As my last name suggests, my family origins trace back to Germany. My great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Breuer, was a leader in the German Orthodox community and a respected figure within German society. His youngest daughter, my great-great aunt, vividly recalls reading Psalms during Kristallnacht while her father was arrested by the Gestapo and their synagogue was being burnt to the ground. As some of the very last Jews to flee Germany from the Nazis, my family found a home in the United States, where they were able to rebuild and sustain their Jewish life and identity. To this day, the synagogue they built in New York City remains standing and active, a living testament not only to the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people, but also to what makes the United States of America such a beautiful, welcoming country.
Because of that history, I have never viewed anti-Semitism as an abstract subject of study or a distant chapter in history. Instead, my story of anti-Semitism is deeply painful and deeply personal. For me, Kristallnacht did not begin with book burnings or broken windows. It began neither with destroyed synagogues nor with expulsions. Kristallnacht began with a pernicious ideology that swept across German society. It began with the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred.
Though history never repeats itself exactly, its periods of turmoil often begin in recognizable ways. That is why what I have witnessed at Harvard—the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred on campus—has felt so painfully familiar. The treatment of Jewish Americans on college campuses across this country, and in particular at Harvard University, is nothing short of a national emergency. It is blatantly anti-Semitic, frighteningly discriminatory, and deeply illiberal.
If that sounds hyperbolic, let me show you how my four years at Harvard ended. As I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a ten-page, student-produced newspaper. What should have been a keepsake of the day became something else entirely. To my surprise, the “newspaper” accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an Intifada are a direct promotion of violence. The authors went on to defend chants for actual violence like “from water to water Palestine is Arab” and “globalize the Intifada.”
Then, the 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa, took the stage. “I was called anti-Semitic by power and money,” she boomed into the microphone, “because they want power and money.” Just a week before, she had deployed anti-Semitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families during a graduation ceremony. That same week, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “Intifada, intifada, come to America!” That was how my college education ended—not with a celebration of learning, but with the normalization of anti-Semitism.
Alongside the rising tide of Jew-hatred on campus, there has also been an extraordinary resurgence of Jewish pride.
These events were just the tip of the iceberg, encapsulating the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for much of the preceding year. During a nearly month-long illegal encampment in the center of Harvard Yard, students and faculty demanded that the university completely divest from what they referred to as “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants tried forcing open Harvard’s gates with bolt cutters, repeatedly violated all time, place, and manner restrictions for demonstrations on campus, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews on their way to class, they were handsomely rewarded by the institution. In exchange for dismantling the encampment and packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, the suspensions of all graduate and almost all undergraduate students were revoked. The encampment leaders would later go on to meet with senior university officials to discuss establishing a Palestinian Studies department and sit down with the Harvard Management Corporation to discuss divestment of its $50 billion endowment from Israel. President Alan Garber himself, despite having been depicted by the protesters as a horned Jewish devil, had personally ensured “leniency” in the disciplinary process.
Then came the final blow, as Harvard’s anti-Semitism taskforce—led by a professor who had repeatedly dismissed reports of anti-Semitism at the university as “exaggerated”—quietly revised its timeline. Jewish students at Harvard had their education disrupted by their classmates calling for an Intifada, sat alongside peers who praised Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, watched thirty-four student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, endured countless threats, and spent a significant portion of their college years under the leadership of a university president who described calls for the genocide of Jews as “context-dependent.” Yet, rather than fulfilling its promise to deliver recommendations for combatting Jew-hatred by the end of the spring semester, the taskforce announced that its findings would not be released before the fall.
Even now, more than two years later, little has changed. Although both the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association and the Congressional Committee on Education and The Workforce released damning reports documenting the systematic silencing of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus, the university has yet to announce or implement a single policy in response. In fact, despite findings that Jewish and Israeli students were spat on, assaulted, asked to leave class because their nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” and even threatened by a machete-wielding staff member—as happened to me personally —Harvard has yet to publicly acknowledge any of these incidents. Instead, the university recently announced a policy of institutional neutrality, declaring that it would refrain from issuing statements on matters of public policy or affairs. Just one day earlier, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee had called for an “open intifada” against “every settler and soldier… in every capital.” Yet, after years of issuing statements on issues ranging from the murder of George Floyd to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Harvard chose institutional neutrality only when confronted with open calls for violence against Jews.
Yet the Jew-hatred at Harvard does not tell the whole story. Alongside the rising tide of Jew-hatred on campus, there has also been an extraordinary resurgence of Jewish pride. I have witnessed firsthand how thousands of young American Jews rediscovered and publicly reclaimed their Jewish identity. I have seen Chabad houses filled with students gathering for Shabbat dinner. I have seen American and Israeli flags waved on campus by young Jews who have woken up. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, they—and I—have been both unable and unwilling to go back to sleep.
Here we are.
Still here.
Hinenu.
