What It’s Like to Be Jewish at Harvard Among Antisemites and Hamas Supporters

February 29, 2024

What’s it like being a Jewish student at Harvard today? With us to tell their firsthand accounts are Nitsan Machlis, co-chair of the Harvard Kennedy School Jewish Caucus, and Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity school student who is part of a group that sued the university–alleging that they failed to address “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism.

AJC's State of Antisemitism in America 2023 Report found that 24% of current or recent college students say they felt uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event because they're Jewish. Listen in to hear from Machlis and Kestenbaum on how Harvard’s administration has made Jewish students feel unwelcome and unsupported – and what they’re doing to fix it.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Nitsan Machlis, Shabbos Kestenbaum

Show Notes:

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Transcript of Interview with Nitsan Machlis and Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Since the October 7 terror attack on Israel by Hamas, it has become increasingly difficult for Jewish students to feel safe on American college campuses. AJC's state of antisemitism and America 2023 report found that 24% of current or recent college students say they felt uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event because they're Jewish. This is even true at one of the world's top Ivy League schools. Some might even say, especially true at Harvard University.

This week, the co-chair of a task force set up by Harvard to combat antisemitism resigned. The second such departure after Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from an antisemitism Advisory Committee. He cited former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony and events on campus, which reinforced the idea that he could not make the sort of difference he had hoped. The latest event on campus: a blatantly antisemitic cartoon circulated on Instagram by pro Palestinian student groups.

Here to give us some perspective on the ground are Harvard Divinity student Shabbos Kestenbaum and co-chair of the Harvard Kennedy School Jewish Caucus, Nitsan Machlis.

Shabbos, Nitsan, welcome to People of the Pod.

Nitsan Machlis:

Thank you.

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So as I mentioned on Sunday, Professor Raphaela Sadoon resigned from her role on the University Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Any idea why?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Sure. So when President Garber put out that announcement, it was definitely a surprise to many of us. The official reason was she wanted to focus on her administrative and academic responsibilities as a professor at the business school. But we know that that's not true. The very next day, The Harvard Crimson wrote an article detailing from members on the antisemitism Task Force, that she was incredibly frustrated with the slow pace, with the bureaucracy. And more fundamentally, she had asked Harvard to commit themselves to actually applying the recommendations that the taskforce would issue. And Harvard was not willing to do that. And I think that speaks volumes, again, about their priorities and how serious they are about combating antisemitism, that they wouldn't even commit themselves to listening to the advice of people that they themselves appointed.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So what are some of those basic obvious objectives that you think the task force–what are your expectations for this task force?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Well, my expectations for the task force is nothing. I mean, the first one was so remarkably useless. It was disbanded after, what 40 days. And this one, I'll give it, let's say 100 days tops. But in terms of what I would want to see, and what Jewish students have been asking for for years, is I'll give you an example. When all incoming students come into Harvard, they take mandatory Title Nine training, and it tells them that things like fat phobia, like size-ism, like the wrong gender pronouns are forms of abuse, and they can be disciplinary, if someone were to engage in them.

Why is antisemitism not included in that type of mandatory training? And why is it that we need the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust for Harvard to wake up to that reality? So that's number one.

Number two, we need to see the fair enforcement of the school code of conduct and the fair enforcement of school policies. If you're a student engaged in antisemitism, the way that many of them are at the moment, you will be disciplined in the same way you would be and you have been, because Harvard has a track record of doing this, if you were engaged in racism, or sexism, or homophobia. But why the double standard when it comes to Jews?

And then more fundamentally, we need to really restructure and reconsider DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campus that have never included Jewish people. Not once. These are just three basic recommendations off the top of my head that we've been saying for so, so long.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

It seems like students and faculty are simply oblivious to just how vulnerable Jewish students are feeling. Case in point the cartoon last week showing a hand marked with a star of David and $1 sign holding nooses around the necks of a black man and an Arab. Can you share with our listeners, what kinds of explanations, apologies or consequences that you've heard about associated with that cartoon?

Nitsan Machlis:

That cartoon was really upsetting on a personal level. I'll share maybe attuned with the general theme here that I personally have never felt threatened on campus. I have friends who have had very bad experiences. I think antisemitism at an institutional level definitely exists.

But I think that cartoon for me was the first time that I really felt like, wow, this is very upsetting. And this is something that could hurt me. I haven't had conversations with students about the cartoon. And I was actually surprised how many students were unaware that that cartoon had, in fact, been circulating.

And many times I found that in conversations I'll have with friends, they will be very upset, but they didn't even know it was happening. So I will hear about this first from my Israeli circles or from my Jewish circles. But many students are really unaware the extent these images are circulating on campus. So I don't know if that directly answers the question of reactions.

But for me, there's been this big question of how do people not know this is happening? And how can I be so upset for several days over this and my classmates are not even aware.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Shabbos you, as you were saying, you're one of six students who has sued the university for not adequately protecting Jewish students. In fact, you personally encountered antisemitism. Can you share that experience with our listeners?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Sure. So unfortunately, I haven't just encountered it on a one off, but it's been pervasive and it's been consistent. But one particular example that stands out was the very first day of the spring semester here at Harvard. I was walking through Harvard Yard and I noticed that every single poster that called attention to kidnapped Jewish babies was vandalized and not just vandalized, but with horrific horrific antisemitism, saying that Jews are best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, that they're responsible for 9/11.

And in fact, on Kfir Bibas, who's the one year old Jewish child, someone had written his head is still on, where's the evidence? So I, of course, reported that immediately, no action was taken. It was only after CNN and Fox News had covered the story that Harvard retroactively issue a statement.

But anyways, the next morning, I get a unprompted unsolicited email from a current Harvard employee who asked me to meet him in a secluded underpass to debate whether Jews were involved in 9/11. I, of course, reported that.

And then later that night, he posted a video on his social media waving a machete with a picture of my face, saying that he wants to fight and he has some master plan. And as I said, I recorded all of this, I went through all the proper channels, whether it was DEI, whether it was the police, whether it was the Office of Student Life.

To this day, February 27, he is still employed at Harvard. In fact, a friend of mine told me he saw him walking through Harvard Yard just a couple of days ago.

It is inconceivable that any other minority group would be treated the way that Harvard treats its Jewish student body. And that's what makes this lawsuit, unfortunately, so necessary.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

That sounds absolutely horrifying and terrifying for you. I'm so sorry that you're having to deal with that. And that's on social media. Have you also encountered people on campus? Have you had personal encounters as well?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I'll just tell you the most recent incident that happened. There is a forum for Harvard students, specifically Harvard Divinity School students, and it's really just become a forum in the last couple of months to bash the Jewish state—It's genocidal, it’s apartheid. And someone had posted a couple of days ago that they were going to organize an event demanding lawmakers pass a ceasefire resolution.

So I responded and this is the first time I was really involved in this forum for months, I responded saying wouldn't it make more sense to ask Hamas to release all the Jewish babies that they kidnapped and to surrender and end the war and I was kicked out of the forum.

So there was not space for mainstream Jewish viewpoints unless that Jewish viewpoint is anti-Zionist. Harvard does not value freedom of speech, the free exchange of ideas or intellectual discourse. what it values is a one narrative, one ideology, and the moment you are counter to that you are ostracized, you are bullied and you're isolated.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Nitsan, have you encountered the same resistance to your point of view? Have you been reluctant to share that you’re Jewish or Israeli?

Nitsan Machlis:

I have felt for the first time, uncomfortable with how I share my identity. And whenever I speak in class, either on Israel or my Jewish identity, I think twice about it. And I have friends who have had very difficult experiences in classrooms and have really been caught off guard, that constant feeling that you have to be on guard because you don't know what will be said and how he will reply to it. It's very exhausting.

But again, what I want to emphasize here is that this isn't the case for everyone. On a personal level, I haven't felt unsafe on a day to day basis, and I have had overwhelmingly positive experiences with my peers in the classroom. At the same time, there's a lot of very upsetting behavior that's happening, like the cartoon we just discussed. But the reason I think it's important to also discuss these stories is because I think that that feeling of isolation can be very dangerous.

So we need to separate fighting against all the awful things that are happening, but also listening to students who have had positive experiences with their peers who have stepped forward and supported them in this time. I think both from an Israeli and a Jewish perspective, the worst thing that can happen is for us to feel completely isolated from our surroundings.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Nitsan, you are not part of this lawsuit. You have not been targeted in the same way. How are you trying to make a difference and change the climate there?

Nitsan Machlis:

I will say that my approach has been to first of all work with the administration. And I very much believe in this. I think there is value to challenging the institution from the outside, especially when they have disappointed us on so many levels. But as the chair of the Jewish caucus in the Harvard Kennedy School, we have tried with the other co chairs, to work together with administration and specifically with DEI offices. For me this is one of the most important asks to have DEI offices in Harvard and another campuses understand that religious identities and national identities are part of any policy of inclusivity.

And personally, I've seen results here, I think there is a greater understanding that these offices should cater to the needs of Jewish students. And I think this is institutionally one of the most important places that we can make things better for students in the long term, and shift the mindset of how administration deals with different identities within the school.

But this really requires an approach of being willing to work together with administration, even when they have disappointed us. To make the meetings, to speak to the deans, and to come with lists of of demands from our students.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You mentioned working with University officials and leaders who run the DEI programs, there on campus. And I know that there has also been a task force formed to address anti Muslim and anti Arab bias. And both that group and the antisemitism Task Force are being advised by the university's chief diversity and inclusion officer. Until now, have the DEI efforts adequately included Jewish students, or let me just say, have they addressed Jewish students' needs at all?

Nitsan Machlis:

So pre-October 7, not at all, at all. And I found that really shocking, even from having orientation presentations, where we speak about all the different identities in school, and no religious identities would be there. And I think that we had a similar issue with Muslim students in the school who also felt like their religious identity is not something they felt comfortable talking about, or expressing or asking for accommodations.

And in that sense, I think we should be building bridges with these kinds of student groups and working together because this is a dual issue. So we definitely did not see any of that pre-October 7. And a lot of our work with the DEI Deans has been making them aware that this is part of their toolkit and part of what they should be working on on campus.

And some of it is really basic stuff like celebrating Jewish holidays when we're celebrating different holidays. So giving that a space on campus, having people know that a lot of the student population are celebrating a holiday right now, building courses around antisemitism, talking about antisemitism in racism classes, clarifying who we can report antisemitism to on campus.

So these are small milestones. But I think what's important here is the mindset change. And understanding that if we want to talk about being inclusive, then we should be talking about religious identities, too.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Shabbos, there's the strategy of working from within, and there's this strategy of putting pressure from the outside. Do you feel like you kind of maximized used up any energy you had to try to work from within? Or is that in your experience, just not a successful strategy? And how did you decide to put the pressure on from the outside in the form of this lawsuit?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

My mindset from day one was let's work with the administration, let's work from the inside. And in fact, when I was working with my legal team to draft this lawsuit, which took about three months, I was quite emphatic, and quite clear that should things change, I would be willing to drop the lawsuit in a heartbeat.

You know, I don't want to do this. And I don't want to go to DC. And I don't want to appear on different conferences, telling strangers how bad antisemitism is at Harvard. I want to learn. that's why I came to Harvard. But much like they say about Palestinian leadership, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The Harvard faculty, the Harvard administration are the exact same way. They failed time and time again, not only did they fail, but they made the situation untenable, they made the situation so much worse.

So my attitude in the past month or so has been these things are not amenable, we cannot change it. We have to dismantle it, we have to put pressure, outside pressure.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

What are some of the mistakes that you're seeing in this battle to confront antisemitism?

Nitsan Machlis:

The whole conversation on anti-Zionism being critical of Israel and antisemitism is a very, very, very complicated conversation. There are no easy answers. I wish I had easy answers. And we shouldn't be having a complicated conversation about it, we should not be having an easy answer to every single case of criticizing Israel is necessarily antisemitic. And when we do that, unfortunately, people take us less seriously.

Again, it's very complicated conversation. And I think very much of antisemitism is tied to anti-Zionism. And these things are not separate at all. I think we need to be very careful with how we fight antisemitism on campuses. And I think the listeners of this podcast will hopefully be willing to understand that climate is very, very, very complicated.

I'm very critical of Israel's policies, I was involved in a lot of political activism work, I'm also a Zionist, and I'm a proud Israeli and I will return to Israel to work within the Israeli political system.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Have you taken precautions to stay safe? Have you changed any of your behavior?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Yeah. So you know, going back to this example of the current Harvard employee who taunted me with a machete, I had private armed security outside my house for three days, I had armed security follow me to synagogue on Friday night, you know, my parents are always calling and checking in on me, they very much want me to leave Cambridge and to come back home.

And in the lawsuit, we also talked about how there was one instance at Widener library, which is really the heart and soul of Harvard University, where during finals week of the fall semester, there were hundreds of students chanting, globalize the Intifada, Palestine will be Arab, from the river to the sea. And Widener library’s where I like to go. It's where I'm entitled to go as a Harvard student.

And I, of course, made sure not to, not even go into Widener library, but to change my regular route. So I wouldn't even have to walk across these people.

Because we already know as we saw in the week after October 7, these protests can get violent, they do get violent, you know, there was an incident of a physical altercation at the business school. So what has Harvard done about it? The answer is nothing.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'm just curious if your sense is that this climate already existed on campus, and October 7, that just intensified it, or are we just now paying attention to something that has long been there?

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

That’s a great question. Well, before October 7, just as one anecdote, my first semester as a Harvard student, actually my first month, with the Palestine Solidarity committee invited Mohamed El Kurd to speak, this was his second time coming to campus. This is someone who said that Jews eat the organs of Palestinians. This is someone who says that the Israeli occupying forces have adopted the ways of Nazi Germany.

And this is also someone that literally last night lamented on Twitter, that it's such a shame that we can't hijack planes to pursue our cause. I mean, calling him a terrorist sympathizer puts it mildly.

Harvard has a strong track record, rightly or wrongly, but a strong track record of regulating speech that they find to be harmful to students. And they have a track record of rescinding invitations and even acceptances to students and to speakers in the name of promoting peace and safety for its students. The obvious and only exception is when it comes to Jews.

We went to the administration, we said this is someone who supports violence against Jewish people in the name of Palestinian resistance. And the answers we got were shrugs on the shoulder, and well, there's nothing we can do about it. The hypocrisy and the double standard is so breathtaking, is so hurtful, is so demeaning. This was my first month at Harvard.

So to say that this suddenly appeared out of nowhere, really does not encapsulate the pervasive problem of antisemitism at Harvard. And it also encapsulates how Harvard has enabled and in some cases, promoted this type of discourse and behavior amongst students and faculty.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Nitsan, you are a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of public policy and government. Your classmates are learning how to navigate the complexities of policy negotiations and international diplomacy. Do the conversations there tend to be elevated compared to the general campus discourse?

Nitsan Machlis:

I think this is exactly the vacuum that I've been feeling on campus. It took a very long time to be having serious policy conversations about this topic. And this is at the top policy school in the world. So if we're not having policy conversations on a foreign policy issue, the war in Israel and Gaza, then the people who are going to enter that vacuum are going to be bad actors and are going to be extremist activists sometimes, and their voices will be heard to a disproportional extent.

Now, I'm not saying these conversations aren't happening at all, because eventually people stepped up and some of my more impressive professors were brave enough to step up into that space. But they've been lone actors in a system that as a whole has not led discourse of this kind.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In other words, they're lone actors. There's not a community, there's not a mass, critical mass that is following in their footsteps. There really are just lone voices.

Nitsan Machlis:

As students, we've had to push for this. And I think it isn't my role as a student to be asking a policy school to teach me policy.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You're not just Jewish, you're also Israeli. Does that help or hinder your role and your ability to carry on these conversations? I mean, you just said you're very critical of Israeli policies. To me I think that would help right in, in fostering conversations and teaching people that, you know, here are, these are policy conversations.

Nitsan Machlis:

It's a very difficult point. And I think many times, my Israeli identity goes before me and colors anything I say, no matter what my thoughts are on the government, no matter what my thoughts are on Israeli politics. And that's very upsetting. And that's something that many Israeli students have felt on campus. I also think that we're learning how to have these conversations. And we're learning how to be strategic about the people we speak to, and the way we raise awareness.

I do my best not to give attention to the extreme people, but to work with moderates. And I think most students at the end of the day are a silent majority, who either are unaware of antisemitism happening on campus or are scared to speak up.

And working with them can be much more effective, in my opinion, than working with people who are shouting the loudest on the edges of the spectrum. And I can speak for the Israeli community at the Harvard Kennedy School, but that's something we've worked on together as a community, how do we target the majority, and not the people who are making us most upset and who gets the headlines, who are speaking on the margins of the campus discourse?

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Being from Israel I imagine it was incredibly difficult to watch abroad, what was happening in your home country? Do you have family or friends who were directly affected on October 7?

Nitsan Machlis:

My brother had just finished his military service. He's an officer, he had actually come to the States for a visit and to travel after his service a week before October 7. And he got on a plane on October 8, and had been in Gaza for around three months since.

And this is actually a crazy story. But in one of the only times that he left Gaza during that time, he called me up and he said Nitsan, what's happening in Harvard. And I found that shocking, that someone who was actually at the frontlines and actually in a war and actually endangering their own life, was asking me what's happening on a campus on the other side of the world. And it's crazy, it really is.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

It speaks to the effect, the emotional impact on the Jewish community at large around the world, what's happening at such a major college campus. I'm also curious what the reaction on campus has been to you having a brother who's serving on the front lines?

Nitsan Machlis:

That's a good question. And to be honest, that's something I don't feel comfortable sharing with most people in school. And that's a problem. There are people who know and there are people who have been very supportive. But there are many people who I've been concerned, what will they think of me? What will they think of my family? And it's a very difficult environment to navigate.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I’m sure it is. That would be taxing for any college student whose family is fighting in a war anywhere in the world. Not just with this added element. Nitsan, I certainly will keep your family in my prayers.

Nitsan, Shabbos: thank you both for sharing your difficult but different experiences on Harvard’s campus.

Nitsan Machlis:

Thank you.

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Thank you for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC's, managing director of policy and political affairs on the efforts in Congress to stand in solidarity with Israeli victims of Hamas’ sexual violence and what you can do to make sure the plight of Israeli women is heard.