An Israeli student who attended graduate school at Harvard dealt with hostility due to his religious identity and found himself at odds with a professor who compared the idea of the Jewish state to “White supremacy.”
Matan Yaffe is a founder of an organization that helped Israel’s Bedouin Muslim population and came to Harvard so he could gain the skills to further his mission of Tikkun Olam or “healing the world.” It didn’t take long after his arrival for the trouble to begin.
“Pretty soon on the first day, there were already hints that something was kind of off,” Matan Yaffe told Fox News Digital.
Yaffe, 40, accepted a scholarship to attend Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in June 2022. Having founded Desert Stars, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides educational and employment opportunities to Israel’s Bedouin community. He was excited to attend the Ivy League school to gain skills he could apply back home.
Yaffe, an IDF officer, said his first impressions of Harvard were positive, but when he entered the Kennedy School’s “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” course taught by Professor Marshall Ganz, he immediately became aware that his Israeli identity would become an issue.
HARVARD SETTLES TWO LAWSUITS DEALING WITH ALLEGATIONS OF ANTISEMITISM
Yaffe is barred from discussing Professor Ganz by name per the terms of a settlement Harvard just reached with the Brandeis Center, which represented the father of five along with other Israeli and Jewish students, but Ganz is named in the lawsuit.
Yaffe decided to team up with two other Israelis on a project entitled “Organizing a growing majority of Israelis acting in harmony building on a shared ethos of Israel, as a liberal Jewish democracy being a cultural, economic and security lighthouse.”
The professor summoned the Israelis to his office and informed them that their project was “offensive” and were told they needed to change topics or face “consequences,” Yaffe claimed. Ganz allegedly felt that the phrase “Jewish democracy” was at issue and likened the concept to “White supremacy.”
Yaffe was aghast that his project, or homeland for that matter, could be compared to White supremacy, especially since he was hoping his research could help him return to the NGO world to help make Israeli society more inclusive.
“48% of the world’s nations define themselves by religion or ethnicity including all the Muslim states,” Yaffe said in the tense meeting. “I asked him if he ever forced a student to change topics before, and he said no. The whole thing was bizarre,” he told Fox News Digital.
The meeting concluded with Yaffe telling the professor that his behavior was antisemitic.
The entrepreneur said that he and his Israeli classmates were then subjected to a campaign of silencing from the professor. When a fellow classmate offered harsh criticisms of their homeland, they asked to be able to respond.
“You’ve already done enough damage,” the professor allegedly replied. Yaffe asked the professor if he would prefer if the three Israeli students dropped his course, Ganz allegedly said he would.
Despite the professor’s seeming antagonism towards the Israeli students, Yaffe and his project-mates attempted to foster dialogue with their classmates regarding their home country. The three Israeli students invited their classmates for a dinner where they could freely discuss any issues they had about Israel or their project. While not all students attended, Yaffe said the dinner went well.
Yaffe and his Israeli classmates persisted in their choice of project, but were denied the opportunity to present in front of the class, the only students denied the opportunity to do so. Ultimately, the Israeli students all received grades that they felt were unjustly lower than their average.
“Harvard is the top of the academic world, you’d think it would be a very safe place to share their ideas,” Yaffee told Fox News Digital.
While Yaffe felt that being an older student with life experience in the military and the business world helped protect him from what could have been a very traumatic experience, he felt compelled to fight back against what happened so a younger, more vulnerable student would never have to endure what he did.
“I’m relatively a lucky guy, I have many anchors in my life. I have kids, a wife, a state that I love. What would happen if I didn’t have all of these anchors, if I was a 20-year-old Jewish guy growing up in America not holding the identity of Israel as a backbone, and suddenly I became very alarmed. I understood that many people that might not have the anchors that I have, this kind of incident could be very traumatic on the personal level,” Yaffe said.
An independent investigator concluded that the Harvard Kennedy School created a “hostile learning environment” for the Israeli students. Harvard accepted the finding’s conclusions.
Harvard settled with the Brandeis Center on Tuesday. As part of the settlement, the university agreed to adopt the International Historical Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism.
“This is a very strong settlement, and a huge win. Not only will this have a major impact at Harvard University and the university’s stature, it will have a huge influence throughout American higher education,” Brandeis Center Founder and Chairman Ken Marcus told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reached out to Harvard and Professor Ganz for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
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