Word: jewish
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Further, the administration has more to apologize for than a series of one-time incidents. For these incidents reflected a broader set of policies and attitudes at Harvard at the time which substantially bolstered the proponents of anti-Semitism and Nazism. By 1931, according to the American Jewish Historical Society, the ranks of Jewish students at Harvard had been cut to 15 percent of the freshman class from 22 percent a decade earlier. The student employment office cooperated with employers who explicitly discriminated against Jewish students...
President Conant repeatedly neglected to assist distinguished Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi Germany to seek refuge in American academia. Yet the current administration persists in defending Conant’s policies, and rebuffing any suggestion of the University’s culpability...
There were some students who had the wisdom and the moral courage to stand up to Nazism and anti-Semitism from the very start. They organized a demonstration thousands strong in Harvard Square to protest Hanfstaengl’s visit. Other students fought to end discrimination against Jewish students and professors within the University. Half a dozen students even volunteered for combat in Spain in 1936, fighting against the combined forces of Hitler and fascist general Francisco Franco. At least one, philosophy student Eugene Bronstein, was killed in battle, but his name appears nowhere in campus memorials to Harvard?...
...cause to wonder whether the continuing silence on this matter might be, to quote President Summers, “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.” For it seems to attribute more importance to the image of this university than to the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime...
...administration must acknowledge where Harvard went wrong in the 1930s, honor those students who did right, and offer an immediate apology to the Jewish community and all those with families that were decimated by the Nazi regime. And Harvard must recognize its international moral responsibility in its current and future decisions, for its past “neutrality” has only helped the tyrants of the world...