At HBS Shabbat Dinner, Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Says He Trusts Garber To Fight Antisemitism

New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft said he believes Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 “personally is committed to eradicating antisemitism from this campus” in a keynote speech at the annual Harvard Business School Shabbat Dinner on Friday.

Kraft said he believed it was “more important than ever” for university leaders to fight anti-Jewish hate in the months following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel — which, he said, left Harvard fraught “with emotion, intensity, and edge.”

“Changing behaviors and cultural norms that have been allowed to go unchecked for decades is not easy, especially under the rules that guide academia,” Kraft said. “But I know how strong Alan’s moral compass is, and it would not allow him to function in any other manner.”

Hundreds of Harvard students, faculty, and alumni — including Garber himself and Harvard College Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 — gathered in a banquet hall on the HBS campus to celebrate Jewish unity and listen to Kraft’s address.

Kraft — who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1965 — told attendees he was “very proud” of how HBS responded to Hamas’ Oct 7. attacks, saying that HBS Dean Srikant Datar’s statement was “strong and unequivocal.”

Kraft praised Datar’s decision to describe conversations with HBS affiliates who were impacted by the attack and to refer to it as a “terrorist action.”

Datar’s statement, emailed to HBS affiliates Oct. 10, 2023, came one day after then-Harvard President Claudine Gay and other University leaders, including then-Provost Garber, issued a statement mourning the violence in Israel and Gaza. Gay’s statement was quickly slammed as milquetoast, and she followed it the next morning with a second statement condemning the “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

Datar’s message to HBS came shortly after Gay’s second statement.

“Not all leaders are willing to stand up to take a strong position against hate, and it’s been sad to me that many people are afraid,” Kraft said.

Gay’s sequence of statements marked the start of more than a year of backlash — including Gay’s resignation, multiple federal investigations, and the loss of major Harvard donors. Months later, an investigation by House Republicans revealed tense private deliberations between University administrators over how to word their message.

Kraft, a major contributor to Columbia University, suggested he would stop giving as pro-Palestine protests swept the school’s campus last spring. A $24 million donation to Harvard from Kraft and his son created the Business School’s largest endowed fellowship fund.

Garber offered praise for Kraft in brief opening remarks.

“Robert is one of the most extraordinary philanthropists, but in the past few years, we’ve particularly benefited from his work to combat antisemitism,” he said.

The Feb. 28 dinner was organized by Harvard Chabad and the HBS Jewish Students Association. Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi thanked Kraft for skipping the Oscars to recognize Shabbat at HBS and told him his message had “critical importance at this moment.”

Alongside each place setting at the dinner was a blue square — a symbol of the Stand Up to Jewish Hate campaign, run by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which Kraft started in 2019.

He described when he brought Philadelphia-based rapper Meek Mill to Poland in 2023 for the annual March of the Living, a two-mile walk from Auschwitz to the Birkenau death camp.

“I invited him to come with us, because there had been a lot of noise of Holocaust denial in the recent past — with our friend Kanye West — and I wanted Meek to see the atrocities in person and hopefully bring the message back to his community,” he said.

After seeing exhibits representing the atrocities perpetrated in the concentration camps, Kraft said, the rapper said he had a new understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust.

“Meek came over to me and Dana and said with a tear in his eye, ‘Robert, I never thought I would see anything worse than the ghetto in North Philadelphia where I grew up. But what the Jewish people went through here is worse,’” he said.

Kraft said on Friday that he started the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism after the 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11 congregants.

“I started to see the fracture, the divisiveness, and the hate that I felt was beginning to look a lot like Germany looked in the 1930s,” Kraft said on Friday. “It was imperative to do something to ensure our country — which I still believe is the greatest country in the world — it did not start to look like Germany in the 1940s.”

Kraft, a longtime friend of President Donald Trump’s, let the relationship cool after Trump’s supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But Trump appointed Kraft’s wife, Dana Blumberg, to the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees amid his takeover of the cultural center. Trump and Kraft both watched the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans.

Kraft praised Trump’s attendance as a win for the NFL at the time, but has yet to share public opinions on Trump’s second presidency.

— Staff writer Ayaan Ahmad can be reached at ayaan.ahmad@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AyaanAhmad2024.

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.