Harvard After 400 Years

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Logo for the Harvard Crimson introduced in 2020. By Harvard University – Gocrimson.com, Public Domain, Wikipedia

The Trump administration announced on March 20 that it is suing Harvard University for failing to act against antisemitism in its hallowed ivy-covered halls.

The forty-four pages produced by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division allege that after October 7, with “deliberate indifference…Harvard fostered and continues to foster a campus climate where hostile antisemitism and anti-Israeli conduct thrive.”

A year ago, in April, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber calling for reforms that the second Trump administration wanted in order to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.” The letter demanded Harvard “audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture,” e.g. the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures would be staffed by anti-Jews.

But the Divinity School too is known for its anti-Israel hostility and may be the worst of all?

Harvard, “you’ve come a long way, baby.”

In the Torah, G-d tells Abraham a great nation will come from his loins, but it will take four hundred years.

Likewise, in the one-volume, classic Columbia University Encyclopedia, the entry on the Roman Empire, the progeny of Jacob’s brother Esau, reports it also lasted four centuries.

The same might be said of the British Empire, from the glorious Elizabethan age of the 16th century until the 20th, when in 1967 it relinquished rule in Aden, the last of the Empire east of Suez.

In the Bible, in the age of the Judges, it also took the Israelites some four centuries to coalesce as a nation (and no longer a tribal confederation), to subdue the Canaanites and Philistines and become a nation under one king.

In the Bible, the first Israelite generation after the Exodus is known as “dor ha-midbar,” the “generation of the desert,” teaching a generation can be forty years. The first Temple stood for 403 years; the second Temple for 418. That’s ten generations each.

Sixteen years after when Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, after nine weeks at sea, passing some of the time studying Hebrew so they could read the Bible in the original, the leader of their community, a minister of their religion, and other elders realized their settlement needed to train future leaders who of course would also be ministers.

So, in 1636, they founded a school, Harvard, basically a seminary to train the next generation of politico/religious leaders. They established a four-year program of study that required each year the study of Hebrew, at the end which they received the academic degree of a B.A. and clerical ordination.

Indeed, the cap and gown of graduation ceremonies in our time are the garments worn originally by medieval Catholic priests in monasteries, the origin of the very institution of today’s universities.

And on graduation day at Harvard, the valedictorian, chosen for being the best student of Hebrew in the graduating class, delivered his commencement speech in Hebrew. This was the tradition at Harvard that lasted for its first 150 years.

Fast forward to the United States Department of Justice indictment/description of Harvard in its relationship today to Jews and their Bible. Surely, Harvard’s founding fathers up there beyond the Pearly Gates are shedding a tear for what has happened to their school. From awe of the People of the Book and their Book, their school has become a cesspool of Jew-hatred in which, according to the DOJ report, there have been “mobs” of haters of Israel physically harassing Jews in the Harvard Yard, mobs of classical Jew-haters on fire in their brains with fantasies of Jews committing acts of terrible crimes that have no basis in truth. These mobs have “occupied its buildings and terrorized its Jewish and Israeli students.”

The report says that since October 7, 2023, Harvard has done nothing against barring Jewish students from entering buildings. Worse, Harvard University Police Chief Victor A. Clay did nothing against the unauthorized demonstrations and tent camps.

The complaint charges that Harvard did nothing against protests that “featured outward hostility, harassment, and intimidation directed at Jewish and Israeli students.” This includes chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “globalize the intifada,” and the infamous Nazi-adjacent cry of “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.” As the complaint puts it, this rhetoric calls “to expand violence towards Jews that reminds the listener of the Nazis’ ‘final solution to the Jewish question,’ which was the gas chambers.”

The Harvard administration even “rewarded students who assaulted, harassed, or intimidated their Jewish and Israeli peers.” After some students broke into and occupied University Hall on November 16, 2023, one Harvard dean “brought them burritos for dinner,” as another dean brought them candy.

When a Jewish student named Yoav Segev began videoing a “die-in” protest on October 18, 2023, two graduate students assaulted him and were criminally charged. Harvard later honored one, a law student named Ibrahim I. Bharmal, appointing him Class Marshal, gave him free housing, and a $65,000 fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Harvard president Alan Garber blamed Segev for his own assault, claiming that “the way he was taking videos appears provocative.”

This is horrifying. The United States of America has been riddled, at least since the Clinton Administration (1993-2001) with degenerate corruption: that president’s perverted sex play with a woman old enough to be his daughter in the Oval Office no less; the recent exposure of Muslim Somalis looting billions of dollars of federal funds in Minnesota; even more billions pilfered in California government-connected scams; Biden’s criminal opening of the country’s borders to millions of unknown aliens, including homicidal psychopaths; before then, the treasonous plot to destroy President Trump with the colossal lie that he was a Russian agent, when in fact it was Hillary Clinton who used a former Soviet agent to smear him. She accused him of her own treason.

It has become a culture inviting transvestites into their children’s kindergartens; whose demographers report Americans are not having children, at the same time the government has supported the destruction of millions of infants in the womb; an LGBT culture in which sexual perversion has become socially acceptable.

The ugly Jew-hatred at Harvard is only another symptom of a society rotting from within, whose common speech is now peppered with F-bombs of other dirty words; some of whose elementary school libraries have stocked homosexual pornography.

Of course the Jews are hated. Their Biblical values, morals and ethics that once inspired the Pilgrims, whose descendants went on to create the finest of American universities, are under attack.

A society one of whose two major political parties, Mr. Jefferson’s party, have become prostitutes catering to the Jew-haters. Most of the Democratic senators just voted to deny military assistance to Israel, as every day the Muslims have launched missiles into the country terrifying millions of Jews.

What has happened to Harvard and sister institutions like Columbia, whose encyclopedia reported that Rome lasted four centuries only, likewise shows symptoms of a terminal, spiritual decrepitude featuring the latest explosion in world history of mass Jew-hatred.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.