Over and over again, the Trump administration has portrayed Harvard University as a hub of antisemitism, where Jewish and Israeli students are routinely harassed and assaulted, and administrators look the other way.
Last year, the government stripped the school of funding, detailing abuses faced by students. In March, it sued.
The administration’s menacing portrayal of the university is outdated, however, according to Jewish and Israeli students who spoke in interviews this spring. Most of the episodes citied in the government lawsuit occurred in late 2023 and in 2024. Since then, the tent encampments are gone; the large, sustained Gaza protests have not returned.
The campus climate for Jews and Israelis has improved, they said; the campus is calmer than during the major Gaza protests, and some students are choosing to avoid contentious discussions. The climate may not be not perfect, but it is better, according to groups that represent or serve Jewish students; leaders involved with the Jewish community on campus, including Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, and Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, the founder and president of Harvard Chabad; as well as students who agreed to share their perspective in interviews.
“It without a doubt has seen much improvement since the aftermath of Oct. 7,” Rabbi Zarchi said, referring to the tumultuous demonstrations after the Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the Gaza war, though that by itself “would be a low bar.” He said that the school administration continued to address complaints of antisemitism seriously, and that “Jewish life on campus is flourishing — it is as vibrant as ever.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which in 2024 assigned Harvard an F grade on its campus antisemitism report card, has noted the improvement by grading the campus as a C the past two years. Several students who agreed to be interviewed were referred by the Israel on Campus Coalition, a nonprofit pro-Israel advocacy group.
Guy Almoznino, of Israel, who is finishing his freshman year at Harvard, said that when he was applying to the university, he spoke to other Israelis who had been on campus through the bulk of the protests.
“I’ve heard a lot about what it meant to be Israeli back then, about their experience and what they endured,” he said. “And I think now, coming here two years after, is completely a different experience.” He said he had never felt scared on campus: “I feel safe. I feel safe to say I am Israeli.”
A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, said in a statement that “Harvard University allowed its Jewish students to be targeted, harassed, and discriminated against for years,” and that the Trump administration “stepped in to end it and is finally delivering long-overdue accountability.”
Harvard launched parallel investigations into campus antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias in January 2024, a year before the Trump administration took office.
Harvard’s antisemitism investigation found that after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, many Jewish students felt the atmosphere on campus had become hostile. Jews at Harvard felt socially pressured to renounce Israel, while students who were not Jewish were pressured to stop being friends with Israeli students, according to the investigators’ 2025 report.
Jewish students had told investigators that “anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish expression” was tolerated on campus in ways that similar language toward other groups would not have been. Sharp confrontations during campus protests made national headlines. At the time, some Jewish students who opposed the Gaza war joined protests and told Congress that accusations of antisemitism were shutting down free speech.
A number of factors may have since calmed the climate at Harvard, one of many prominent U.S. schools with significant Gaza protests. Harvard’s administration under its current president, Alan Garber, updated and clarified rules related to protesting, and promoted and offered grants for programs to encourage dialogue among students.
Exhaustion after months of demonstrations and the subsequent disciplinary crackdown shifted the campus culture, students have said. And while many described relief that the environment is calmer, some have said the cost of the crackdown, at Harvard and elsewhere, is a chilling of speech.
A Harvard spokesman declined to comment. In a legal filing this month, the university said it “has engaged in sustained and ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism, and its campus is thus a very different place today than it was several years ago.”
Beneath the calm, though, tensions remain, several students said. Dr. Garber, too, has acknowledged that the school needs to do more to enhance its campus culture.
Certain topics, such as Israel and the Gaza conflict, can still feel taboo on campus. And when things are hard to talk about, the path of least resistance, some of the students said, is not to talk about them at all. A few people spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely on a highly charged topic.
Mr. Almoznino, for instance, helps organize the annual Harvard College Israel Trek, a student-led event that brings students to the Middle East to meet with residents, journalists and political leaders. It has been “a challenging task,” he said.
“I’ve had people approach me who said, ‘I had a major fight with my friends because I want to come to Israel,’” he said. “And people who’ve said, ‘Listen, I’m not going to do it. It’s not worth risking my friendships.’”
Other forms of bias, such as Islamophobia, have not received the same level of national attention as antisemitism, but remain a problem.
In a 2024 Harvard survey, 47 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt physically unsafe on campus, and more than 90 percent said they believed they would face “academic or professional repercussions” for expressing their opinions, according to the 2025 report of the Harvard task force that investigated anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias at the university.
Moeen Razzaque, a Harvard senior from Texas, and co-president of the Harvard Islamic Society, said recently that the survey numbers in the report still held true.
“Simply identifying as Muslim invites attacks from student groups, and that does not create an environment where everyone can thrive,” Mr. Razzaque said.
Genia Lukin, an Israeli graduate student, suggested that an issue can burn at such high energy for only so long. “I think there was a certain amount of fatigue,” Ms. Lukin said.
For Ms. Lukin, actions from the protests linger even now. In late 2023, Ms. Lukin quit the graduate student union, she said, after the union endorsed language in favor of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, an economic pressure campaign against Israel, and called on U.S. unions to cut ties with Israeli labor groups.
When the graduate student union went on strike last month, Ms. Lukin could not support the action, she said, though she would have liked to: “I can’t argue with any of their goals and claims, but I won’t do it because the union has essentially made a point to inform me that I don’t belong there.”
A union representative did not respond to requests for comment.
Charlotte Newman, a Jewish student at Harvard from California, said that the climate for Jews has improved consistently over her two years at Harvard. She said she had met with Thomas Dunne, dean of students, and found that “he is very considerate and cognizant of the Jewish experience on campus.”
“I love being Jewish at Harvard,” she said. “I like to think that because of the tough events of Oct. 7 and everything that followed on campus, it did bring a lot of the Jewish students on campus closer together.” Some Jews became inspired to be more involved in Jewish life on campus, she added.
Zachary Sardi-Santos, a Harvard senior from Massachusetts who is Jewish, said the campus fractured after Oct. 7, when a segment of the school decided “that you’re morally corrupt if you’re attached to Israel.”
He appreciated that Harvard had made “a real effort to confront the issue,” but believes the anti-Israeli sentiments that helped animate the protests are still around. “I think that the undercurrent still exists today,” he said. “It’s still taboo to be affiliated with Israel, to be a Zionist.”
Tejas Billa, a Harvard sophomore and a Jewish student from San Jose, Calif., said Harvard should do more to improve its culture. “I don’t think they’ve done enough,” he said. “I think they waited for a trend of activism to fizzle out and then took credit for it. The deeper issue is to get students to talk to each other.”
He is skeptical of the current programs that seek to bring together students with differing viewpoints. “The people who will attend are those who are already open to debate,” he said. “Those aren’t the students who need the program.”
Mark Arsenault covers higher education for The Times.
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