On October 30, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to Diane Lopez, Vice President of General Counsel for Harvard University, regarding the “Response by Harvard and Harvard Kennedy School to Antisemitic Discrimination and Bias in Marshall Ganz’s Course and on Campus.”
According to the letter, Harvard University found that Professor Gantz, who teaches at its Kennedy School, discriminated against three Jewish Israeli graduate students in violation of Harvard and Kennedy School policies and federal civil rights guidance under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But after more than four months, not only has Harvard failed to address the antisemitism, but the school is now publicly touting the professor as a civil rights hero.
The letter reminded Lopez that “On June 15, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf acknowledged in correspondence that the rights of HKS students Amnon Shefler, Matan Yaffe, and Gilad Neumann, whom we represent, were violated by faculty member Marshall Ganz. Dean Elmendorf acknowledged that Professor Ganz’s conduct violated our clients’ freedom of speech and impermissibly discriminated against them as Israelis and as Jews. Admirably, the Dean pledged that Harvard would take the necessary steps to ensure that such violations do not recur.”
“Unfortunately,” continued the letter’s authors, Kenneth Marcus, Rachel Lerman, and Alyza Lewin, “Harvard and HKS have not honored Dean Elmendorf’s promises. This failure, on top of other failures of leadership, has set the stage for the worsening climate that we have seen for Jewish Harvard students since.”
Indeed, the letter stated, “Harvard’s failure to promptly and effectively address acknowledged violations of its Jewish and Israeli students’ rights is especially dangerous now, in light of the support that over thirty Harvard student groups recently expressed for the murder, kidnapping, and rape of Israeli Jews during the October 7 Hamas pogroms. While Harvard has taken the important step of admitting the problem, the situation for Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard will only worsen in the face of the University’s inaction.”
Marshall Ganz, 80, the founder of the Leading Change Network NGO, is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign. According to Wiki, his father was a rabbi, and for three years after World War II, his family lived in occupied Germany, where his father served as a US Army chaplain working with displaced persons.
“Having encountered survivors of the Holocaust, his parents taught Marshall about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.”
Not enough, apparently. Ganz was accused of discrimination and harassment of three Jewish Israeli students – Amnon Shefler, Gilad Neumann, and Matan Yaffe – last spring, in his course titled, “Organizing: People, Power, Change.”
The three students decided to work together on a joint project that would examine ways “to harness and unite a majority of diverse and moderate Israelis to strengthen Israel’s liberal and Jewish democracy” at a time of division and social strife in their country. They presented it as “organizing a growing majority of Israelis… that act in harmony, building on a shared ethos of Israel as a liberal-Jewish-democracy, being a cultural, economic and security lighthouse.”
Professor Ganz dismissed their project as illegitimate, demanded they change it, and subjected them to anti-Israel and antisemitic bias and discrimination when they refused.
Ganz told the students they could not use the term “Jewish democracy” to describe Israel. He demanded they eliminate “Jewish” and “democracy” from their project’s stated purpose, stating that an organizing project to promote Jewish democracy was akin to a project promoting white supremacy.
When the students decided to stick with their project as designed, Ganz threatened them with consequences. He admitted that he had never before told students in any of his classes that they could not present their work, even when it centered on controversial topics. During the final class, two of Ganz’s teaching fellows taught a lesson on how to recruit support for “Palestinians.” While the topic itself was not objectionable, it led to students making hostile claims, inaccurate characterizations, and false accusations against Israel and Israelis. Ganz refused to let the Israeli students provide a response or any counterarguments to the wildly inaccurate data presented.
After the Brandeis Center sent a complaint to the university last March, Harvard launched a third-party-investigation, which concluded that Ganz subjected the students to anti-Israel and antisemitic bias and discrimination based on their identities as Jewish Israelis, silenced the speech of the Jewish Israeli students about a topic he viewed as illegitimate, treated the students differently and denigrated them based on their Israeli national origin and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry, and prioritized others’ concerns over the Israeli students.
The independent investigator also concluded that Ganz’s conduct interfered with and limited the students’ ability to participate in and benefit from Harvard Kennedy School’s educational program, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires schools that receive federal funding to respond immediately to discrimination and/or harassment that “negatively affect[s] the ability and willingness of Jewish students to participate fully in the school’s education programs and activities.” A university “must take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end the harassment, eliminate any hostile environment, and prevent the harassment from recurring.”
“Four months later, not only has there been no action to address the antisemitism, Harvard is now publicly touting Ganz, who continues to teach there, as a civil rights hero. The latest edition of the Harvard Gazette vaunts Ganz’s early civil rights work, making no mention of his recent dishonorable conduct,” Brandeis wrote Lopez.
“The professor is no civil rights champion when it comes to minorities that he personally finds distasteful, namely, Jewish Israelis,” the letter stated, adding, “He is, in fact, a civil rights violator, who undisputedly trampled the rights of students in his class without hesitation or apology, denigrating the Students’ identity and preventing them from participating fully in his class.”
“Harvard, it seems, has no genuine intent to address the antisemitism on its campus, choosing instead to publicly celebrate a professor who recently subjected Jewish and Israeli students to bias and discrimination. Harvard’s leadership has allowed its campus to run amuck with antisemitism for far too long. This outrageous, irresponsible, and illegal failure of Harvard’s administration to address even undisputed antisemitism has paved the way for the problems they are now facing,” the Brandeis letter concluded, “It is high time the university provides the leadership it is required under the law.”
