else. It can be that way again.

Jesse M. Fried ’85 is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Matthew L. Meyerson ’85 is Professor of Genetics and Medicine at Harvard Medical School. They are founders of the new faculty group Harvard Faculty for Israel.