‘Tonight, We Fight Back’: Harvard Graduate Slams Campus Antisemitism in Blistering RNC Speech Zach Kessel
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School who is currently suing the university over its failure to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination on campus, took aim at left-wing antisemitism in a Republican National Convention speech that drew raucous cheers from the Milwaukee audience.
“I came to Harvard to study religion, the foundation of Western civilization,” Kestenbaum said. “What I found was not theology but a contempt for it. My problem with Harvard is not its liberalism but its illiberalism. Too often, students at Harvard are taught not how to think but what to think. I found myself immersed in a culture that is anti-Western, that is anti-American, and that is antisemitic.”
Kestenbaum stressed to the convention crowd that antisemitism does not exist in a vacuum. Those who hate the Jewish people and the state of Israel, he argued, abhor the United States and the West as well.
“Students and professors have openly called for new Hamas-style attacks against the United States, and perhaps most damning, when Hamas terrorists butchered 45 American citizens on October 7 — when they took twelve Americans hostage — Harvard refused to immediately and unequivocally condemn this atrocity,” he said.
Formerly a member of the progressive Left, Kestenbaum explained to the audience how he went from being a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the 2020 Democratic presidential-primary race to understanding what he deemed the deep rot at the core of left-wing radicalism.
“Although I once voted for Bernie Sanders, I now recognize that the far Left has not only abandoned the Jewish people but the American people,” he told the crowd. “The Democratic Party — the party I registered to vote for the day I turned 18 — has become ideologically poisoned. And it is this poison, it is this corruption, that is infecting far too many young American students. Let’s be clear: The far Left’s antisemitic extremism has no virtue, and the radicalism on our campuses and on our streets has no moral legitimacy.”
After describing the threats antisemitism and support for terrorism pose to American society, Kestenbaum turned his attention to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.
“Tonight, we fight back,” he vowed. “I am proud to support President Trump’s policies to expel foreign students who violate our laws, harass our Jewish classmates, and desecrate our freedoms. Let’s elect a president who will instill patriotism in our schools. Once again, let’s elect a president who will confront terrorism and its supporters.”
Kestenbaum ended his speech by affirming the tight-knit bond between the Jewish tradition and the principles upon which the United States was founded and a reminder not to forget the American citizens still held in Hamas captivity.
“Let’s elect a president who recognizes that although Harvard and the Ivy Leagues have long abandoned the United States of America, the Jewish people never will, because Jewish values are American values, and American values are Jewish values,” he said. “God bless the United States, God bless the land of Israel, God bless, protect, and return the American hostages in Gaza.”
Kestenbaum’s experience at Harvard, he told a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in February, can best be distilled by events that occurred over a three-week period during the past academic year, including harassment from fellow students and even death threats from a university employee.
“On the morning of Thursday, January 25, I received an email from a Harvard employee challenging me to debate him in a secluded underpass as to whether Jews orchestrated 9/11,” Kestenbaum told the committee at the time. “That night, that same Harvard employee posted a video on his social media with a machete and a picture of my face, saying he ‘wants to fight’ and has ‘a plan.’”
Despite the discrimination and harassment he and his Jewish classmates faced at Harvard, Kestenbaum said, the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department told him such matters fell “outside their purview.”
Harvard was the first university to capture national attention for student-group statements valorizing Hamas and excusing terrorism, with 31 organizations endorsing an October 8 letter asserting that the “apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for massacres of Israeli civilians and declaring that Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
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