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Students hold a rally in support of Israel and demand greater protection from anti-semitism on campus at Columbia University on Feb. 14, 2024.

The rise of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel has cooled down, at least on the surface. We aren’t seeing as many distressing videos as we did last year of protesters blocking Jewish students from parts of the UCLA campus, damaging a campus building at Columbia while yelling slurs or setting up an encampment in Harvard Yard and chanting “globalize the intifada,” a reference to violent Palestinian uprisings against the Jewish state.

But don’t be fooled. There is a fertile source of antisemitism on American campuses that lies under the hood. Windows aren’t being broken. Nazi swastikas aren’t being displayed on the walls of college dorms. Jewish ritual objects such as mezuzahs aren’t being torn off of doorways. Instead, some professors have turned their classrooms into hidden breeding grounds for anti-Israeli and antisemitic views.

As a 311-page report released last week by the Harvard University Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias revealed, there is some deep-seated bias against Jews and Israelis in the lectures, books and other academic content of too many instructors. Harvard President Alan Garber, who is himself Jewish, said the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza brought tensions to the surface that had long festered under the radar, and promised to address them. According to The Wall Street Journal, the report concluded that there are some classes being taught “that denied historical facts in service to a political agenda,” stemming from years of “compromised scholarship, diminished intellectual standards on campus and biased curriculum.”

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