Top universities facing antisemitism accusations, losing long-time donors amid Israel-Hamas conflict

The Israel-Hamas conflict is shining a spotlight on accusations of antisemitism against multiple major U.S. colleges.

Donors and board members at Ivy league members including the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have decried what they call antisemitic responses from the schools to Hamas’s attack on Israel — and the way the institutions have been treating Israeli students even before the conflict began.

The University of Pennsylvania was told its “silence is antisemitism” by long-time donor and former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman. 

“The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low. Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate,” Huntsman said in a letter to UPenn President Liz Magill.

“Consequently, Huntsman Foundation will close its checkbook on all future giving to Penn — something that has been a source of enormous pride for now three generations of graduates. My siblings join me in this rebuke,” he added.

UPenn was already facing controversy after hosting a Palestine Writes Literature Festival last month that included speakers with a history of antisemitic comments. The university’s administration apologized for not rebuking the speakers more swiftly.

“The University did not, and emphatically does not, endorse these speakers or their views. While we did communicate, we should have moved faster to share our position strongly and more broadly with the Penn community,” Magill said in a statement.

Charter school leader Vahan Gureghian, a member of UPenn’s Board of Trustees, announced late last week that he would resign in protest.

“Just as at so many other elite academic institutions, the Penn community has been failed by an embrace of antisemitism, a failure to stand for justice and complete negligence in the defense of our students’ wellbeing,” Gureghian said. 

Harvard, meanwhile, has had two major donors cut ties since Hamas’s attack on Israel, with one describing the hostile environment that it says the Israeli community has felt at the school. 

The Wexner Foundation, started by Victoria Secret founder Leslie Wexner and his wife, sent a letter to the Harvard Board of Overseers saying how the board’s Israeli fellows have long felt “increasingly marginalized” on campus, and that a statement from student groups blaming Israel for the Hamas attack was the last straw.

“Harvard’s leaders were indeed tiptoeing, equivocating, and we, like former Harvard President Larry Summers cannot ‘fathom the administration’s failure to disassociate the university and condemn the statement’ swiftly issued by 34 student groups holding Israel entirely responsible for the violent terror attack on its own citizens,” the letter reads. 

The university released a statement saying the student groups didn’t represent Harvard’s leadership, but the Wexner Foundation said it was “stunned and sickened by the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians.”

And the Wexner Foundation was not the only major donor that felt disappointed enough with Harvard to cut its connections.

“Unfortunately, our faith in the University’s leadership has been broken and we cannot in good faith continue to support Harvard and its committees,” Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife Batia said as they announced their departure from the university’s Kennedy School of Government. 

Steven Davidoff Solomon, a corporate law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the adviser to the Jewish law student association, says the poor handling of the Hamas attacks is just the latest example of universities creating an environment that fosters antisemitism on campus.

In a Sunday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal called “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students,” Solomon argued that “The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.”

In a Tuesday interview with The Hill, Solomon said the “lack of a moral response by universities has led people to finally put their foot down. Universities have been engaging for far too long in moral equivocation and terrorist attacks against innocents should be condemned and not justified. And the fact that the universities, the elite universities, hesitated is just plain wrong.”

Universities have tried to quell the backlash, emphasizing the need for free exchange of ideas and free expression on college campuses. 

The Israeli-Palestine debate has been a hot topic on college campuses for decades among student groups, but recent events have garnered more backlash as some have shown support for Hamas or have not clearly distinguished support for Palestine from a condoning of the attack. 

“Ultimately, all donors have the right to decide the organizations they will support, and they have every right to share their opinions,” said Brian Otis, vice president for University Advancement for the University of New Haven. “I encourage benefactors contributing to all colleges and universities to remember that higher education and the academic environments created on college campuses have proven for centuries to be the safest place imaginable for individuals to engage in debate and the rigorous exchange of ideas. We should cherish and protect that.”