I’m a Jewish Faculty Member at Harvard. Hillel Does Not Represent Me.

Dear Rabbi Rubenstein,

I hope you’re having a meaningful Sukkot holiday.

I’m writing to ask that Harvard Hillel — the institution you oversee — stop claiming to represent the Jewish community on campus. Hillel’s longstanding hostility to dissent despite our community’s persistent disagreements on Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and campus free speech means that it is unable to serve as an honest broker.

Just last week, you went so far as to call the police about flyers put up outside Hillel critiquing Israel’s destruction of Gaza and killing of children. The flyers displayed images of carnage next to a Hebrew passage from the Yom Kippur liturgy calling for ritual atonement. The flyering campaign was organized by Hillel’s very own J Street U, a group of Jewish students which you subsequently temporarily suspended. You also called the flyers “intimidating,” as if they presented a threat to Jews’ physical safety rather than a challenge to Hillel’s political stances.

Meanwhile, Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon continue unabated. Historians have compared these abuses, and the silence of the U.S. establishment, to the Holocaust. But rather than helping us come to terms with this moral disaster, your public communication is focused on conflating expressions of dismay with bigotry against Jews.

You have argued to the New York Times that “antisemitism is a fear, and hatred, of Jewish power.” Such attempts to raise Jewish power beyond criticism are ethically corrosive. They exempt us from justifying the manner in which that power is wielded, using the devastation of the Holocaust as a shield for state violence. They are far too common among our community leaders.

On Friday, Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer sent a University-wide email denouncing stickers found on campus which superimposed a swastika on an Israeli flag. There is no evidence that the perpetrator, who remains unknown, had any connection to the University. Nonetheless, the email stated, the University would continue to partner with groups including Hillel to organize campus programming on antisemitism, further institutionalizing its views on the subject at Harvard.

Ironically, although the stickers associating an Israeli flag with a Nazi symbol shocked administrators, in Israel such parallels are not unheard of. The term “Judeo-Nazi” has been used by intellectuals, pundits, and politicians in Israel — including now in reference to members of the current government.

When South Africa charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice earlier this year, it cited quotations from Israeli officials which suggest that these parallels may not be wrong. I will mention one of the many here: Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s declaration that “when we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy — they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”

By June, sitting officials were more cautious, but former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Moshe Feiglin shed light on their political models: “As Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left.’ We can’t live here if one ‘Islamo-Nazi’ remains in Gaza.”

These public figures are the faces of the Jewish power you spoke of. They are the leading exponents of Zionism, and “fear and hatred” of the ideology and political project which they represent is not antisemitic.

There is a line from the biblical book of Jeremiah that speaks to the central problem in Jewish life today: Hoi boneh beto belo tzedek, “woe to him that builds his house by injustice.” For me and many other Jews at Harvard, this passage perfectly describes the state which has destroyed the lives of millions of Palestinians so that Jewish power can be upheld, and framing our critiques as antisemitic is a direct attack on our Jewish identity and heritage.

Every morning during Sukkot we read a few passages of Psalms, and one of them has stayed with me. “Their idols are silver and gold,” reads the text, “made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell.”

Hillel’s idolatry of Israel has made it not just unwilling to acknowledge the millions of Palestinians whom the Jewish state has harmed, but unable even to perceive their humanity in any morally significant way. Worse still, you push the Harvard administration to silence those of us who are not so impaired.

Rabbi Rubenstein, I myself am from an old rabbinic family — my great-great grandfather was head of the Beis Din in Mogilev — and I participated in quite a few Hillel events at U.C. Santa Cruz in the 1990s. The organization seemed committed to offering a space for all Jewish students to arrive at our own views on urgent questions like the fate of Jewish nationalism. I think its leaders saw this tolerant approach both in pedagogical terms and spiritual ones.

The vision of Jewish community at Harvard Hillel today is dramatically different, so focused on propagandizing for Israeli impunity between the Jordan and the Mediterranean that you are willing to break the bonds of our shared heritage and override every other moral, intellectual and cultural value. This is not the behavior of a good-faith community spokesperson, and I request that you stop masquerading as one.

Thank you for hearing me out.

Moadim l’simcha,

Aaron

Aaron D.A. Shakow is a lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.