After a stint as president of Harvard University’s Hillel exposed her to the harassment and hostility endured by many of her fellow Jewish students, Sabrina Goldfischer decided to write her senior thesis about the experiences of Jews on campus. She highlights some of her findings:

I interviewed 60 Jewish Harvard students, Harvard Hillel staff members, and students and Hillel staff members at nearby Massachusetts schools. . . . What I learned was concerning: the most acute examples of discrimination involved Harvard’s Israeli students. One student faced backlash for his involvement with Israel Trek, an Israeli student-led trip to Israel for Harvard students who do not identify as Jewish. He reached out to organizers of the anti-Trek movement on campus, hoping to begin a dialogue and potentially incorporate their feedback. They refused to speak to him.

Indeed, social alienation is unavoidable for Harvard’s Israeli students. Students recall moments of feeling like their “humanity was questioned.” One student said to an Israeli peer, “I can only imagine the war crimes you have committed.” Another explained that his friend was not allowed into a social organization when the leadership discovered he was Israeli. At Harvard, students face obstacles—social and otherwise—simply because of their nationality.

Anti-Zionism . . . has become the norm in most social and intellectual milieux on campus. This affects how Harvard’s largest Jewish institution is perceived. For instance, another student recalled a first-year orientation program that purported to show incoming students the “bad parts of Harvard.” The tour guide stopped at Hillel, suggesting it was a hostile environment for Palestinian students.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.