#WTH The Jews and Harvard

A century of discrimination

Let’s start with some stats about Jews and Harvard University:

• Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has declined from 25 percent to 5 percent in less than 20 years. Per the same report, “[t]his is a larger decline than when Harvard had openly instituted a Jewish Quota in the 1920s.”

• A recently released report on antisemitism at Harvard revealed, per our pod guest Maya Sulkin’s reporting, that, “nearly 60 percent of Jewish students at Harvard said they had experienced ‘discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to [their] views on current events.’”

• “The report said that 73 percent of Jewish students expressed discomfort sharing their political opinions, while 75 percent believed there was an ‘academic or professional penalty’ for expressing their views at Harvard.”

• Per the FBI’s 2023 Hate Crime Statistics, 68 percent of all religion-based hate crimes were committed against Jews, and 8.7 percent against Muslims.

• Concurrently with its report on Antisemitism at Harvard, the University released a report on Islamophobia, which itself singles out “donors” as a problem (read: Jewish donors), but didn’t mention Arab funding like that from Qatar which runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Here’s Maya’s take on releasing an “Islamophobia” report at the same time as one on antisemitism:

Just to set the table, any type of religious or political discrimination or bigotry should be stopped and condemned, of course. But to release these statements in tandem, as if these two groups have experienced the same thing over the past two years, let alone a hundred years, is completely absurd. And I think it demonstrates how deeply Harvard is, frankly, in denial or unclear about their antisemitism problem.

Even if you read their report side by side, which I'm sure only freaks like me are doing, their recommendation sections are completely at odds with each other. The antisemitism report suggests the IHRA definition of antisemitism for, basically, behavioral proceedings. The Islamophobia report says that the IHRA definition of antisemitism limits speech. The list goes on here.

The Islamophobia report mentions Jewish donors and how they influence policy, but there's not... If you command F, Qatar in the antisemitism report, that surely does not come up.

Releasing them in tandem is the entire problem actually. There was a quote in there that said... It was in an introduction of the Islamophobia report that basically said antisemitism has permeated everything so much that you can't even voice pro-Palestinian beliefs without being punished.

I don't even understand how that was printed and published. If you look at what's happened on Harvard's campus in the past two years alone, there are Palestinian protests every single day. Kids are getting spit on for wearing kippahs, and every single person is wearing keffiyeh. It's unbelievable. It's really unbelievable.

Marc and I have written and spoken about the explosion of antisemitism since October 7 on many occasions. Under Biden, Jew hatred was, for the most part, tolerated. But from the very inception of the Trump administration, it appeared that the good times were over for Jew haters on campus. Except that the backlash has been strong, and the defense of the right to intimidate, attack, and vilify Jews has been aggressive. Then there is a growing problem of antisemitism on the right, which preoccupies Team Trump far less. (More on this below.)

But let’s stick with the universities for a moment. Columbia University has made some accommodations with Trump administration demands, and recently arrested participants in a 2025 effort to occupy one of its buildings. But not Harvard. Harvard is, for the most part, impenitent. Maya, like many, bemoans the slashing of US government grants to Harvard and others who are disinclined to extend civil rights protections to Jews. Researchers at places like Harvard and Johns Hopkins are, she insists, rarely at the forefront of antisemitic protests, which tend to be the more exclusive purview of gender studies departments and the like.

Here’s the issue: Harvard boasts an endowment of $53.2 billion. That’s right, B for billion. What exactly is the taxpayer doing subsidizing this university, even its valuable scientific research? Or, let’s ask a harder question: Why is it worth it to Harvard and others to sacrifice government lucre in order to continue to pursue antisemitic policies? Because, let’s face it: Choosing to defy the federal government is a choice. Is Trump asking too much? Treading where no government should tread? Perhaps yes, and there are real questions as to whether he should be threatening Harvard’s 501(c)3 status. Nonetheless, it seems clear that it is more important to Harvard to allow anti-Jewish discrimination than to crack down on its faculty and students.

Universities will argue that they are protecting their independence from federal writ. Perhaps, but ask yourself this question: If we were talking about protecting black students, would their reaction be the same? How about Latinos? You already know the answer. And that leads to the mostly unspoken, yet manifest reality: The Harvards and Stanfords and Yales that a century ago decided to deal with what the then Harvard president called “the Jewish problem” — too many Jewish students being admitted when admissions are blind —have almost exactly the same pseudo-DEI driven antisemitic policies in place today. As Jewish students and families know all too well, for decades, preferential admissions have sought to exclude Jews and other high performers (Indians, Asians).

No discussion of institutional antisemitism should be complete without a word for the growing cadre of right-wing antisemites who now populate the podcast and alt-media space. This is not an attempt to draw equivalence between two sides; rather, it is to note that the Trump administration’s efforts fall flat when the only antisemitism it seems to loathe is on the left. Right-wing Jew haters have increasing sway inside the Trump White House, and make no mistake, the sudden return of the expression “neocon” to describe those nominally antithetical to the President’s “America First” agenda is a dog whistle to Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their fellow Hitler nostalgics.

I wrote here about the the claim that Trump is weaponizing antisemitism. But such refutations of accusations of base motives begin to fall flat when it begins to be clear that it’s not antisemitism this White House hates; it’s left-wing antisemitism.

HIGHLIGHTS

What surprised you in Harvard’s antisemitism report?

MS: To anyone who's been paying a little bit of attention, the 311-page report was actually really not shocking. But it was, of course, pretty hard to digest all of that information in one sitting.

It shows what students there already knew to be true, which was that the norm for Jewish students and professors was one, censorship, but also, what I found to be perhaps even more alarming, was this kind of social ostracization. The numbers show that 73% of Jewish students express discomfort sharing their political opinions. 75% believe there is academic or professional penalty for expressing their views at Harvard. But then there were really harrowing stories about students who just lost their friends, not even for saying anything outwardly in defense of Israel, but even for appearing in an Instagram post with someone who was Israeli. There were students who would walk to class and hear someone mutter "F***ing Zionist", under their breath. And they said in the report, "I don't even know if I'm a Zionist. I'm Jewish." The report really showed this norm of Jew-hatred and how deeply embedded it is, both in the student body, but, perhaps more alarmingly, within the faculty and curriculum.

How many of these examples predate October 7, 2023?

MS: So a number of these examples are far before October 7th, and this is really about the way October 7th turned up the heat on an issue that has been on a very high simmer for decades, since the 1920s. Harvard had Jewish quotas and very outwardly addressed the quote - I'm using air quotes - "Jewish problem".

In this report, I'm just going to pull up some of the things that I covered at the School of Public Health. A 2022 course called Settler Colonial Detriments on Health required students to read material that literally argued, and I'm using quotes, "Zionism manipulated Judaism as a religion to reinterpret history and redefine Jewishness in terms of ethnic belonging."

There was a student at admitted students day for Harvard Medical School who was just told blatantly, "Zionists are not welcome at Harvard Medical School."

The Divinity school, a Israeli doctoral student said the professor began the class about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying the discourse is saturated with the Israeli narrative and that she had decided to remove Israeli sources from the syllabus. This is a course literally on Israeli-Palestinian history, and there is not one source material that is an Israeli source or shows the Israeli perspective.

And like I said, there are the social ostracization. There's an Israeli grad student who was told by one of his friends who would "hurt his career to associate with the Zionists or to be publicly associated with one". There is a student who is in the IDF who said she felt scared to walk back to her dorm room. This is an extremely hostile, volatile environment for Jewish students and professors.

What is Harvard’s history with antisemitism?

MS: The history there is extremely long. There were actual Jewish quotas in the 1920s. There were guest speakers, like Leonard Jeffries, who had theories about how the Jews' world domination. As far back as 1922, the governing board of Harvard unanimously voted there was a Jewish problem on campus.

At that time, in admissions, you're seeing something in the 1920s that a little bit resembles the kind of DEI admissions we're seeing now, which was that, okay, we want to increase diversity on Harvard's campus. What that really meant is you want less Jews, which they were open about. Where do Jews live? They live in, at that time, they lived in New Jersey, in Boston, in New York. And they said, "Okay, well, we want to have students at Harvard from every state represented." Okay, well, if you start to have students from California and Texas and Washington and Utah, they're going to be less Jews. This was this less overt way of saying, "We want more kinds of students, but they're not going to be Jewish."

So there's a really, really, really long history there. Rabbi David Wolpe just wrote an incredible piece in The Free Press about his year at Harvard Divinity School as a visiting scholar. He talks about how even before October 7th, there was just this normalization of guest speakers saying the things that we just alluded to, which is that Zionism is racism. That was just totally, totally accepted.

Like you said, after October 7th, it was this all hell broke loose because there was permission to be really open about it. As soon as it was normalized, there was no going back. The cat was out of the bag after that.

How has “holistic admissions” been used to admit fewer Jews?

MS: It was explained to me as, "Well, this is just an algorithmic truth. If we're representative of the country, then of course there are going to be..."

This was after when... I don't know if you guys saw this. There was a graph that went really viral on Twitter, X, I guess, that basically showed the decline in Jewish admissions. It said there is more discrimination. What it showed is there is more discrimination against Jews in the last 10 years or 20 years than there was in the 1920s when there were actual quotas.

I asked a Harvard administrator about this, and their answer to that was, "Well, we want to have more students from low-income families, first-generation college students. Those are not Jews." By and large, most Jews' parents went to college, and they are not generally low income. That obviously results in less Jews being admitted.

Now, there's this conversation that Jewish excellence has been in decline because we're no longer under the first-generation American pressure to succeed in that way and that the average 18-year-old Jewish kid after World War II would score higher on an SAT than an 18-year-old Jewish kid now. And that might be true. But I don't really think it's a winning argument when we're seeing what's happening on their campus.

Harvard also did a report on Islamaphobia and released it at the same time as the antisemitism report. What does that mean for its attempts to combat antisemitism?

MS: Just to set the table, any type of religious or political discrimination or bigotry should be stopped and condemned, of course. But to release these statements in tandem, as if these two groups have experienced the same thing over the past two years, let alone a hundred years, is completely absurd. And I think it demonstrates how deeply Harvard is, frankly, in denial or unclear about their antisemitism problem.

Even if you read their report side by side, which I'm sure only freaks like me are doing, their recommendation sections are completely at odds with each other. The antisemitism report suggests the IHRA definition of antisemitism for, basically, behavioral proceedings. The Islamophobia report says that the IHRA definition of antisemitism limits speech. The list goes on here.

The Islamophobia report mentions Jewish donors and how they influence policy, but there's not... If you command F, Qatar in the antisemitism report, that surely does not come up.

Releasing them in tandem is the entire problem actually. There was a quote in there that said... It was in an introduction of the Islamophobia report that basically said antisemitism has permeated everything so much that you can't even voice pro-Palestinian beliefs without being punished.

I don't even understand how that was printed and published. If you look at what's happened on Harvard's campus in the past two years alone, there are Palestinian protests every single day. Kids are getting spit on for wearing kippahs, and every single person is wearing keffiyeh. It's unbelievable. It's really unbelievable.

It seems as though this report shows that antistimism has always existed at Harvard, 10/7 just opened the doors for people to be public with their Jew-hatred.

MS: Yeah, and I think it also opened the gate for this Soviet Union kind of antisemitism that served two purposes. One was to proudly hate Jews. But the other was to destroy the root of what we know to be as western civilization. This serves two purposes, and it's why the same people saying, "From the river to the sea" are also the same people saying, "Death to America". That is not new or surprising to me at all.

What do you make of the argument that Trump is “weaponizing antisemitism”?

MS: There's a New York Times piece today from a number of Jewish groups, condemning the Trump administration's approach to all of this. I've been reporting on this since January, end of January, and it's been really hard for me to be really upfront because I've seen firsthand how toxic these campuses are for Jewish students and how really baked into the system it is with faculty, with admissions, with curriculum.

But also, I get on the phone with Columbia researchers who were actually the most outspoken against antisemitism on campus, who work 60 blocks north of Columbia's undergraduate school, who can't continue to research things like ALS and cancer. To me, that is the tragedy in all of this, is that the professors who are teaching gender studies, who are literally leading the protests, don't really face any punishment, but the people that are, in many cases, mostly Jewish, number one, and two, were the most outspoken, are now losing their federal funding for researching things that are, obviously, to the benefit of society, like curing cancer.

In that respect, the Trump administration is leveraging what it has, which is its grants, and those grants are from the NIH and the HHS, and those are for research. If there were grants for Middle Eastern studies programs, I would hope that those would be the ones targeted, rather than ALS research. But those are the means the government has right now.

How have other universities, like Columbia, reacted to the Trump administration’s campaign against antisemitism?

MS: The old president, President Armstrong, she has, if I can say, no moral backbone and was saying one thing to the Trump administration and another to faculty, which I reported on because there was a transcript from a meeting where she says to faculty, "Don't worry about it, guys. I'm not doing any of this." And then she turns around and says to McMahon and the Education Department, "Yep, you got it. We're on it."

But they did actually agree to some of these things. If you look at Colombia's protests, the kids chaining themselves to the gates, they're literally having people cut the chains off. I wish that they were stronger about it, but they came to the table.

Harvard, on the other hand, just said, "No. We're not doing any of these demands. We're not coming to the negotiating table. And actually, you're violating our First Amendment rights."

I think you're exactly right, that if they cared about preserving what the university ought to be and fixing this problem, federal grants would not have to be cut. It's obviously a really drastic measure.

Even today, Columbia sent an email to researchers that said they're cutting 180 jobs. They're laying off 180 people over fixing the problem they have.

Did Harvard’s report accurately capture the extent of antisemitism on campus?

MS: Even though the report is 311 pages, and it's grueling, it actually doesn't show the... No report can demonstrate a general vibe. You know what I mean? What it can't show is this baked-in thing that has existed for decades, that completely allows and allows this kind of behavior.

Yeah, you can list a thousand incidences of horrible antisemitic behavior, but what no report can really demonstrate is what we all know to be true, which is that it's just a part of the culture. It's the more minute things. It's the way a student feels walking to class. It's the way a professor feels about going to a Jewish service. It's the way someone feels about inviting a certain speaker. Those are things that are not in the report, but those are what define institutions like this.

How do foreign donations to universities help perpetuate antisemitism?

MS: I reported on this a couple of weeks ago with my colleague Frannie. Since the government has started collecting this data in the 1980s, Harvard has been the top recipient of foreign funding of any school by a lot. The second is Cornell. Most Ivies are on the list of those top 10 schools.

Harvard also, as you said, did not disclose, which is Section 117, did not properly disclose the amount of foreign funding that they were receiving, which is why there was this investigation into what was going on there. But that's why, when this report came out, I was so stunned, and maybe I shouldn't have been, that Qatar or China is not mentioned once. And then, the Islamophobia report, which as their release timing indicates, you should read them at the same time, talks about Jewish donors.

These foreign governments, whose interests are at direct odds with United States, are funneling money into these universities, and then we're left thinking, "Wow, how do these places get so antisemitic and anti-American?" Well, China and Qatar are giving them money, and or their declared interests are against ours. And they're at our "top" universities. Top is in air quotes, of course.

Read the full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (Harvard University, April 29, 2025)

Update on Presidential Task Forces (Alan M. Garber, Harvard Office of the President, April 29, 2025)

The Jewish Student Who Took On Harvard (Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times, May 4, 2025)

Harvard’s President Is Fighting Trump. He Also Agrees With Him. (New York Times, May 3, 2025)

Harvard President Says Any Move to Revoke Tax-Exempt Status Would Be ‘Highly Illegal’ (Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2025)

Harvard Promises Changes After Reports on Antisemitism and Islamophobia (New York Times, April 29, 2025)

The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities (Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2025)

U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Sends Letters to 60 Universities Under Investigation for Antisemitic Discrimination and Harassment (U.S. Department of Education, March 10, 2025)

Harvard Settles Antisemitism Lawsuits (Harvard Magazine, Updated February 13, 2025)

Denounced, Cursed, and Ghosted: What Harvard’s Antisemitism Report Found (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press, April 30, 2025)

Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities (Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin, The Free Press, April 30, 2025)

David Wolpe: Harvard Is Spraying Perfume on a Sewer (David Wolpe, The Free Press, May 2, 2025)