Will the recent surge of antisemitism on college campuses mark the end of an era for Jews at elite universities? Jewish scholars analyzed the current crisis — and debated whether Jewish students still belong at elite bastions of higher education — at a symposium hosted by the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, NYC, on Sunday. 

Rabbi David Wolpe, a former visiting scholar at Harvard University Divinity School, delivered the event’s opening address.“I certainly don’t think that we should abandon great citadels of learning or be chased out of them, although to be there takes fortitude that I don’t think should be asked of every student,” Wolpe said. “So I’m going to give a selective answer: it depends who.” 

“But one of the things that you have heard, and that has been controversial, is how much money, how many scholarships, how many chairs, how many buildings, we have given over the years to all of these institutions — and that’s true,” continued Wolpe, who stepped down from an antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard in December 2023, due to the increase of antisemitism at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

“It was a dream of our ancestors that Jews be able to go to places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton, and on and on, certainly Columbia,” Wolpe said. “It was their dream and they invested their souls in enabling their children and grandchildren to realize that dream. With all my caveats, I’m not ready to give up on the entire investment of all of those souls because others have been so cruel, so thoughtless, so blunt and even evil in the treatment of their descendants. How many souls have we invested? The answer is a lot.”

“And my guess,” Wolpe continued, “is that we are not done.”   

The antisemitism symposium was held against the backdrop of intense debate over campus antisemitism among Jewish leaders in recent months as the Trump administration has pulled billions of dollars in federal funding from Ivy League schools. 

In the keynote panel, titled “The Future of Jews and Elite Universities: What Is to Be Done?” Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s former antisemitism envoy, praised some of the Trump administration’s “initial actions” on campus antisemitism. 

“But what we’re seeing now has gone beyond the pale,” Lipstadt, who served on Emory University’s faculty for nearly 30 years, continued. “What we’re seeing now is an attack on elite universities in the name of antisemitism, which does exist on the campuses. But what scares me is if the universities that are fighting back win, they will say we won despite the suggestion that we were antisemitic — or despite the Jews — and if they lose they will say we lost because of the Jews. 

“Either way, the Jews lose,” Lipstadt said. 

The keynote panel also featured Leon Wieseltier, editor of the literary review Liberties, and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The decision to include Ackman generated some controversy leading up to the event. A Harvard alum and longtime donor to the center, Ackman has positioned himself with conservative critics of higher education and has been supportive of the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities. More than 60 academics affiliated with the center signed a petition last week calling for the event to be postponed — demonstrating just how politically charged the debate over antisemitism and elite institutions has become. 

Ackman criticized his alma mater during the panel, expressing that he believes “Harvard has failed in a very dramatic way.” 

In another panel, called “Columbia and Harvard: The Exception or the Rule?” co-chair of  Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, Nicholas Lemann, noted a “paradox in these elite universities.” 

Antisemitism “is really particularized, not just to elites, but to a really small number of universities, with elites mostly in the news,” said Lemann, a journalism professor at the university. 

He described a unique culture at elite universities — one that “oddly combines very specific expertise … with having a hot take on various issues that you don’t know anything about.” 

Lemann, who has taught at Columbia for 22 years, said that serving on the antisemitism task force — which was created in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — has led to the loss of several long-standing relationships on campus. “I don’t know what to do about this overall climate of a very distinct minority of the campus that has a blowtorch-like attitude towards Zionism, that is very difficult.”   

He added that “some of the reason for what’s going on at Columbia” is due to administration. The university has had four different presidents over the past 22 months. “Our leadership recently has been virtually all people who are brand new to the job and don’t know the community very well,” Lemann said. 

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, said that the rise of antisemitism on the Boston campus is a “basic failure of the liberal academic virtues of following truth, it’s an illiberal progressivism here.” 

Rubenstein continued, “university leadership has a responsibility to address this and has taken some important steps, but not all of the ones that need to be taken.”