Garber Talks Jewish Identity, Free Speech at Launch of New Jewish Thought Journal

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said Sunday that young Jews on college campuses face a far more divided community than the one he grew up in, speaking at a symposium celebrating the launch of YARID, a new student-run journal of Jewish thought.

The event opened with a Q&A between Garber and Hillel’s undergraduate president Miriam E. Goldberger ’28, in which Garber addressed a range of campus challenges, from declining student reading rates to the tensions facing students who support Israel. Other panels brought together Jewish students and faculty to discuss the journal’s inaugural issue and the diasporic Jewish experiences it represents.

“Especially if you are a young progressive Jew at a university, you are under tension, especially if you care about Israel,” Garber said, adding that the climate during the Six-Year War, which he said he remembers from his childhood, was very different.

“Public support for Israel was extremely high,” Garber said. “Almost all the Jews who identified as Jewish were Zionists at that time. Certainly, people who spoke up were Zionists. Today, the Jewish community is much more divided.”

Garber described a generational divide, in which older American Jews tend to identify more closely with Israel than younger Jews do.

Now, he said, young Jews have to face the question: “What is the basis in your Jewish identity, and what is it that you want to adhere to and emphasize as part of being a Jew?”

“That’s a question well beyond me,” he said.

Garber also touched on institutional changes he would make at the University and issues he hopes to address in his role.

Asked what he would redesign about Harvard, Garber said it was clear from the start of his tenure that some things “desperately” needed revision.

“When I started as president in January 2024, we knew there were some things that we needed to change,” he said. “Actually, we changed a huge number of them in one year alone.”

The “most important issue” to him, he said, was championing the ability for those at the University to “speak to each other freely about difficult issues.”

“We need to learn how to respect people who are different,” he said. “So that’s one of the things I would like to change: to make us a more accepting community of different points of view. And I think that is happening.”

Garber has long been a vocal champion of open disagreement at Harvard. Harvard has been quietly asking donors to establish $10 million in endowed professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” The College’s “Intellectual Vitality” initiative, first spearheaded by former Dean Rakesh Khurana, has received nearly $200,000 in grant funding for student-led programming. The initiative also sponsored the YARID event.

Garber also said that he hopes Harvard students have “the skills and the experience to look at a difficult issue from multiple points of view” after graduation.

Although “descriptions, courses, and all kinds of reports” suggest that how these skills are taught is “uneven,” he said, personal anecdotes from students gave him confidence in Harvard’s approach.

“I have to admit that I’d say that we’re actually in a pretty good place and on a good path in this regard,” he added.

Garber said the most “prominent problem that we face today” is ease of access to “distractions.” Faculty at Harvard and other universities, he said, complain that they “can’t assign long reading passages anymore to their syllabi.”

“They’re immediately rewarding in so many ways, yet they don’t actually provide intellectual sustenance,” he said.

After Garber’s remarks, the event featured three panels with YARID contributors, faculty, and students.

Professor Jessica M. Marglin, a co-director of Undergraduate Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and YARID contributor Maya S. Rosen ’25, discussed Rosen’s article in the issue called ‘A Jew in China’ in the context of Marglin’s experience in countries she has lived in.

A separate conversation featured Daniel M. Pesin ’29 and Judah Hain, a student at Yeshiva College, who spoke on the lack of “real conversations” in Jewish community spaces.

At his university, Hain said, Jewish conversations often centered solely around decrying antisemitism and broad platitudes – what he called “self-congratulatory public relations-centered Judaism.”

“I wish that our community was having more serious, thoughtful, intellectual conversations,” he said.

“People speaking out loudly against anti-Semitism, those people are important,” he said, “but who our heroes are, who we want our kids to be like, should maybe be the intellectuals.”

Isaac R. Mansell ’26, the founder of YARID, said the group chose Garber as a speaker because Jewish students were interested in what he had to say.

“We wanted someone who Jewish college students and college students more broadly would find to be an interesting figure who has interesting things to say about the future and about the phase of life we’re in now,” he said. “President Garber seemed to be a great fit, just given his position, his background, and experience.”

The group invited Garber directly, and he accepted. The appearance marks the first known time Garber has sat for a public interview with a student since taking office. He has repeatedly declined interview requests from The Crimson, breaking a precedent set by previous University presidents.

“We were deeply honored to have President Garber with us — it was a privilege to speak with him and deeply inspirational,” Goldberger wrote in a statement.

“I just think it was very cool today in the last year to see how the texts that we published in the Yarid are now out there, and they’re there for people to read and interpret and incorporate into what they’re doing,” Abel W. Bellows ’29, a member of the YARID’s editorial board, said.

“It’s sort of a special feeling,” Mansell added.

—Staff writer Alma T. Barak can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at almabk.54. Follow her on X @almabk_.

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.