Before last year, tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Sam Lessin thought of himself as only slightly more engaged with Harvard than the average Harvard grad. That changed last fall, after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel spurred a rise in antisemitism on American campuses, including at Harvard. In late December, Lessin announced a long-shot write-in bid to be a candidate to serve on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He came just a few hundred votes short of qualifying for a spot on the ballot, but he pledged to stay involved with university affairs ahead of another board campaign next year. Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch talked to Lessin about the spiraling situation at Harvard and his views on how Harvard should change.

Optimistic for change: “It actually was very invigorating in that you just do see this huge mass of alums coming out of the woodwork who do want change, and I’m optimistic that there can be change,” Lessin, a former Facebook executive, told JI last week. 

Don’t politicize: Lessin described himself as a moderate seeking to avoid the culture wars in which Harvard has become entangled, a position that he viewed in contrast to Harvard’s loudest critic: hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. “I worry that he’s politicizing this even more, in certain ways, putting forward right-wing voices against left-wing voices. I’m much more of a centrist, is the way I would approach it,” said Lessin. Instead, he earned the endorsement of another billionaire who studied at Harvard — Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Fair game: Lessin said he believes in a robust free speech culture inside the classroom, but a crackdown on anti-Jewish harassment elsewhere on campus. “I believe strongly that there should be free speech in the classroom towards the goal of academic excellence. If people want to make a civil argument about why rape and murder is OK, inside of the classroom — from my personal perspective, I think that’s fair game,” he said. 

Read the full interview here.

Israeli Tourism Minister Haim Katz and his ministry’s director general, Danny Shahar, addressed separate American audiences this week, urging Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel to resume their visits to the country even as the war in the Gaza Strip rages near the five-month mark and rocket fire from Hezbollah in the north continues. Katz arrived in the U.S. on Monday to address more than 4,000 Christian communicators at the National Religious Broadcasting Convention in Nashville, Tenn., while Shahar spoke to Jewish American leaders in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ annual meet-up in Jerusalem, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports. 

Show of support: “What we are telling people is that if you want to support Israel then don’t just donate, come,” Peleg Lewi, the minister’s foreign affairs advisor, told JI by phone on Tuesday. “Israel is now safe for tourists and visiting is the best way to support us.” At the Conference of Presidents, Shahar’s message was similar, calling on American Jewish leaders to “come with your communities to visit Israel. Your support for Israel takes on new validity and meaning in these difficult times,” Shahar said. “The tourism industry relies on the visits of our Jewish brothers and sisters from around the world, who are visiting Israel right now.”

Slow rebound: Israel’s tourism sector was hit hard following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, with most international airlines immediately grounding their flights to Tel Aviv and the majority of the country’s 52,723 hotel rooms suddenly filled by evacuees from the Gaza periphery and the communities along the northern border. Four months later, while Israel’s internal tourism is showing signs of rebounding, with nearly half the 88,000 evacuees placed in hotels returning home or moving to longer-term accommodations, foreign tourists are still refraining from visiting, largely due to the slow resumption of services by international airlines and the high prices charged by Israeli carriers.

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Harvard University, under scrutiny for its inaction against antisemitism on campus, took a tough stance against pro-Palestinian student and faculty groups for distributing “deeply offensive antisemitic tropes” posted to social media. The groups had posted an image containing a cartoon from 1967 of a puppeteer whose hand is marked by a dollar sign inside a Star of David, lynching two men who appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Harvard announced that it will be launching an investigation into how the antisemitic material got posted, and who was responsible for promoting the hateful material, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen for Jewish Insider. 

Official response: “The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president, said in a statement on Tuesday. 

Response to the response: Harvard’s response has led some Jewish leaders who have criticized campus leadership’s handling of antisemitism to applaud the college’s swift response to the most recent incident, with Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi calling it the school’s first “moment that looks appropriate.”

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Days after Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Hitler’s treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, he met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken in Brasilia, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports. 

Strong ties: Public communications from the State Department about the Wednesday meeting did not mention Lula’s comments on Israel, although an official readout said the two men discussed the war in Gaza. Blinken tweeted afterward that U.S.-Brazil “ties are stronger than ever,” with a photo of the men smiling and shaking hands. 

Not genocide: The day before, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said “obviously we disagree” with Lula’s comments. “We have been quite clear that we do not believe that genocide has occurred in Gaza,” said Miller. 

Disagreement relayed: On Wednesday afternoon, Miller said Blinken had raised the comments with Lula. “The secretary had a chance to discuss the comments with President Lula today in his meeting, in the context of an overall discussion about the conflict in Gaza, and made clear — as I did yesterday, made clear that those are comments with which we disagree,” said Miller. 

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A coalition of 17 U.S. Jewish groups wrote letters to House lawmakers this week expressing support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and urging them against endorsing any alternative definitions, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. 

No alternatives: The letter comes as many major Jewish groups are lobbying Congress to pass legislation related to the issue and amid a countervailing expanded lobbying effort in favor of the Nexus Task Force’s definition, an alternative antisemitism definition written in response to the IHRA definition that leaves more room for criticism of Israel. It strongly urges lawmakers against endorsing any alternative definition, arguing that doing so “would undo years of international cooperation and progress in identifying and combating antisemitism and would only create confusion and unequal standards,” “would break international consensus and undermine anti-discrimination efforts” and “would undermine efforts to protect Jewish communities.”

Who joined: The letter was signed by AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, the American Zionist Movement, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith International, Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Elie Wiesel Foundation, Hadassah, the Israeli American Council, the Jewish Federations of North America, MERCAZ USA, the National Coalition supporting Eurasian Jewry, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the Orthodox Union and Zioness.

Brewing battle: Eric Fingerhut, the CEO of JFNA, told JI last month that an expanded lobbying effort for the Nexus definition — a new lobbying group was established last year led by a former top J Street lobbyist — had heightened the importance of JFNA’s efforts to support IHRA. The Jewish umbrella group organized a series of meetings between nationwide activists and lawmakers and their staffs in January. “It simply is an attempt to undermine the IHRA definition to advocate for a different definition, including the Nexus definition, which has been accepted by nobody and is not being used anywhere,” Fingerhut said. “Additionally the substance of it is simply wrong… We recognize that members of Congress and their staffs are likely hearing from people about the Nexus definition, so we’ll address it directly and explain to them why it’s a diversion, and not a substantive response to antisemitism.”

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For Gadi Roz, a major in the IDF, the front line and the home front have collided, with life-and-death consequences. Since Oct. 7, Roz, a reservist, has spent months fighting in Gaza, while back home, his 6-year-old son Meitar is battling a degenerative condition known as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, for which there is no known cure. When he is not with his unit, Roz has been pressing the Israeli government — so far, to no avail — to approve a promising gene-therapy treatment for DMD, one approved last year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Roz, 35, describes “fighting two wars” — one for the future of Israel and one for the life of his son, Lianne Kolirin reports for Jewish Insider.

A father’s mission: Meitar, the younger of Roz’s two children with his wife, Eliya, was diagnosed with the life-limiting condition when he was 3. “Our world collapsed,” Roz, who had never previously heard of the illness, told JI. Since his son’s diagnosis, the decorated soldier, who in his civilian life works in high-tech while also studying for a degree in electronic and electrical engineering, has been campaigning to convince Israel’s Ministry of Health and health-care providers to authorize a pioneering gene-therapy treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year. 

No giving up: “It was very hard on us, but I realized I had one of two decisions to make,” said Roz. The first, he said, was to “say, OK, my son is going to die, let’s make the best of those years, quit my job, stop learning and just gather positive experiences.” But this, he said, “is not me. I’m not the one that gives up, I’m the one that pursues my dreams, says there is always a hope and there is always a solution and you just need to find it.” 

Read the full story here.