No Jewish Student Should be Shunned for their Beliefs

Dear beloved fellow members of Harvard’s Jewish community,

Yesterday, many of you saw the Harvard Crimson article “Ethicist, Should I Let Go of My Zionist Friends?” This piece has rightfully caused shock, hurt, and concern across our community. This question, and the response’s failure to forcefully reject discrimination against Jews for our beliefs, represent exactly what we have been fighting against for the past two years.

I recorded a video response last night to address what this article means, why it matters, and what we’re doing to address not just it, but the culture that gave rise to it. I want to speak directly to you about the work ahead and how we can face this challenge together.

For those who prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Defending the place of every Jew, and every type of Judaism – and particularly Israelis and Zionism – remains central to our commitments. We are in this for the long haul, working alongside university leadership, alumni, parents, students, and faculty to make Harvard again into a place where every Jewish student enjoys the fullness of a Harvard education, without the marginalization and stigmatization that have been all-too-common at Harvard for the past number of years, and burst into public view on and after 10/7.

Thank you for your partnership in this work. We need each other now more than ever.

Shabbat Shalom,

Jason Rubenstein

Executive Director

My name is Jason Rubenstein, and I’m the executive director of Harvard Hillel. This morning, as many of you saw, an article appeared in the Harvard Crimson titled “Ethicist, Should I Let Go of My Zionist Friends?” We’re shocked to see this. And we’re right to be shocked, outraged, and concerned. And I want to say three things that we need to understand, we need to think about, and together we can and are working on. The first, is that this is precisely the type of shunning, ostracization, demonization of Zionism, Zionist Jews, and Israelis, that we have been speaking about, speaking out against, working against for the last two years. And I want to give a lot of appreciation to President Garber for diagnosing precisely this shunning as the most pervasive, insidious, and destructive form of antisemitic discrimination that’s been present, and as we’re seeing in this article, is still present at Harvard.

And it’s a critical thing to understand that this is not like the genteel antisemitism at the elite universities in the mid-20th century. If you listen to alumni from the Princeton eating clubs of the 60s, of why they restricted the number of Jews, they didn’t say they should do it. They didn’t feel a moral obligation. But the morally tinged call to exclude Jews, to exclude Jewish nationalism from the purview of one’s friend circle, from your circle of sympathy, is something more troubling. And that’s why we’ve been reaching back, you know, to the Austria of the 1930s, for an example of a kind of moral crusade that will take Jews as some of its victims. And we are right to see hints of that and echoes of it here, and to raise the alarms.

We also need to understand, secondly, that this question and the wrong answer, that yes, I can, I ought to exclude Zionists from my social circles, is widespread among young Americans today. The best data are that 25% of American college students report that they would not be friends with a Zionist. This is a question that’s being asked millions of times across America, not just at Harvard (were that it was just by this one student at Harvard). And I want to call our community’s attention to that; that the efforts that we’ve made heretofore have been inadequate to the demands of the moment, to the demands of the era, to the demands of the coming generation. And we need to be more resourceful. We need to be more creative.

We need to speak more directly to the issues and make the case on substance for the dignity and the integrity of Zionism as the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, and that we deserve a place among the people and the nations of the world and among the political fabric of America, the social fabric of our communities, no less than anyone else, and that any call to the contrary is a form of bigotry and discrimination. And the last thing I want to point out is that this is not new at Harvard. Many of us are noticing this for the first time. I’ve been getting emails all day today. But almost exactly a year ago, when Harvard Hillel hosted a former IDF spokesperson, there were protests outside our building. “Zionists are not welcome here” was the chant.

That chant wasn’t just about friendship, like in this piece. This was about whether Jews of a certain belief— Jews who are the majority of the world’s Jews and the majority of American Jews who believe in Zionism— are welcome at Harvard. And there are students on this campus who think that the answer is and ought to be no, and some faculty as well. And those people are practicing a form of bigotry: a call to exclude members of our community based on our sincerely held beliefs. And all decent people, not just Jews, should rise up against that, because those calls are corrosive; they’re destructive to the Jewish community; they’re harmful to the security that we have fought so hard for. They’re also harmful to these institutions to which we’ve given so much.

And they’re harmful to the place of every student here who wants to be able to share their honest beliefs without fear of being subjected to hatred and mistreatment by their colleagues. And we’re right to ask for that and nothing less. And so the question I would like to ask the Ethicist is what it’s like to write in the context of widespread discrimination against Jewish students and how they address the concerns of contributing to a plausibility structure of discrimination, marginalization, demonization, and bigotry. I want you all to know out there that these issues are the ones that we are working on tirelessly at Harvard Hillel, in partnership with the administration, in coordination with Harvard’s Jewish alumni, parents, donors, student leaders, faculty, and members of the larger American and international conversation.

We have made real progress over the last two years. And as you can see today, there is much more work to be done. Please join us and help us in these efforts so that, two years from now, this question will be asked much less frequently, in a different tone, and we’ll receive a very different answer on campus. Thank you for your partnership. We all need to be in this, working together for the long haul. It is not an easy path, but our people have faced harder things in the past and survived, and together, we can do this as well. Thank you.