Harvard Jews Are Doing Just Fine

When I tell people back in my home community that I don’t get harassed on campus, they’re often skeptical — and sometimes even disappointed.

The current media narrative paints Harvard as a dangerous place for Jewish students like me. The idea is pushed in Jewish communities and institutions, too: In their 2025 Campus Antisemitism Report Card, the Anti-Defamation League gave Harvard a C grade for, among other things, its “level of severe antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents.”

These reports don’t align with my experience at all. Beyond misleading the public, this narrative harms the long-term success of Jewish communities on our campus by scaring some Jews away.

I decided to apply to Harvard after reading about the campus turmoil following October 7th. The media portrayed Harvard as a prime battleground not just for Middle Eastern affairs but for Jewish identity in America. At a time when Jewish students across the country were in fact being harassed and discriminated against, I felt it was important to represent the Jewish community on campus.

Before coming to Harvard, I spent a gap year focused on religious studies in Israel. Despite being thousands of miles from campus, I was very much emotionally attached to what was happening at Harvard — reading the latest stories and following the talking heads and Jewish community organizations on social media.

They supplied me with a consistent narrative — that campus was dangerous for Jews, if not physically, then at least emotionally and socially. It seemed as though Harvard students were frequently and arbitrarily harassing their Jewish peers.

The same rhetoric has been pervasive online and in my home community since I’ve been on campus. Given the ubiquity of this narrative, I incorrectly assumed that conditions for Jewish students must be similar today.

While I can’t speak to the polarized campus situation in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I can tell you that is not the campus I experience today. It’s as though the media landscape and community landscape are operating on a delay — or at least playing a tense game of telephone.

Bias incidents definitely do exist, particularly against Israeli Jewish students. Last semester, there was controversy about a social media post complaining that former Israeli soldiers “just free roam around” campus. These represent lone occasions and don’t accurately reflect the peaceful day-to-day life of many Jewish students on campus.

In my personal experience, being Jewish on campus is not unsafe or socially taboo. There have been no antisemitic incidents on campus reported in The Crimson so far this year, and in my experience, even on issues related to Israel, fervent disagreement rarely leads to harassment.

I am an incredibly visible Jew. I wear a large yarmulka and bright blue tzitzit strings that hang past my knees. In my time at Harvard, I have not experienced harassment or felt any pressure to modify my beliefs in public. Instead, I’ve witnessed that most students want to live their lives, take their classes, join their consulting clubs, and complain about the College’s new grading policy. They don’t want to go out of their way to harass Jews.

Not only is this public perception misleading, it has negative effects on Jewish life on campus. Reports of campus antisemitism frequently affect college choices for Jewish students, so Harvard’s reputation for campus hostility towards Jewish students is likely dampening the levels of Jewish applicants and future students.

Our communities need a constant flow of new students to continue to thrive. The recent Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias believes there to already be a decades-spanning decline in Harvard’s Jewish population, making it increasingly challenging to hold certain Jewish activities and “affecting students’ ability to experience and explore the richness of Jewish heritage and life.”

In this way, the misleading narrative further harms the ability for a strong Jewish community to be built by discouraging Jewish students from coming here.

This creates a vicious cycle. Exaggerated media reports of Jewish life on campus scare Jewish applicants from applying, which harms the ability to foster Jewish community, which harms the actual quality of Jewish life on campus, causing more media sensation and further scaring potential Jewish students — and the cycle repeats.

We can both acknowledge that currently there isn’t an imminent danger as a Jew on campus without detracting from concerns about whether Harvard could handle crises in the future. For Jewish life to truly thrive on campus, community institutions and talking heads need to be more honest about the state of campus affairs.

Prospective students: understand that we’re no longer in 2024 and that Jewish life is thriving at Harvard. From staples like minyan three times a day and a kosher dining hall, to extras like Tuesday night Chinese dinner at Chabad and Wednesday night steak break — you name it, Harvard Jewish life has it.

Azaria Sussman ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Adams House.