The Harvard Crimson at 150: How the Nation’s Oldest Student Newspaper Went off the Anti-Israel Deep End
by Akiva Van Koningsveld
Matthews Hall, Harvard University. Photo: Daderot/Wikimedia Commons.
The Harvard Crimson, the prestigious student-run newspaper at America’s most elite university, has produced journalists who have gone on to populate positions of power in major news organizations throughout the nation, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Foreign Policy, and counts more than 25 Pulitzer Prize winners among its alumni.
That is, perhaps, what makes the recent radical shift in its editorial stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict especially disconcerting.
Exactly one year ago this week, the newspaper, which will celebrate its sesquicentennial this weekend in the presence of hundreds of supporters and former writers, officially endorsed the controversial Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel.
Notably, the Crimson’s April 29, 2022, editorial, titled “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine,” marked a 180-degree reversal of the paper’s longstanding stance against boycotting the Jewish state, and was approved for publication amid a deadly campaign of Palestinian terrorism targeting Israeli civilians.
Now, a dive into the Crimson’s 2022-2023 coverage of Israel and Jewish issues suggests that some of its current staff has fully gone off the deep end of activism disguised as journalism, as blatant anti-Israel editorializing has become a regular occurrence on the pages of the country’s oldest continuously printed student daily.
The Harvard Crimson’s Israel Obsession
Between April 24, 2022, and April 24, 2023, the Crimson ran almost 40 news articles and op-eds that touched upon Israel and the Palestinians — considerably more than the combined total of pieces it published about Iran’s women’s revolution (seven), the catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria (five), and the shocking human rights violations surrounding Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup (one).
While the excessive focus on just one Middle Eastern state in opinion essays can possibly be explained as a symptom of proven rampant anti-Jewish sentiments among swaths of the student body, several Crimson editors have also personally demonstrated a clear bias in the publication’s news columns.
For instance, reporting on an April 9, 2023, rally by extremist campus groups in response to altercations between Palestinian rioters and Israeli security forces at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, staff writers Cam Kettles and Neil Shah charged the Jewish state with “police violence.” In truth, anti-riot officers only entered the Muslim holy site on April 5 to restore order after agitators, armed with fireworks, batons, and stones, refused to leave. According to eyewitness reports, masked rioters had closed the mosque’s doors, locking peaceful worshipers inside.
On March 6 of this year, in an article entitled “Harvard Affiliates Gather at Vigil to Mourn Palestinian Lives Lost,” Crimson editor Joyce Kim covered a Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) vigil that mourned members of US-designated terrorist organizations. The piece shockingly described Israel Defense Forces counter-terrorism operations as “attacks,” while making no mention at all of the Palestinian terror wave that prompted the arrest raids.
Furthermore, when former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth was denied a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the Crimson joined the chorus in conspiratorially implying that “well-monied” Jewish and pro-Israel donors might have affected Dean Douglas Elmendorf’s decision (which was swiftly reversed following a relentless, media-abetted campaign against Elmendorf).
“[T]he influence of donors within our institution should never be applied to suffocate academic freedom,” the newspaper’s editorial board posited in a January 31 statement. However, its sudden concern for the free exchange of ideas reeks of sheer hypocrisy and double standards. The Crimson-backed BDS movement explicitly calls on universities to “boycott… Israeli academic and cultural institutions,” a discriminatory suggestion antithetical to the very notion of academic freedom.
Academic Freedom for Me, Not for Thee
Indeed, The Harvard Crimson only seems to care about academic freedom when it can be weaponized against Israel. Case in point: The Crimson has yet to cover a November 2022 report that ranked Harvard University number one in the nation for campus antisemitism. As noted by other media outlets, the AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan group that tracks Jew-hatred, concluded that Harvard accounted for almost one in every ten incidents deemed a threat to Jewish identity.
The Crimson likewise failed to investigate specific allegations of antisemitism and the stifling of Jewish voices in the wake of the Ken Roth saga. “Harvard Kennedy School is not a place you feel safe as an Israeli or Jewish person. You don’t feel that you can be yourself or speak your mind, or your opinion is accepted, if it’s not the right opinion,” The Boston Globe quoted a student as saying earlier this year, in remarks that have simply been ignored by the editors of Harvard’s student paper.
One possible explanation for the Crimson’s recent anti-Israel slant is the seemingly symbiotic relationship between some of its writers and the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), the radical organization credited for prompting the editorial board’s volte-face on BDS.
Janna Ramadan, who has served as a Crimson editor since at least 2021, doubles as one of the lead campaigners in the PSC. Two months ago, she appeared at a forum at the Kennedy School wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and a necklace that erased Israel off the map. Unsurprisingly, the activist has denied the Jewish state’s right to exist within any borders, claiming in a 2021 tweet that Israel has occupied “Palestine” since 1948. Moreover, she mourned terrorists who carried out stabbing attacks, and retweeted a post that called for the release of PFLP terrorist Khalida Jarrar.
For anyone trying to understand the basics of this 73-yr long occupation https://t.co/OnBki1CwaN
— Janna Ramadan (@JannaRamadan) May 11, 2021
For her part, Crimson associate editor Labiba Uddin, who in an October 2022 op-ed mentioned a “large Palestinian flag” donning her dorm room, signed a PSC letter demanding the Harvard Kennedy School “sever all association” with retired IDF major general Amos Yadlin. Among other slanderous charges, the missive accused the Jewish state of “six decades of … ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, and apartheid.”
Suddenly, it becomes clear why the Crimson continues to pump out slanted pieces about Israel.
On the “About” page of the Crimson website, the newspaper boasts of its “rich tradition of journalistic integrity” and the fact that it “counts among its ranks of editorship some of America’s greatest journalists.” Yet as the Crimson marks 150 years since the first issue went to press, its editorial team has apparently lost all integrity when it comes to reporting on the conflict between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors.
Perhaps next year’s editors should take a clue from Harvard’s 187-year-old motto: Veritas (truth).
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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