{shortcode-55e9ca90d4344c950304284303d30cf5d7675208}

More than 430 Harvard faculty joined the newly-founded Harvard Faculty for Israel, which aims to support Israeli students on campus and advocate for closer collaboration between Harvard and Israeli universities.

Its founders — Harvard Medical School professor Matthew L. Meyerson ’85 and Harvard Law School professor Jesse M. Fried ’85 — say those goals have become more urgent for Israeli students who feel isolated as concerns of antisemitism rise and their peers protest Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“Last year, things got really terrible for many of them, and I started talking to more of them about it,” Fried said. “It turned out that a lot of Israeli students had very difficult experiences even before Oct. 7.”

The group comprises members from all nine of Harvard’s faculties. Many hold appointments at Harvard Medical School, which has more than 12,000 faculty members.

Three members of Harvard’s presidential task force on combating antisemitism — Fried, Computer Science professor Boaz Barak, and Harvard Medical School professor Jerome E. Groopman — have joined the group.

Harvard Faculty for Israel plans to push back against demands for Harvard to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions. Those demands are not new, but they’ve gained momentum as the war in Gaza continues.

Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, a group founded in January, called for “boycotts of Israeli academic institutions that support apartheid and colonial occupation” in a statement. The American Association of University Professors — whose Harvard chapter was chartered in June — recently dropped its opposition to academic boycotts.

Fried said he saw calls for an academic boycott as part of “growing efforts to demonize Israel, with the ultimate objective of many to weaken it economically and then make it an easier target for those who want to destroy it.”

Multiple Harvard presidents have denounced academic boycotts, and Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has also rejected the idea.

“Harvard leadership has made clear that it opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions,” University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a March statement after the Harvard Law School student government voted to ask Harvard to divest from Israel.

Harvard Faculty for Israel plans to provide support for students who wish to study abroad in Israel and aims to expand research and teaching exchange programs between Harvard and Israeli institutions.

Its leaders said they want to focus on making Israeli students feel more welcome on campus. They plan to start by holding a weekly lunch series for Israeli students and scholars.

Fried and Meyerson wrote in an op-ed in The Crimson that discrimination against Israeli students — and pressure on Jewish students to repudiate Zionism — had risen over the past year.

“We cannot remember anti-Israel hatred or antisemitism at Harvard ever being this profound and widespread,” they wrote.

A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a Saturday request for comment. Newton has written in previous statements that Harvard “has and will continue to be unequivocal – in our words and actions – that antisemitism is not and will not be tolerated on our campus.”

Fried and Meyerson said that Israeli students confided in them about being excluded from extracurriculars or social activities because of their national origin.

One student told the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance — a group that has lobbied Harvard to root out practices its members see as antisemitic — that a professor told her to leave his class after she said she was Israeli.

In another incident, an outside investigator found support that Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall L. Ganz ’64 discriminated against three Israeli students in his class on the basis of their ethnicity. The students had filed a complaint with the Kennedy School after Ganz urged them to revise a proposed project aimed at organizing Israelis around “liberal-Jewish democracy.”

Ganz and several of his colleagues alleged the investigation was mishandled.

Since Oct. 7, student protests against the war in Gaza have been a fixture on Harvard’s campus, culminating in an encampment in Harvard Yard last spring.

Many Israeli students have said the protests have created a tense environment for them on campus, and critics — including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — have singled out the protests as a source of antisemitism.

But Fried and Meyerson said they did not see addressing student protesters as the focus of Harvard Faculty for Israel.

“They’re entitled to their views. They’re entitled to protest,” Fried said. “My sense is that things like the encampment and the walkout are not the biggest sources of suffering for Israeli students on campus.”

Instead, he said, interpersonal discrimination — whether from faculty or other students — was a source of distress for Israeli students.

Meyerson took aim at an Oct. 7 letter signed by more than 30 Harvard student organizations, which held the Israeli government “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the region.

He said the letter, which drew instant backlash when it was published online, displayed a disregard for suffering among Israelis.

“We saw that immediately after the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 — where Israel was invaded, people were murdered, they were mutilated, they were raped — a number of student groups shockingly looked at the situation and blamed Israelis for being the victims,” Meyerson said.

Harvard Faculty for Israel is not the first initiative among faculty to support Israel, but it provides organization to efforts that were previously ad hoc.

In April, a group of affiliates describing themselves as the “Harvard pro-Israel community,” including dozens of faculty, sent a letter to Garber urging him to discipline students who had participated in the pro-Palestine encampment.

The letter asked Harvard to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s widely-used definition of antisemitism, which describes certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic.

Meyerson, who signed the letter, and Fried, who did not, both said they did not currently plan to push for Harvard to adopt a specific definition of antisemitism or anti-Israel sentiment, though Meyerson said he would consider the possibility.

Both declined to say what approach Harvard Faculty for Israel would take to address continued pro-Palestine protests.

“Our focus is very much on these three pillars — supporting Israelis at Harvard, supporting Harvard people studying in Israel, and supporting academic exchanges,” Meyerson said.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.