Title: Harvard and the Crisis of the American University: Why De-Hamasification Is the Moral Imperative

From Heidegger to Hamas: How elite academia became the vanguard of modern antisemitism.

Harvard's response to the Trump Task Force on Antisemitism was predictable—and so was the nearly unanimous support of the liberal Jewish establishment. We have been here before. The tragic results are also familiar: Jewish students harassed, attacked, and systematically excluded, as they were in German universities during the rise of Nazism.

The parallels between the 1930s and today are chilling:

October 7 Was Our Kristallnacht: The Universities Lit the Match

The universities of Nazi Germany were not passive observers of antisemitic violence—they were its intellectual vanguard. Faculty lent legitimacy to racial pseudoscience, rewrote curricula to erase Jewish thought, and expelled Jewish scholars in advance of official policy. Student groups organized boycotts and assaults, often with the tacit or explicit support of professors. By the time Kristallnacht erupted in November 1938, the universities had already helped normalize the violence that followed. They were not reacting to Kristallnacht—they had prepared the soil from which it grew.

And now, once again, the universities are leading—not following—the resurgence of antisemitic violence.

Within hours of Hamas’s barbaric attack on October 7, faculty and students at America’s elite universities flooded social media and campus spaces with statements that justified, excused, or even celebrated the massacre of Jews. Harvard student groups blamed Israel. Columbia faculty refused to condemn the slaughter. At NYU, students marched with signs glorifying the attackers. Professors at the University of California, Davis, and Princeton praised the “resistance.”

The images of Jewish students barricaded in campus libraries or being warned to stay home for their own safety in the days following October 7 were not anomalies. They were the American echoes of 1938. The violence on Israeli soil was met with ideological pogroms in the ivory towers of the West.

And just as Kristallnacht revealed the German university's deep entanglement in the machinery of hate, so too did October 7 expose the American university's central role in the ideological assault on the Jewish people. This was not a reaction to war. It was the culmination of decades of indoctrination under the banner of critical theory, anti-colonialism, and “liberation.”

Nazis block Jews from entering the University of Vienna. Austria, 1938.

Pro-Palestinian Protests Block UC Santa Cruz Entrances

What makes this moment even more damning is the silence—or complicity—of Jewish faculty. In Nazi Germany, many Jewish professors were removed from their posts without protest. Today, many Jewish academics not only fail to oppose the rising ideological antisemitism, but they also actively contribute to it.

In May 2021, more than 220 Jewish studies and Israel studies professors signed a "Statement on Israel/Palestine" that read more like a political manifesto than a scholarly statement. It began with a denunciation of Israel for “state violence” in Gaza and for the eviction of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah.

The statement framed Israel as the primary aggressor while offering only perfunctory acknowledgment of Israeli suffering, stating that “we affirm the pain, fear, and anger of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel” only after listing Palestinian losses in emotional detail.

The signatories framed Zionism within a "settler colonial paradigm," denouncing what they called “unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy.” These phrases—lifted directly from critical theory—align with the same ideological moorings that justified violence against Jews on American campuses after October 7.

Historians and scholars are expected to handle framing with care. Instead, these faculty members chose to adopt the ideological framework that paints the entire Jewish national project as illegitimate. Far from offering a defense of their people or their students, they helped define the intellectual architecture that allowed the modern Kristallnacht to unfold.

The idea that free speech protects all equally only works when shared norms, such as truth, dignity, and civilization, are in place. But when speech is used to glorify violence, call for genocide, and dehumanize an entire people, it becomes an instrument of civilizational sabotage.

The Precedent of Denazification: A Model for Reconstructing the American Academy

Post-war Germany was rebuilt on the moral necessity of denazification. Universities that had become engines of racial ideology were restructured. Professors complicit in Nazism were removed. The same principle must now apply: de-Hamasification.

This is not censorship. This is moral hygiene. The removal of programs, professors, and departments that glorify Hamas or delegitimize Jewish existence is not a threat to education—it is its rescue.

After World War II, the Allied powers recognized that rebuilding Germany required not just political or economic restructuring, but a moral and institutional purge—removing Nazi ideology from universities, civil society, and public institutions. In the same way, if universities have become the engine of genocidal antisemitism disguised as academic discourse, then the only meaningful response is to treat them as ideologically compromised institutions that must be rebuilt from within.

Free speech is not neutral when it empowers genocidal propaganda. The university’s mission is formation, not unbounded relativism. Denazification, properly understood, was not about censorship for its own sake—it was about re-establishing the moral and civilizational foundations necessary for human dignity and democratic coexistence.

Why Denazification—Not Dialogue—Is the Only Moral Response

In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies understood a simple truth: a nation cannot be rebuilt upon the ideological ashes of its moral collapse. Denazification was not an act of revenge. It was an act of reconstruction, rooted in the recognition that the same professors who had blessed the Nuremberg Laws and indoctrinated youth in racial science could not be left to shape the minds of a new democratic Germany. If Germany were to become a civilization again, it had to begin by reclaiming its soul.

We face the same question now. Except the danger no longer wears a swastika. It wears a keffiyeh and quotes Foucault. Faculty at America’s elite universities, with tenured impunity, have not merely failed to denounce genocidal violence—they have shaped the ideological framework that justifies it. They are not bystanders to hate. They are its engineers.

Denazification succeeded not only because it removed a cancer, but because it named it. Whole institutions—departments, publications, associations—were dismantled, reconstituted, or shut down. Individuals who lent intellectual credibility to mass murder were barred from the classroom and the public square. In our time, a parallel reckoning is not only justified—it is overdue. This is not about dissent. It is about those who use the university to incite, to delegitimize Jewish existence, and to radicalize the next generation in the service of ideological violence.

The rebuilding of the university must begin where the rot is deepest: with a full, independent accounting. A federal commission—armed with subpoena power, independence, and moral clarity—should be established to investigate the infrastructure of antisemitism now embedded in American academia. This means examining faculty affiliations with terror-linked movements, scrutinizing curricula that substitute grievance for scholarship, and tracing the flow of public funds into the pockets of ideologues who have made Jew-hatred fashionable again.

But commissions alone are not enough. The lifeblood of these institutions—federal aid, accreditation, and student loans—must be tied to clear moral lines. Any department that cannot certify it does not actively promote terror or suppress Jewish identity has forfeited the right to public legitimacy. Departments that glorify Hamas under the guise of post-colonial studies, that train students to see Jewish sovereignty as supremacist sin, must be placed under academic receivership—restructured or shuttered.

And what of the curriculum? Let it begin again. The teaching of the Holocaust, the study of totalitarian ideologies, and the story of Jewish survival and statehood must return not as electives but as essentials. A civilization that forgets what it means to be human is one lecture away from repeating the past.

To those who will cry McCarthyism, the response is simple: This is not about political affiliation. It is about moral boundaries. There is no “both sides” when it comes to the justification of mass murder. There is no safe harbor for those who chant for intifada with one breath and academic freedom with the next.

Postwar Germany could not build peace on the bones of unrepentant Nazi professors. And we cannot create a free society atop faculties that have made hatred their pedagogy and propaganda their syllabus. Denazification was not anti-German. It was pro-human. And academic reconstruction today must be the same—pro-civilization, pro-truth, and unapologetically clear about the difference between debate and dehumanization.

We have tried tolerance. We have attempted to dialogue. And in return, our students have been barricaded in libraries while mobs outside chant for another October 7. The line has been crossed. The only question left is whether we have the moral courage to draw a new one.

Universities must be returned to their original purpose: the cultivation of wisdom, the transmission of civilizational knowledge, and the formation of moral character. Denazification is not a relic of the past; it serves as a precedent for confronting institutions that have been seized by ideologies bent on civilizational destruction. The only alternative to reform is ruin.

Harvard’s recent actions—pausing the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, cutting ties with institutions promoting antisemitic narratives—are a start. But only a start. A full investigation into departmental bias, structural antisemitism, and ideological complicity must follow. Federal funding should be contingent upon compliance with anti-discrimination standards, as it was during the desegregation era and in the Bob Jones University case.

The Cost of Inaction

The demonization of Israel and Jews is no longer symbolic. It is bleeding into physical violence, threats, and the normalization of antisemitic ideology. The BDS movement has corrupted the academic mission. Departments no longer seek truth; they train activists to destroy the Jewish state.

We have seen this before. The university becomes the source of the hate. The media repeats it. The public absorbs it. And violence follows.

The Call to Action

- **Reform or close departments that propagate antisemitic ideologies**

- **Deny funding to programs that justify terror or erase Jewish identity**

- **Revoke teaching privileges from professors promoting falsehoods or inciting hatred**

- **Hold academic publishers accountable for legitimizing anti-Jewish propaganda**

- **Replace corrupted disciplines with new institutions devoted to Jewish thought, democratic values, and truth**

The time for tolerance of intolerance has passed. Harvard, and every university like it, must be de-Hamasified, just as German universities were denazified. If we do not act, we forfeit the moral ground upon which any civilized society stands.

As Hazony said, "This is where the future of Judaism will be decided." The question now is not whether universities are failing; rather, it is whether they are succeeding. The question is: Will Jews rise to rebuild what has been lost?

Jewish organizations that reflexively embrace free speech absolutism—even in the face of open advocacy for genocidal violence against Jews—may, with good intentions, be repeating a historic pattern: mistaking procedural liberalism for a guarantee of safety, and in so doing, enabling the ideological conditions that lead to Jewish exclusion, persecution, and eventually violence.