Harvard Complaint (File Copy)
Harvard Complaint (File Copy)
- The lawsuit alleges that Harvard has fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students, particularly following the October 7th Hamas attack.
- The complaint details numerous antisemitic incidents, including harassment, intimidation, and disruptions by student groups and faculty, and accuses Harvard of enabling and tolerating this behavior.
- Plaintiffs claim Harvard's policies are selectively enforced, with a double standard applied to antisemitic acts compared to other forms of discrimination.
- The lawsuit argues that Harvard's actions violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, breach contracts with Jewish students, and breach the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, leading to the denial of equal access to educational opportunities and benefits.
Harvard Complaint (File Copy)
@powderhownd14922 months ago
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
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Case No.
COMPLAINT
Jury Trial Demanded
ALEXANDER KESTENBAUM and STUDENTS AGAINST ANTISEMITISM, INC.,
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Plaintiffs, :
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v.
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PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE,
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Defendant.
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Plaintiffs Alexander Kestenbaum ('Kestenbaum') and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc. ('SAA'), for their complaint against defendant President and Fellows of Harvard College ('Harvard'), allege as follows:
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
- 1. Harvard, America's leading university, has become a bastion of rampant antiJewish hatred and harassment. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people-including infants, children, and the elderly-antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive. Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard's campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel. Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object. What is most striking about all of this is Harvard's abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to
- 2. Harvard's antisemitism cancer-as a past Harvard president termed it-manifests itself in a double standard invidious to Jews. Harvard selectively enforces its policies to avoid protecting Jewish students from harassment, hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda, and ignores Jewish students' pleas for protection. Those professors teach and advocate through a binary oppressor-oppressed lens, through which Jews, one of history's most persecuted peoples, are typically designated 'oppressor,' and therefore unworthy of support or sympathy. Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world. Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.
- 3. Harvard's double standard starts at the top. Whereas almost twenty years ago, a Harvard president was run out of his position for merely suggesting a disfavored hypothesis concerning the underrepresentation of women in the sciences-a hypothesis he said he wanted proven wrong-Harvard's most recent president testified before Congress that calls for the genocide of the Jewish people do not necessarily violate Harvard's policies, and then received the unanimous backing of Harvard's governing body. Following that testimony on December 5, 2023, the only rabbi on Harvard's recently appointed Antisemitism Advisory Group resigned because, as he said, 'both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.' Only after the disclosure of
- 4. Kestenbaum, SAA's members, and numerous others have explicitly and repeatedly warned Harvard that its severe and pervasive hostile environment endangers Jewish students. In fact, Harvard has been aware of its antisemitism problem for years, but its response has been, to say the least, clearly unreasonable and totally unacceptable in not just tolerating, but enabling antisemitism. Harvard has abjectly failed to enforce its policies and discipline those responsible for turning Harvard's campus into a severely hostile environment for its Jewish students, including Kestenbaum and other SAA members. Its faculty members have gone so far as to cancel classes so students can attend antisemitic rallies and harass and intimidate Jews without consequence. When, in clear violation of Harvard policies, a mob of students took over a campus building to further their antisemitic agenda, Harvard's response was not to remove and discipline them, but to supply them with burritos and candy.
- 5. Harvard's longtime practice of refusing to enforce its own policies against antisemitism ensured that the October 7 terrorist attack would enormously intensify the antiJewish abuse on campus. Numerous students and faculty members at Harvard have openly endorsed Hamas's October 7 massacre, issuing public statements blaming Jews for their own murders, or otherwise excusing or supporting Hamas's actions, notwithstanding Hamas's history since its founding in 1987 of perpetrating numerous suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, Hamas's explicit vows to kill and destroy Jews and Israel, the U.S. State Department's designation of Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization, and Hamas's repeated public proclamations of its determination to repeat the October 7 atrocities until its genocidal aims are achieved. In supporting Hamas and condemning Israel, Harvard students and faculty harass,
- 6. Harvard's purported excuse for refusing to take disciplinary measures and sitting by idly as the Jew-bashing on campus escalates-that antisemitic harassment is protected by free expression principles-confirms its antisemitic double standard. Considering that Harvard aggressively enforces policies to address bias against other minorities and regularly disciplines students and faculty members who harass other groups or espouse viewpoints Harvard deems inappropriate, its refusal to discipline students attacking, harassing, or intimidating Jews is glaring. Based on its track record, it is inconceivable that Harvard would allow any group other than Jews to be targeted for similar abuse or that it would permit, without response, students and professors to call for the annihilation of any country other than Israel.
- 7. Subjected to intense anti-Jewish vitriol, including from their own professors and Harvard administrators, Kestenbaum and other Jewish students, including SAA members, have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully participate in Harvard's educational and other programs and have been placed at severe emotional and physical risk. Moreover, over the past ten years, Harvard has instituted admissions policies that have severely reduced-by as much as sixty percent-the number of Jewish students, an enormous decline that evinces an intentional effort, much like Harvard's quotas one hundred years ago, to exclude Jews. The
stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it.
plagiarism allegations and a month of intense public scrutiny did Harvard's president finally resign.
Case 1:24-cv-10092 Document 1 Filed 01/10/24 Page 4 of 77
discriminate, and assault Jewish students-including on October 18, when a mob of protesters attacked a Jewish student, and the next day, when a mob trapped a group of Jewish students in a study room-but they are never heard to condemn, let alone rally against, Syria and Yemen, which have killed hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians, or Pakistan, which is currently expelling almost two million Afghan Muslims, or China, which has imprisoned its Muslims in reeducation camps, or countries like Somalia and Nigeria, where Christians are regularly murdered.