Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance’s summit
Harvard Magazine, Max J. Krupnick, September 25, 2024
Sunday afternoon, September 22, hundreds of Harvard community members donning miniature Israeli flags and hostage dog tags filed into Sanders Theatre for a summit about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. The high-security gathering was organized by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA), a group formed following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last October 7. Throughout the afternoon, undergraduates, Israeli government officials, and the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism took the stage to discuss their perceptions of conditions on Harvard’s campus.
The afternoon began with a series of memorials to the victims of Hamas’s attack. A video showed Israelis being shot in their cars, dragged bloody into trucks, and hiding in trees during the assault. Avigail Gimpel, an Israeli who prepared bodies for burial, spoke about the conditions of the corpses. She recalled a young girl whose arm had been sawed off, a Russian grandmother strangled in her own curtains, and a father and son tied together and burnt. “Evil was not a strong enough word,” she said. “These murders were slow. They were deliberate. They were meant to inflict as much pain, harm, terror, and suffering on their victims.”
Lipstadt described antisemitism as a unique hatred. In some ways, she said, it operates like other prejudices: “A Jew does something wrong? That’s how all Jews are. A Jew does something right? That’s one of the good ones,” she explained. Like other hatreds, antisemitism leads people to see Jews as lesser human beings. But unlike other prejudices, antisemitism also “punches up”—claiming that “Jews are more powerful…richer…stronger…able to control the society, and they must be stopped—to borrow a phrase that has been used against all of us in this room—by any means necessary.” She also explained that antisemitism takes different forms depending on where and when it takes place. “It mutates,” she said. “It changes, it’s a virus.”