Harvard Holds a Symposium on Antisemitism and Universities

“I was raised with two stories about Harvard, both of which I believe to be true,” said Porter University Professor Noah Feldman on Thursday morning, at the start of an all-day symposium on antisemitism and universities at Harvard’s Rubenstein Treehouse conference center in Allston. One, Feldman explained, was that Harvard was a place where antisemitism had “played a meaningful role,” including during former President A. Lawrence Lowell’s efforts in the 1920s to limit the number of Jews on campus.

The other was that the University had become “a place of increasing prominence, possibility, and openness for Jews,” especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Feldman’s parents met as Harvard students in the 1960s and got married at Harvard Hillel; Feldman had his bar mitzvah there and went on to graduate from the College in 1992.

Those two competing narratives have made it challenging “to come to terms with changing circumstances in the world and on campus and their effects on Jewish experience here,” said Feldman. 

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