harvard crimson op-ed

The Harvard Crimson column reveals the reemergence of an old pattern: the use of “ethical” reasoning to justify the social exclusion of Jews now recast as “Zionists.” We have seen this before—when Soviet campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans” in the late 1940s rebranded Jews as “Zionists” and purged them from public life; when postcolonial regimes across the Middle East and North Africa expelled their Jewish populations under the same banner; when Poland’s 1968 antizionist campaign drove out its remaining Jews as “suspicious Zionist agents.” In each case, antizionism functioned as racism—a mechanism for defining Jewish identity itself as a contaminant within the moral or national body. That same structure now reappears in elite American institutions, where the language of conscience once again licenses exclusion, urging the virtuous to separate themselves from so-called “Zionists” in order to remain pure. The vocabulary changes, but the logic endures: the racist segregation of Jews from the moral community.