Harvard Also Has Christian Antisemitism

‘As queer and trans people, political radicals, abolitionists and anti-Zionists, imagination is our calling,” a Harvard Divinity School student pronounced on campus. She denounced Israel’s “state violence, settler colonialism, fermented trauma and religious nationalism.”

The setting wasn’t an encampment, an unauthorized graduation speech, or a foreign-funded Middle East studies seminar. It was a sermon at morning prayers inside Harvard’s Memorial Church.

The university owns and operates the church, which occupies a prominent position in the physical center of campus. The Harvard Corp. selects and employs its minister. The church website, with audio and transcripts of sermons, has a Harvard.edu address. Contributors to the church get a tax receipt that says “thank you for donating to Harvard University.”

Memorial Church calls itself “an interdenominational Protestant church” and “a community of social critique and human compassion.” When it comes to Israel and the Jews, as the Divinity School student’s speech indicates, Harvard’s main campus church has been heavy on critique and light on compassion. Hostility has come from professors and professional clergy, too.