September 13, 2025
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Harvard gets failing mark for protecting free speech and academic freedom

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13 June 2025

Harvard University is faced with grotesque penalties from the Trump Administration on the grounds that the University has failed to address antisemitism on campus. But as 27 Jewish scholars of Jewish studies – including Barry Trachtenberg (pictured) – point out in this Guardian article, Harvard’s own management has complicated the situation by asserting claims about Jews that are themselves antisemitic. One almost despairs of the highly-paid managers there and at many other universities in the US, UK and elsewhere who betray woeful ignorance of the issues raised by Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people. Most of them have unmatched expertise close at hand, yet they seem incapable of using it.

Harvard appears to think all Jews support Israel. That is discriminatory

Barry Trachtenberg, Victor Silverman, Atalia Omer, Raz Segal, Rebecca T Alpert and Judith Butler

We are Jewish scholars who filed an amicus brief with the US supreme court on Harvard’s discriminatory assumption that being Jewish means supporting IsraelThu 12 Jun 2025 12.00 BSTShare

Harvard is suing to stop the Trump administration’s unprecedented interference in the operation of the university, supposedly to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. Harvard maintains it has already addressed a crisis of antisemitism on campus. The government is wrong in attacking Harvard, but so is Harvard in its defense.

We are part of a group of 27 Jewish scholars of Jewish studies who have filed an amicus brief in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration. We submitted the brief, drafted by the civil rights attorney Yaman Salahi, because we support the university’s fight against government overreach. Yet in doing so, the institution has committed a different kind of discrimination – one that violates federal civil rights law. We reject Harvard’s troubling assumption that being Jewish necessitates supporting Israel, or that criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza constitutes antisemitism.

Harvard’s claims about campus antisemitism don’t only misrepresent Jewish diversity – they violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by subjecting Jews to harmful stereotypes about what constitutes “authentic” Jewish identity.

Harvard’s own complaint and legal filings perpetuate a pernicious fiction: that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza stem from prejudice against Jewish students rather than moral opposition to the systematic destruction of Palestinian life. This narrative relies on three false assumptions: that Jewish communities hold monolithic pro-Israel views, that Jewish students cannot tolerate different perspectives on Israel-Palestine, and that exposure to criticism of Israel constitutes a civil rights injury.

These assumptions aren’t just empirically wrong – they’re legally dangerous. As the US supreme court established in Students for Fair Admissions, universities cannot operate on the “belief that minority students always express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue”. The court explicitly rejected “impermissible racial stereotypes” that assume all “members of the same racial group think alike”.

The same principle applies when universities assume all Jewish people share identical views about Israel and Zionism. When Harvard treats criticisms of Israeli violence as antisemitism or of Israel as a state for Jews above the other people who live there, it reduces Jewish identity to a political litmus test – one that erases the rich diversity of Jewish thought and experience.

This erasure has real consequences for Jewish students and faculty who don’t conform to Harvard’s preferred stereotype. Consider Professor Atalia Omer, one of our co-signers and a Jewish Israeli academic who previously taught at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard’s antisemitism taskforce identified her courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as contributing to campus hostility – despite the fact that she designed these courses as a Jewish scholar exploring the complexity of the region through multiple perspectives.

As Professor Omer wrote: Harvard’s report “attempts to redraw the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy”and effectively declared her “the wrong kind of Jew” – a determination that no educational institution should have the power to make.

This experience reflects a broader pattern affecting Jewish students and faculty. Harvard recognizes student organizations such as Tzedek (Hebrew for justice), which is “a home on campus for a liberatory approach to Judaism” and “anti-Zionist, non-Zionist, and Zionist-questioning Jewish students”. Similarly, the Harvard Forward-Thinking Jewish Union exists because some Jewish students felt they were not allowed to question Zionism in pre-existing Jewish campus spaces.

These students and scholars aren’t marginal voices. Recent polling shows that nearly one-third of Jewish Americans agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and more than half support withholding arms shipments to Israel. A 2020 Pew Research survey found that only 45% of Jewish Americans consider “caring about Israel” essential to their Jewish identity.

Harvard’s approach doesn’t just erase Jewish diversity – it actively harms Jewish students who don’t conform to expected political views. Administrators tried to stop a Passover seder organized by anti-Zionist Jewish students, treating their religious observance as inherently problematic because of their political views. Jewish students report facing discipline for passive acts of solidarity like placing protest stickers on laptops while studying in university libraries. In this, Harvard is no outlier, as dissident Jewish students and faculty around the country have been targeted along with their Palestinian and Muslim fellows.

This discriminatory treatment stems from Harvard’s misguided adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with prejudice against Jewish people.

This isn’t just bad policy – it’s illegal discrimination under Title VI. As the Israeli law professors Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona argue, when Jewish employees or students are told they have “betrayed their own race” or are “not acting Jewish enough” by supporting Palestinian rights, they face discrimination based on their failure to conform to ethnic stereotypes.

The supreme court established that employers cannot discriminate against workers for failing to conform to stereotypes about their protected characteristics. The same principle must protect Jewish students, staff and faculty from being punished for holding “the wrong” political views about Israel.

We support Harvard’s legal challenge to federal overreach, but we reject the university’s characterization of its own censorship as necessary protection for Jewish students. Many of the students facing discipline and marginalization are themselves Jewish. They don’t need protection from their own political views – they need protection from institutions that would force them to choose between their Jewish identity and their political conscience.

Universities must stop policing the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy and start respecting Jewish agency. Jews are capable of forming their own views about Israel, Palestine and everything else. We don’t need institutions to tell us what we must believe to be authentically Jewish.

As Jewish scholars who have devoted our lives to the study of Jewish issues and ideas that include a commitment to intellectual freedom and human dignity, we call on Harvard and other universities to abandon their efforts to enforce political orthodoxy in Jewish communities. Stop erasing Jewish voices that don’t conform to your preferred narrative. Stop treating criticism of genocide as antisemitism. And start treating Jewish people as complex individuals capable of thinking for themselves.

Our Jewish identity is not conditional on support for any government’s policies. Our commitment to justice is not separate from our Jewishness or from Jewish history – it flows directly from it. Universities that claim to protect us while silencing our voices have fundamentally misunderstood both antisemitism and Jewish identity itself.

 Barry Trachtenberg, Victor Silverman, Atalia Omer, Raz Segal and Rebecca T Alpert

The authors are among 27 Jewish scholars of Jewish studies who filed an amicus brief in Harvard’s federal lawsuit

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