On April 24, 2025 President Alan Garber of Harvard finally admitted what has long been known by observers: “I would say that, at Harvard, we have a real problem with antisemitism. We take it very seriously, and we’re trying to address it.” We hope he means it. But antisemitism has a long and dark history at Harvard, going back decades.
The events of October 18, 2023, when Harvard students shocked the country by celebrating the Hamas massacre of 1,400 Jews the week before, were only the latest in a string of anti-Jewish acts.
Antisemitism first became sewn in the fabric of Harvard through its communist-leaning faculty. As The Harvard Crimson pointed out, in the 1930s and 1940s, Harvard had such a reputation for having a “strong Communist presence, that it earned the moniker ‘Kremlin on the Charles.’” Brainwashed students began forming organizations like the Young Communist League. And it is here that antisemitism reared its ugly head, for communism is not only deeply anti-American and anti-capitalist, but also, through its founder, antisemitic.
Although descended from prominent rabbis on both sides of his family, communism’s founder Karl Marx was the typical self-hating Jew. His father had converted to Lutheranism, thinking it would enable him to integrate into German society, and had his children baptized, including six-year-old Karl. But Karl was always aware of his Jewish background and hated it. And what better way to prove how “un-Jewish” he was to the world than with vicious denunciations of Jews? Marx, in his essay “On the Jewish Question,” characterizes Jews as hucksters, with money as their God.
Let us consider the worldly Jew:
What is his worldly religion? Huckstering.
And what is his worldly God? Money,
In the face of which no other God may exist.
Once society has succeeded in
Abolishing the real essence of Judaism
The Jew will have become impossible.
When one reads Marx’s later anti-capitalist rant, Das Kapital, it is easy to see the link between the Jew and the capitalist. In Marx’s mind, the evil Jew and the evil capitalist are interchangeable. The satanic capitalist of Das Kapital is Marx’s Jew writ large. In Marx’s simplistic system — down with the rich, up with the poor — when the rich and the Jew are rendered “impossible,” the poor and the downtrodden will automatically rise and magically create a permanent paradise.
Marx’s text is a classic antisemitic tract. What he says is exactly what Hitler would later say in Mein Kampf and in his famous letter to a fellow German, where he says that the goal of the Nazis “must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” This is not surprising. Totalitarian ideologies converge in most of their practices, including in their practice of scapegoating Jews.
This convergence of communism and Nazism was demonstrated in 1934, when Harvard’s president, James Conant, invited Ernst Hanfstaengl, a 47-year-old Harvard-educated German and close friend of Hitler, to be feted in a special ceremony by the administration and faculty. In the previous year, 1933, Hitler had vaulted to power in Germany, and perhaps, in Conant’s mind, the timing would be perfect to demonstrate to the world how Harvard was in accord with what Hitler and Germany stood for. Thus, Conant obviously saw nothing wrong with honoring a man who had been quoted as saying, “The Jews are the vampires sucking out German blood. We shall not be strong until we free ourselves of them.”
The Harvard Crimson echoed Conant’s feelings about the fete and wrote fawningly of the Nazi’s coming visit: “If Herr Hanfstaengl is to be received at all, it should be with the marks of honor, appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country [Hitler’s Nazi Germany] — a great world power.”
Due to pressure from the American public, however, Conant eventually had to call off the honor ceremony. Nevertheless, he insisted that Hanfstaengl still attend receptions at the homes of prominent alumni and cap off the day with a tea party at Conant’s home.
James Conant was a Nazi sympathizer and an antisemite. His antisemitism ran wide and deep, as we now know, poisoning his presidency for 20 long years from 1933 to 1953. He refused to hire leading scientists if they were Jewish, and he even advised others not to hire Jews. When the DuPont Corporation asked for his advice on hiring Dr. Max Bergmann, a German Jewish scientist who had fled the Nazis, Conant urged them not to. Despite the fact that Bergman was “one of the leading organic chemists in the world,” according to The New York Times, what was important to Conant was that Bergman was “very definitely of the Jewish type — very heavy.” Bergman would go on to a Rockefeller Institute, where his lab would produce two Nobel prize–winning scientists in biochemistry.
Now it should be noted that not all students at Harvard were content to follow Conant’s lead. On November 16, 1938, about 500 Harvard and Radcliffe students crowded into Emerson Hall to express their outrage at Kristallnacht, the Nazi “Night of Broken Glass.” A week before, on November 9, 1938, Hitler’s feared Blackshirt SS squadrons had launched his crusade against Jews in Germany with the organized looting and smashing of the windows of Jew-owned stores in Berlin and across Germany, and included the murder of several hundred Jews. Historians view it as a prelude to Hitler’s Final Solution.
But the student gathering at Harvard, a week after Kristallnacht, turned out to be much more than just another student protest meeting. Besides starting an initiative that eventually brought fourteen young refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to study at Harvard — and two refugees to Radcliffe — it gave rise, with astonishing speed, to a national grassroots movement that helped hundreds of persecuted Central European students find refuge and education at colleges and universities across the United States (Harvard Magazine). A linden tree was planted in Harvard Yard in the spring of 1939, with a plaque on it commemorating the students’ acts, in order to inspire future generations.
President Conant, predictably, did not approve of the student rescue plan, but as before, with Hanfstaengl, he was forced by public pressure to endorse it.
So where is Harvard today? Has it followed in the footsteps of those brave and determined students of 1938? Not quite. Sadly, today’s Harvard students have absorbed not only communist and Nazi antisemitism, but also the antisemitism of Muslim extremists. Muslims had already showed their agreement with the Nazis during WWII, when certain Muslim sects from Iraq, Jerusalem, and North Africa joined the Nazis, one group actually recruiting a Muslim SS division for Hitler. It is therefore unsurprising that a recent Hamas body turned up with an Arabic copy of Mein Kampf in its pocket.
Here is just one example of Harvard students continuing the school’s antisemitic tradition. Six years ago, the student magazine Lampoon mocked the memory of Anne Frank by publishing a horrifying cartoon of her in a “sexy pose.” Do they know who Anne Frank really was and what she experienced? For the record, Frank was a fourteen-year-old Dutch girl, a Jew, and the most famous victim of Hitler’s genocide. She and her family were in hiding in their attic when they were discovered by the Gestapo and transported to Auschwitz, where Anne had her head shaven and a number tattooed into her arm. She was then transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she would die at fifteen, whether gassed or from disease we don’t know. All we have left of Anne Frank today is her powerful diary, which became an all-time world best-seller — but a book that Harvard students apparently have never read.
The climax of Harvard students’ irrational Jew-hatred followed what has been called the Second Holocaust of the Jews, when Hamas terrorists raped, beheaded, and murdered 1,400 Jewish men, women, and children. Harvard students responded to this horror by harassing Jewish students and by lying down on the lawn on Parents’ Day — not to mourn the victims, but to honor the perpetrators!
Harvard is not of course the only college disgracing itself in such fashion, but as Harvard is still seen as America’s most prestigious university, it is particularly shocking. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Can President Garber honestly say that Harvard is living up to its motto? Perhaps the students and faculty and even President Garber himself should visit the linden tree in Harvard Yard, with its plaque commemorating the student heroes of 1938, and listen to the leaves whispering the story of those who, instead of spewing hate and celebrating death, focused instead on saving lives.
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