The Antisemitism Settlements Made Progress. Will Harvard Follow Through?

After a brutal year for Jewish students at Harvard, there is finally a glimmer of hope.

Just one day after President Trump’s inauguration, Harvard settled two lawsuits accusing the University of mishandling antisemitism. The University will now take some critical, commendable steps forward, including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

While the adoption of the IHRA definition is an important symbolic step, given both the timing of the settlements and Harvard’s unwillingness to seriously confront antisemitism in the past, we shouldn’t assume all is right on campus.

Harvard’s decision caused significant backlash, but upon hearing the news, I thought back to my time as a freshman living in Harvard Yard and felt relief.

Then — as now — it was not the chants of “globalize the Intifada” themselves that kept me up at night, but rather that student and faculty groups seemed intent on dismissing or denying such antisemitism plaguing our campus.

As former visiting Harvard professor Dara Horn ’99 precisely explained in the Wall Street Journal, “‘intifada’ simply means ‘uprising.’” But as she argues, symbols and terms can take on contextual meaning. “‘Sieg Heil’ simply means ‘Hail victory,’ and Confederate flags are simply regional symbols,” she notes.

As justification for why anti-Israel chants are benign, we are told time and again that anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism. But as history demonstrates, anti-Zionism has been a thinly veiled version of antisemitism dating back to the persecution of Soviet Jews.

In the 1980s, the KGB’s Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public released propaganda with titles like “The Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” linking Zionism to humanity’s worst evils, including racism, genocide, colonialism and apartheid. Some material even pulled from Mein Kampf.

The consequences of the Soviets’ ideology were real. Soviet Jews were arrested and sent to prison camps, on charges of “ties with the Government and Zionist circles of Israel.” 20,000 Jews were expelled from Communist Poland after party leader Władysław Gomułka now infamous 1967 speech railing against “Zionists.” The speech did not even include the word “Jew.”

As Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet and leftist antisemitism, puts it, “claiming that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same may make for an interesting intellectual exercise. What happens in practice is another matter.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism does not equate all anti-Zionism with antisemitism, but it does assert that calling Israel a racist or Nazi state is antisemitic. Given the historical background, Harvard’s adoption of the definition was an imperative.

Despite this step forward, I remain skeptical. Harvard has not spoken out until now. So, do I believe the University when, right after President Trump is sworn in, it suddenly announces its intention to reverse course? Not entirely.

For one, it appears Harvard did not discipline the students who stood in front of Hillel and chanted, “Zionists not welcome here.” Harvard seemingly chose not to expel the two students facing criminal charges of assault and battery for an alleged their attack on an Israeli student at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. And even after Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine shared a blatantly antisemitic cartoon on Instagram – featuring a hand adorned with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around what appears to be one Arab and one Black man – the perpetrators did not face consequences.

The preliminary recommendations released this past summer by Harvard’s vaunted Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism border on the laughable. The word “Zionist” does not appear a single time; there is not even an explicit mention of the attacks on October 7th, nor the anti-Israel protests that plagued our campus in their aftermath.

The report did, however, stress the importance of properly labeling pork products in the dining hall, and it offered a useful Jewish calendar and accompanying explanations of the holidays. Such accommodations are merely performative.

More substantive change could involve addressing Harvard’s plummeting Jewish enrollment. Harvard’s Jewish population is precipitously low, dropping to 5.4 percent of the Class of 2027, according to The Crimson’s freshman survey. Even after anti-Jewish admissions policies were implemented in the 1920s, the percentage of Jewish students in 1931 roughly triples present levels. A sincere effort on Harvard’s part to grow our Jewish community would send a powerful message that we are indeed welcome here.

The University’s inaction both before and after October 7th makes plain that combating antisemitism has never been a true priority. A deeply embedded culture of intolerance towards Jewish and Israeli students is something no settlement can remediate.

The adoption of the IHRA definition, even if meant to appease a new presidential administration, should be celebrated. But such a policy change is a bandage on an internal wound. Harvard still has work to do — if it cares to do it.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Economics and Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Lowell House.