ANALYSIS – Harvard Jewish Student Antisemitism Lawsuit
The third in a series of lawsuits against NYU, then Penn, and now Harvard, each alleging reprehensible antisemitism by school faculty and students, and anemic, if any, response by school administrators
We reported previously on two lawsuits, one against New York University and one against the University of Pennsylvania, each alleging rampant antisemitism on each campus:
The Complaints against each school detail allegations of antisemitism so disturbing that they truly beggar belief.
You can review the NYU Complaint here, and please read the whole thing, but check out this excerpt:
NYU has not “addressed and ameliorated” campus antisemitism, as the university committed to do three years ago. In fact, shockingly, NYU has done the opposite—it has deliberately sought to burnish its antisemitic credentials and make the campus environment even more hostile and frightening for Jewish students. For example, on October 9, just two days after the horrific terrorist attack in Israel, NYU announced the appointment of Eve Tuck to establish a so-called “Center for Indigenous Studies” at NYU. Professor Tuck, who has a long history of anti-Israel statements, wasted no time praising the murder of Jews. Four days after the Hamas massacre, she called the “Palestinian resistance” “life and future affirming,” and two weeks later, signed a viciously antisemitic open letter defaming Israel. NYU did not censure or terminate Professor Tuck—as it has done for far less egregious conduct where antisemitism was not involved—but remained silent for a month, when it belatedly issued a statement on her behalf purporting to condemn Hamas’s terrorism—which, given her previous statements, could not have been more disingenuous.
[emphasis added]
If anything, the allegations of gross antisemitism in the Penn Complaint are even worse. You can read the entire, 259-paragraph, 84-page Penn Complaint here, but below are the first two paragraphs of the Complaint:
1. Penn, the historic 300-year-old Ivy League university, has transformed itself into an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination. Once welcoming to Jewish students, Penn now subjects them to a pervasively hostile educational environment. Among other things, Penn enforces its own rules of conduct selectively to avoid protecting Jewish students from hatred and harassment, hires rabidly antisemitic professors who call for anti-Jewish violence and spread terrorist propaganda, and ignores Jewish students’ pleas for protection. In doing so, Penn has placed plaintiffs and other Jewish and Israeli students at severe emotional and physical risk.
2. This lawsuit seeks to hold Penn accountable under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the damages it has caused plaintiffs and for its failure to remedy the hostile environment on its campus. The harassment and discrimination on campus and in the classroom are relentless and intolerable. Plaintiffs and their Jewish peers are routinely subjected to vile and threatening antisemitic slurs and chants such as “Intifada Revolution,” “from the River to the Sea,” “Fuck the Jews,” “the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them,” “you are a dirty Jew, don’t look at us,” “keep walking you dirty little Jew,” “get out of here kikes!” and “go back to where you came from.” Plaintiffs and other Jewish students must traverse classrooms, dormitories, and buildings vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Subjected to intense anti-Jewish vitriol, these students have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully and meaningfully participate in Penn’s educational and other programs.
[emphasis added]
Please watch this quick 5-minute video by the lead Plaintiff in the Penn lawsuit to get a feel for how he and other Jewish students at Penn are (allegedly) treated by their fellow students, Professors, and Penn Administration:
Both lawsuits were brought by New York City heavy hitter litigation law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, whose tagline is: “Creative. Aggressive. Relentless,” and named partners Marc E. Kasowitz and Daniel R. Benson, among others, are representing the Plaintiffs in both cases. I highly recommend watching Kasowitz’s firm video available here.
And now, Kasowitz has brough yet another antisemitism lawsuit, this time against Harvard.
For a quick summary, see our report here: Jewish Students Sue Harvard for ‘Enabling Antisemitism’ on Campus.
You can review the antisemitism Complaint against Harvard here:
Please read the entire 209-paragraph, 77-page Complaint. Two excerpts:
1. Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people—including infants, children, and the elderly—antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive. Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel. Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object. What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it.
2. Harvard’s antisemitism cancer—as a past Harvard president termed it—manifests itself in a double standard invidious to Jews. Harvard selectively enforces its policies to avoid protecting Jewish students from harassment, hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda, and ignores Jewish students’ pleas for protection. Those professors teach and advocate through a binary oppressor-oppressed lens, through which Jews, one of history’s most persecuted peoples, are typically designated “oppressor,” and therefore unworthy of support or sympathy. Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world. Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior….
50. Harvard PSC [“Palestine Solidarity Committee”], SJP [“Students for Justice in Palestine”], and similar groups have harassed Jews on campus for years without consequence, exemplifying Harvard’s deliberate indifference to its severe antisemitism problem. For example, on April 14, 2016, Harvard Law held an event featuring a speech by Tzipi Livni, a leading Israeli politician. At the event, a student SJP leader accosted Livni, asking her, echoing anti-Jewish stereotypes promoted by, among others, the Nazis: “How is that you are so smelly? It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.” Harvard did not discipline this student, but, instead, the then-dean of Harvard Law—while recognizing that “[m]any perceive [the incident] as anti-Semitic”—responded “that speech is and should be free,” notwithstanding that the conduct plainly violated policies including Harvard’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.
The rest of the Complaint is filled with similar, outrageous allegations about the heinous antisemitism existing at Harvard and Harvard’s abject failure to do anything about it.
Analysis
These three lawsuits have “legs” as we say in the business; i.e. they’re not going to dismissed or settled without major, campus-changing actions taken by each university, which seems impossible at this point. In the NYU lawsuit, NYU filed a motion for a conference with the Judge to discuss their expected Motion to Dismiss. NYU’s grounds for dismissal, as stated in the letter, are that NYU has instituted a 10-Point Plan to combat antisemitism, and have taken other actions to ameliorate the situation, including opening a “Center for the Study of Antisemitism.”
The NYU Plaintiffs are having none of it. See these excerpts from the Response filed by Kasowitz on behalf of the Plaintiffs:
NYU says that because it plans to open a “Center for the Study of Antisemitism” next fall and has issued a (patently inadequate) “10-Point Plan”—“plans” and “processes” which NYU
says are “evolv[ing]”—this Court must dismiss plaintiffs’ claims or must compel plaintiffs to wait for some unspecified period to see if the hostile educational environment on NYU’s campus is remedied. Meanwhile, plaintiffs are forced to run a daily gauntlet of unconscionable harassment on campus—harassment NYU would not tolerate if directed at any other group—where Jewish students are physically and verbally assaulted, subjected to genocidal threats such as “Hitler was right,” “gas the Jews,” and “death to kikes”, and forced to traverse university buildings past students and faculty chanting antisemitic slogans and brandishing antisemitic posters. Incredibly, even as plaintiffs allege that they fear for their physical safety, NYU insists that it is the victim, complaining that allowing this lawsuit to proceed would impose a “hardship on NYU by . . . infringing on the flexibility it needs to function.” (emphasis added)….NYU’s proposed motion is contrary to controlling … law. Not only would granting the motion deny plaintiffs their right to seek relief, but it would also provide every defendant a roadmap for avoiding or delaying accountability for egregious discrimination by simply announcing “ongoing” “plans” and “processes.” NYU does not, as it cannot, cite any authority justifying such an extraordinary result, and a pre-motion conference would be a waste of the Court’s and the parties’ resources. In any event, plaintiffs intend to file an amended complaint by January 31, 2023, adding plaintiffs and further allegations of recent antisemitic harassment on campus—which only confirm the falsity of NYU’s assurances that it is solving the problem.
[bold emphasis added]
Federal Judge Paul Crotty in the NYU case has set a teleconference with the lawyers for each party down for this coming Tuesday, January 16, to discuss NYU’s expected Motion to Dismiss. I would love to be a fly on the wall at the teleconference, because I predict Judge Crotty is going to indicate to NYU that any such motion to dismiss has little chance of being granted.
In any case, we will keep tabs on all three cases and keep you updated.
In the meantime, from X:
Defund @Harvard pic.twitter.com/0uLzZh8zYy
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) January 11, 2024
Harvard is a cesspool. https://t.co/GUQDmDVlOX pic.twitter.com/ShweFpWjTK
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) January 12, 2024
Yesterday, @Harvard was sued by a group of students due to pervasive antisemitism on campus.
The complaint is best described as devastating.
Based on the alleged facts which are consistent with what I have heard from students and faculty on campus, and what I have seen with my…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 12, 2024
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Comments
I cannot fathom enduring so much blatant and open hatred. I hope the plaintiffs prevail. It is also hard for me to believe some of the things happening and allowed in our beautiful USA.
When I hire a disappointing contractor or employee, I fire him, cut my losses and move on. I do not sue him to do better work. Parents should withdraw their children from such schools. It is an imperfect world and hard, adult choices must be made. Lawyers will not create an Elysium.
I do the same in terms of hiring and firing, But this kind of discrimination is not the same as an incompetent employee. And the problem is so wide spread that there are few options.
I agree. I don’t understand why Jewish students who are not in their senior year along with Jewish faculty members don’t hightail it out of the Ivies to more hospitable campuses? Think of how intellectually impoverished the Ivies would become without Jews.
It is about indoctrination and not intellectualism these days. Imagine being a history student right now. Do you answer a question as to what did happen, or what the professor believes happens. It would be like being a geology major with a bunch of profs who are pushing the flat earth model.
Whatever intellectualism Jewish students and faculty bring to the Ivies would be gone. Then, it would be pure indoctrination, with the consequence that other groups may also avoid the Ivies altogether.
It seems like a free speech issue to me. What’s not free is opposing voices except in the form of an unfortunately stereotypical lawsuit, which may not be a plus and will not be good for the law if it succeeds.
Hit the true threats and that’s all.
These universities are private institutions and thus, First Amendment protections aren’t implicated. And, even if they were implicated, the schools’ hypocrisy is that the conduct complained of — brazen and unrelenting Jew-hate and anti-Israel venom — would never have been tolerated/encouraged/unpunished, if directed at another minority ethnic/religious group.
They’re universities though, and a university is the place where you can say whatever you believe to be true. You can’t sue them for being universities.
What’s missing is opposing voices saying what they believe to be true.
A lawsuit does not substitute for that.
I agree that opposing voices are needed to combat the virulent Jew-hate and anti-Israel venom that’s being spewed at universities, but, that doesn’t change the fact that these schools should be held to account when they fail to consistently enforce their own policies and codes of conduct with regard to student harassment, bullying, etc.
That’s what the lawsuit is about. Bullying of students based on their Jewish religion, their ethnicity as Jews, their support of Israel/Zionism, etc., isn’t acceptable conduct, by these schools’ own adopted codes of conduct and policies, but, the conduct is being tolerated, lauded and encouraged by administrators, with professors joining in the vitriol and abuse, in some cases.
Your argument is foolish. No student or faculty member is immune from consequences for their speech at any university anywhere. This is pure fiction in your own mind.
The complaint is such that the very codes that forbid the speech and actions performed are not being enforced evenly. That is definitely grounds for civil litigation. Negligence at a minimum is obvious to an objective observer. Since part of it occurred in classrooms or other official channels by employees malice may also enter the discussion but that’s a tougher climb.
Except that it isn’t. You can’t fly a Confederate flag on these campuses, but you can fly a “Palestinian” flag. You can’t wear a KKK costume, but you can wear a kefiyeh. You can’t say “God hates fags”, but you can say “From the river to the sea”.
These institutions have to decide. Do they behave as if they were bound by the first amendment? If so, then fine. But if they don’t, then they must give Jews the same protection that they give favored classes.
They are universities that receive immense amounts of tax payer funded benefits in the form of student loans, grants, contracts and tax free status for their enormous endowments.
If they want to blatantly discriminate they should immediately loss all forms of tax payer funded benefits.
I agree that federal funding should be cut off, immediately, to Harvard and its wretched ilk; absolutely.
It has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with these schools enforcing their own policies
Is their policy that you can’t say what you believe to be true?
It’s the whole trouble of course but it’s enforced to silence the right. A productive lawsuit would not be a be nice to Jews suit but an allow everybody to say what they think suit.
A lawsuit is not that opposing speech.
You’re trying to bait me..I’m not going there.
They have have behavior and speech policies at universities and the lawsuit is claiming they are arbitrarily and egregiously enforcing and/or failing to enforce those polices. I haven’t read the complaint but that’s what I take away from it.
Of course, you can say what you believe to be true…you just have to suffer any consequences!
Generally the consequences are refutation. That’s how a university works. If you mean something else, that’s tyranny.
You’re missing the point, dude. These schools have myriad anti-harassment policies and codes of conduct. These are policies that the schools themselves adopted and are expected to enforce, fairly and even-handedly. Problem is, they’re brazenly failing to do so, by any reasonable measure.
The schools will readily punish/expel/penalize any student who engages in harassment, bullying, targeting based upon ethnic/religious/national origin status, except where Jewish students are the victims.
The lawsuit against Harvard is fairly grounded in the notion that the schools aren’t enforcing their own harassment policies and codes of conduct, fairly and consistently.
Get it?
Keep in mind rhhardin believes Jews exaggerate the threats against them. He’s not here to debate honestly — he’s here to bait.
Yes, it is. So long as what you believe to be true is that blacks are bad, or that gays are bad, or that sex is binary, or anything else that the left doesn’t like. But suddenly when what you believe is that Jews are bad, they turn around and discover free speech.
Seems like free speech to you, but then gain you didn’t read the complaint (and the LI blog post didn’t feed the information to you). These plaintiffs aren’t filing a lawsuit because NYU exercised free speech. That would be silly. These plaintiffs filed a lawsuit based on a breach of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act and based on certain state law claims. Whether plaintiffs will prevail, I don’t know. But I do know that no one should count on you for legal advice. (This isn’t new news.) Finally, free speech doesn’t mean never having to say your sorry. Sometimes there are consequences. Let’s hope that that is the case here.
Is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment? That would be the only way that your comment would have any relevance. (And if Title VI is unconstitutional, it might be that the entire Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional. Are you prepared to swing for the fences on this one?)
Absolutely. The civil rights act ought to have prohibited freedom of association only in monopoly markets, de jure or de facto. The results of that mistake turn up in insane exceptions all over, making a mess of case law. You only have freedom of association if you have certain religious beliefs and they’re sincere, etc., as if it weren’t a right for everybody else.
So, you would agree with the statement that Congress can’t prohibit discrimination on the basis of race in places of public accommodation using Commerce Clause powers because it would be a violation of the First Amendment, assuming that the areas of public accommodation operate as participants in interstate commerce, unless it is a monopolistic market?
No it isn’t. We have regulated businesses from the 1st day of the United States onwards.
We really need to stop this fetish for any government bad. We aren’t anarchists. We are going to have to use the Civil Rights Act ourselves and should have started using it at latest 20 years ago.
EVERY government will influence the culture and impose regulations, it is especially legitimate to do that when that government is elected to a fixed term after which they must face the voters again.
Look at Florida we went from an under 1% victory to a 2o point blowout by dropping the fetish for government bad and using the legitimate power granted by voters to do positive things.
There is nothing illegitimate about using an 80 year old law that has been enforced heavily every year since it was passed to achieve the outcome that law was passed to achieve.
It would be a free speech issue, if they had a policy that they would behave as if the first amendment applied to them, and they stuck to that policy. But they don’t. They have policies and speech codes that severely restrict speech, and they enforce them strictly, except in this case. Only when it comes to antisemitism do they suddenly discover the freedom of speech.
What the presidents said to Congress was all correct — if only that were their actual policy in all cases. If they were government universities it would have to be their policy. But they’re private, and their policies are restrictive, with this one exception. And that’s not acceptable.
The Penn complaint is as graphic as the Harvard and NYU complaints in its detailed allegations of anti Semitism by faculty and students and benign neglect by administrators
Even Oberlin has done better than Harvard
Oberlin fall 2023 alumni magazine has a note on generously returning Holocaust painter picture to heirs, end of the article “The Art of Difficult Conversations” which may or may not be about model consent in pictures on exhibition. I can’t tell by speed reading.
https://www2.oberlin.edu/alummag/fall2023/
Takes a long time to load for some reason.
Returning the painting was done with the same enthusiasm as was present in settling up with the Gibsons.
It’s not just antisemitism at Harvard.
“… just 6% of all Harvard first-years identified as Protestant. That’s insane. In the Pew data from a general population sample in 2022, 43% identified as Protestants.”
https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/12/4/how-weird-is-the-religious-composition-of-harvards-student-body
See also
Harvard’s ‘Appalling’ Double Standard: Claudine Gay vs. Francesca Gino
https://poetsandquants.com/2024/01/13/harvards-appalling-double-standard-claudine-gay-vs-francesco-gino/
Oberlin was slightly over 50% Jewish when I attended in the late 70’s. I am curious what that percentage is now. A few of my classmates were pretty active over the last decade when some of the “more cray cray” profs were espousing beliefs on social media.
Colleges are basically parasitic and depend to a great deal on wealth generated from the outside in order to exist. There are two sources of that wealth, one being open-minded and seeking the truth whatever it might be, and the other being the support of a close-minded pre-determined viewpoint. I suspect that Oberlin (and other schools) have recently lost a lot of money from the first group. I don’t know whether that money has been made up from either people who are in the second group, or worse, .gov which is supporting the close-minded approach to education.. Higher education is definitely deep in the second camp, and I am not sure whether that will lead to their demise or not. As a friend once put it, the Nazis had a pretty good run for about 10 years before it all turned to s#!7. It seems to me that the current crop wants to repeat that experiment, because they believe that the only reason it didn’t work the first time was because THEY weren’t in charge. We’ll see. I think that their cause is failing faster than they are able to erase the history of what happened the last time.
This is not about free speech. Having dealt with universities and their kangaroo courts for students, I can guarantee you that they all have policies in place, that had they chose to enforce them, would require them to suspend or dismiss students who engage in this kind of behavior.
And how can students learn anything, whether they’re Jewish or not, if their professors engage in this kind of behavior? It’s ridiculous on the part of NYU to even suggest that the plaintiffs should wait for them to get their act together. The problem isn’t that they have no way to address this. The problem is that they refuse to address this and enforce their own student codes.
Yes — gay students should remember that pink triangles follow soon after the yellow stars.