Of course, it’s not just governments that risk falling into moral confusion, and it’s not just large international organizations with outsized budgets that propagate it. At Harvard, a group of over 30 student organizations quickly responded to Saturday’s atrocities with a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Similar declarations emerged from other top-tier colleges, like the 50 student groups at University of California, Berkeley who joined together to express “unwavering support for the resistance in Gaza.”
J.J. Kimche, a doctoral student at Harvard whose explorations of Jewish thought may be familiar to readers of this newsletter, takes the statements of his schoolmates seriously:
Not only have our fellow students failed to condemn this proto-genocide; they have justified and celebrated it. The authors and signatories of this statement, men and women with whom we share dormitories and libraries, have exposed themselves as worse than common anti-Semites. They are enthusiastic proponents of our slaughter, a vanguard of apologists for those who seek the extermination of the Jewish people.
This realization has grave consequences not only for Jewish life on campus but for the university’s existence as a community. How can we share dormitories, classrooms, and ideas with students who would makes excuses or even celebrate if we and our families were hacked to death by a Hamas terrorist tomorrow?
Harvard’s top administrators made no effort to assuage such fears. . . . Only on Tuesday did President Claudine Gay “condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” She didn’t condemn the statement excusing Hamas, but merely distanced herself from it: “No student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
One might defend Gay’s pusillanimity with the argument that issuing statements about current events, no matter how horrific, is well outside the remit of university presidents. But nowadays Harvard presidents feel obliged to issue declarations about the war in Ukraine, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, and much else. Why do they find it so hard to spare a few words to condemn the slaughter of Jews?
Read more on Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-shrugs-at-jew-hatred-hamas-attack-israel-civilian-murder-torture-rape-68f53256?page=1