Hillel Temporarily Suspends J Street After Flyering Campaign Sparks Police Response

Harvard Hillel Executive Director Jason B. Rubenstein ’04 temporarily suspended J Street U on Tuesday after the group’s members used Hillel funding to print and display flyers around Harvard Square that Hillel staff reported to campus and city police as “intimidating.”

The flyers, which featured text from the Jewish liturgy alongside photos of the war in Gaza and the West Bank, were sourced from an external progressive Jewish organization but printed using Hillel funding, according to two students who participated in the flyering.

Members of Hillel leadership — unaware that the organization had paid for the flyers — discovered them on poles near Rosovsky Hall on Mt. Auburn Street early Tuesday morning. The staffers then flagged down a Harvard University Police Department officer to report the flyers, according to HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano.

As the flyers were discovered on property that belonged to the City of Cambridge, HUPD alerted the Cambridge Police Department, which took a report from Hillel.

“The reporting party stated the flyers contained graphic content they felt was meant to be intimidating,” CPD spokesperson Robert Goulston wrote in a statement. “Officers removed the flyers that were on city property and submitted them for evidence.”

Rubenstein wrote in a statement Tuesday night that Hillel’s leadership were “shocked when a student betrayed our trust, flagrantly violated the affiliation agreement they had signed just a month earlier, deceived our staff, and misappropriated Harvard Hillel's funds to produce and distribute these dangerous materials across campus.”

“We are reviewing the status of the organization led by this student as a recognized group within Harvard Hillel, and have in the interim suspended this student’s and their group’s use of Hillel's resources pending the outcome of the review,” he added.

The suspended student serves as co-chair of Hillel’s chapter of J Street U, a movement across college campuses dedicated to advocacy for a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hillel’s website describes its branch of J Street U as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”

The flyer on the pole by Hillel showed an image of a crying child in Gaza covered in rubble, with the words “we have sinned before you” written in both English and Hebrew. Another poster on Plympton Street showed the aftermath of an explosion in Gaza with the text “we have been evil before heaven and mankind” in both languages. The posters’ text is pulled from the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement which begins Friday evening.

Halachic Left, the group that originally designed the flyers, wrote in a statement early Wednesday morning that the “posters articulate what we picture during prayer as religious Jews in this moment of repentance and shaping of our coming year, and are not an attack on our Jewish communities.”

“Instead they’re an invitation for dialogue about the meaning of repentance in a time of collective suffering and ongoing destruction,” the group added. “While Harvard Hillel was not the target of this action, we invite Harvard Hillel to take this opportunity to speak with and support its students — of all political views — as they navigate being Jewish in this terrible time.”

Rubenstein wrote in his Tuesday night statement that “spreading words like these — even when they come from a Jewish student’s sincere religious and moral concern for Palestinian lives and Jewish virtue — is recklessly irresponsible at a time of surging violence against Jews and Jewish institutions inspired by precisely these grotesque portrayals of Jews as collectively and uniquely sinful.”

“As such, their appearance throughout campus is antithetical to Harvard Hillel’s central purpose of ensuring the safety and flourishing of Jewish life at Harvard,” Rubenstein added.

The controversy surrounding the Hillel flyers comes a day after the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, and at a time of heightened tensions on Harvard’s campus.

In an initial statement Tuesday morning — before Rubenstein was aware that Hillel students were responsible for the flyering campaign — he noted that the fliers had appeared outside Hillel just hours after the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee published a controversial social media post calling for increased campus activism.

“We are deeply concerned by the rising rhetoric on campus, now finding physical expression just feet from Harvard Hillel,” he wrote in the Tuesday morning email. “Last week Harvard affiliates charged Hillel with complicity in genocide; last night the PSC wrote that ‘now is the time to escalate’ — which is exactly what these posters represent.”

At the same time the HUPD responded to the flyers on Tuesday, Harvard Campus Services employees worked to clean red paint off the John Harvard Statue — the result of an anonymous act of vandalism in solidarity with the “Palestinian resistance.”

In a Tuesday evening statement, Halachic Left wrote that the postering campaign was designed “to draw our communities’ attention to the ongoing massacre in Gaza by the Israeli military.”

“We understand that facing the reality of what is happening in Gaza — with material and rhetorical support from diaspora communities — is frightening for many,” the group added.

—Staff writer Sally E. Edwards can be reached at sally.edwards@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sallyedwards04 or on Threads @sally_edwards06.