Yesterday, the news was that the Harvard Law Review offered a $65,000 fellowship to a man named Ibrahim Bharmal to do public interest with CAIR. The only problem is that, before receiving the fellowship, Bharmal was charged with assaulting a Jewish student on Harvard’s campus, an action that earned him a sentence of community service and anger management. Given that his Muslim faith, with its jihadist mandate to kill Jews, drove him to the assault, I don’t know that anger management will do the job.

Decent people are outraged, as they should be, but the reality is that Harvard is reverting to type. Except for a very brief window of time, it was always a no-go zone for Jews. Having said that, this time around, Harvard’s antisemitism is worse than it was the first time.

The first time, it was exclusionary (i.e., we don’t want Jews polluting our WASPy Ivy League cloister); this time, it’s eliminationist (i.e., we want Jews dead). In a nutshell, Harvard and Hamas now have a lot in common.

Image: Harvard in 1906, when it was still politely antisemitic (and not sucking on the government’s teat, something that happened during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a progressive and one-time Princeton president). Public domain.

Many of us have been paying attention to the slow-mo degradation of Harvard and other Ivies, a process that’s played out over the decades, but that accelerated during the Obama years. The change has come about as these institutions embraced leftism more overtly, and with leftism a whole panoply of leftist values (i.e., anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, antisemitism, anti-men, anti-whiteness, anti-heterosexuality, etc.). Even knowing this, though, people were shocked by the sheer virulence of antisemitism that exploded on the Ivy League campuses following Hamas’s genocidal mass murder in Israel on October 7, 2023.

It was so obvious that even The Washington Post felt obligated to comment on the fact that, traditionally, the Ivies have always been hostile territory for American Jews. Ironically, Columbia was the only Ivy League school that didn’t exclude,  but it’s now the most virulently antisemitic of all the Ivies.

Our Editor Emeritus, Thomas Lifson, was both a student and professor at Harvard, and he has insights into Harvard’s journey when it comes to Jews:

Harvard is regressing to its historic pattern of antisemitism. Its famous and revered president A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933 and who greatly expanded the university and its wealth, openly argued for a Jewish quota, which was never formally adopted, but which led to geographic distribution requirement in admissions that served the same function.  Jewish enrollment did recover somewhat under his successors, but critics reckon that it was not until roughly 1970 that Jews were free of admissions discrimination.

It took a bit longer for Jews to be accepted at the top levels of Harvard, though. I had the great good fortune to be first a student, then a colleague and friend of the late Henry Rosovsky, whose achievements (read this) made him an obvious choice  when the presidency of Harvard opened up in 1991, having served as “acting president” twice when President Derek Bok (a wealthy Philadelphia blueblood) took leaves of absence. In private, Henry quipped that Harvard would go with someone with a “reversible name”, a reference to WASPs like then-prominent McGeorge Bundy). Ten years later, Harvard finally appointed its first Jewish president, Lawrence Summers (later forced from office).

In its modern incarnation, Harvard has become a deeply disturbing, even dangerous, place for Jewish students: