Gay’s Resignation Is Not a Win Against Antisemitism

I can think of many words to describe former University President Claudine Gay’s tenure, but the three that come most readily to mind are Thomas Hobbes’s immortal triplet: “nasty, brutish, and short.” If I could pick a fourth, I would have little trouble: unfair.

While Gay’s departure was partially prompted by plagiarism allegations, it was fierce criticism of her posture towards antisemitism that overwhelmingly fueled the calls for her resignation. As a Jewish student at Harvard, I believe the issue of antisemitism on our campus — and Gay’s purported failure to properly address it — has been criminally exaggerated.

Oct. 7 produced a well-documented and concerning increase in antisemitic crimes nationwide. Concurrently, the Harvard administration came under tremendous scrutiny for its ostensibly inadequate response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks, namely its failure to condemn student groups — particularly the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee — for blaming the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Somehow, these two stories seem to have mixed in our collective consciousness, creating the impression that the University’s inaction was representative of the national spike in antisemitism. This is untrue, and Gay unfairly bore the blame.

There is a narrative — if not produced, then intentionally fostered, by certain organizations on our campus — that Jewish students have been living in terror since Oct. 7. In a Nov. 30 email responding to a campus-wide protest that involved use of the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea,” Harvard Hillel wrote that “students were terrified by this protest and the violence it endorsed,” with fear of such protests causing “Jewish and Israeli students to avoid class, University events, and dining halls.”

Institutions like Hillel have positioned themselves as authoritative spokespeople for Jews, but their bordering-on-blind commitment to Israel can alienate as many Jewish students as it attracts, myself included. There is an assumption that non-Zionist Jews constitute a small minority of Jewish Americans, but survey data reveals significant diversity in Jewish American attitudes toward Israel, with ambivalence greatest among the young Jews Hillel ironically claims to represent.

Many — I would wager most — of the terrified Jewish students Hillel speaks on behalf of have self-selected into its community because they identify with its staunch position on Israel. As a result, Hillel speaks for some Jews, but certainly not all or even most. Hillel abuses its mandate by speaking about antisemitism in absolutes, misleading the many outsiders who rely on it to understand Jewish students.

With this unquestioned authority, these institutions perform a sleight-of-hand, insisting that phrases like “from the river to the sea” amount to “calls for genocide and anti-Jewish violence,” when in reality many who use it do so as a call for a binational state in the region rather than for ethnic cleansing. While I wholeheartedly acknowledge that some Jewish students genuinely view such chants as antisemitic, this perception does not make it so. It is in fact certain supporters of Israel — not the activists who chant this phrase — that render it antisemitic.

Nonetheless, the mischaracterization of Harvard’s campus politics as a microcosm of the nationwide rise in antisemitism prompted Gay’s now-infamous congressional hearing. While Gay condemned antisemitism at multiple points during her testimony, only her answer to a factual question from Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.), on whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct went viral. The answer to that question is, as she responded, context-dependent; even very objectionable speech often may not constitute the targeted and specific harassment that Harvard would discipline. To answer otherwise could well have been perjury.

Despite her creation of a task force on antisemitism, politicians, organizations, and donors took Gay’s answer as confirmation of her lack of commitment to defending Jewish students’ wellbeing. In its response to the hearing, Hillel wrote that “President Gay’s failure to properly condemn this speech calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus.”

A superficially persuasive but extraordinarily fallacious conclusion, again legitimized, if only inadvertently, by Hillel’s support, entered the national discourse: that Gay not merely failed to properly understand antisemitism, but had no intention of fighting even a manifestation thereof — the ‘genocide’ called for by Palestinian advocacy groups — so obvious she could not plead ignorance of it.

This development threatened to worsen the mass flight of donors from the school, over 1,600 of whom have threatened to withdraw their contributions, including billionaire Bill A. Ackman ’88, who claimed Gay’s response to the Israel-Hamas war lost Harvard over one billion dollars.

And so here we are. Gay has resigned. The plagiarism scandal certainly played its part, but I would be shocked if the impression that Gay was weak on antisemitism and the donor trouble that followed were not determinative factors.

With that in mind, I’ll end with a word to my fellow Jews: For a people that has suffered for centuries from horrible, libelous conspiracies that we control the levers of power in the world’s most important institutions, it does us no service to celebrate the impact that money and influence appear to have achieved in this case.

If Gay’s resignation follows pressure from powerful figures who saw her support of Israel and protection of Jewish students as inadequate — which I fear will be how it will be remembered, regardless of whether that’s what really happened — it is not the win against antisemitism many may feel it to be.

Disappointed to see President Gay go, I hope she and the Corporation made this decision for the right reasons. Otherwise, I fear antisemitism will have been weaponized against a well-meaning, reasonable, and honest university leader — someone meant to support the process of inquiry, not predetermine its conclusions — for failing to take a strong enough side on one of the most authentically controversial political issues of our time.

I couldn’t think up something more cynical if I tried.

Samuel P. N. Libenson, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies and Philosophy joint concentrator in Eliot House.