On a hot day in Jerusalem, Kevin Keystone found his way to the synagogue within Yad Vashem, Israel’s national monument to victims of the Holocaust, and took a moment to reflect. It wasn’t his first visit to Israel, but this time was different. This 2022 trip included a mix of places and voices, encouraging him to engage more deeply with the region’s history and politics than he had growing up, he said, in a Jewish community that had unquestioningly supported Israel.
“The trip was so poignant and powerful and important,” he said. “It really unpacked so many things.”
Keystone’s experience aligns with what the founders of Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program described when they launched it five years ago with the lofty goal of advancing the “public understanding of religion in service of a just world at peace.” As part of that mission, the program ran annual trips to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where students like Keystone met with politicians, farmers, artists and human rights groups. Several students told NBC News it was the reason they joined the divinity school.
But the trip and a related course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were put on pause in March amid what the school described as “substantial adjustments” to Religion and Public Life, a program that offers a one-year master’s degree for roughly a dozen students per year, a certificate program, and events and courses for students across campus.
Since January, all three of the program’s leaders and most of its staff have left or not had their contracts renewed amid internal and external allegations of antisemitism against the program. It will continue to operate under new leadership this fall, but with vast changes.
Former faculty members of the program, speaking publicly for the first time, shed light on how the program fell apart — and what it could portend for the future of free speech on campuses nationwide.
“Nobody came to our defense,” said Hussein Rashid, the program’s former assistant dean, who resigned from his post in January and left at the end of June. “Our students were fantastic — our administrators were cowards.”
Harvard Divinity School declined to make its dean, Marla Frederick, or the new head of Religion and Public Life, Terrence Johnson, available for interviews. In a statement, the divinity school said that due to “financial constraints and other considerations,” the program was being “integrated more fully” within the divinity school and that the school “remains committed” to its mission.
The gutting of Religion and Public Life comes at a critical time. Harvard has been accused by the Trump administration of failing to root out antisemitism and threatened with a loss of federal funding. It is battling in federal court to maintain control of university policies and has trumpeted its defense of academic freedom against governmental intrusion. But for the devoted cohort of students and alumni of Religion and Public Life and its former leadership, the school’s apparent failure to protect the program’s staff suggests the opposite: that Harvard might quietly cave to outside pressure.
Critics of the program, including some Jewish students and organizations, are glad to see it overhauled. They say it invited one-sided or antisemitic speakers to give book talks and webinars and encouraged students to reject Zionism. Harvard’s April report on antisemitism singled out the program and said it was biased against Israel.
“The programming, the teaching, the literature and events are presenting one view,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, president of Chabad House and a chaplain at Harvard. “And it’s not just a view — it’s done in an activist manner.”
In her response to the report on antisemitism, Frederick said that Religion and Public Life would be evaluated by a review committee. She highlighted a book discussion series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and said the school would hire additional faculty members with expertise in Judaism, Islam and “religion, violence, and peace.”
But six alumni of the program told NBC News the overhaul of Religion and Public Life was unnecessary, given that it was already incorporating multiple viewpoints. Its dismantling, they say, hurts students and the university itself.
“They’re sacrificing the moral center of Harvard Divinity School, and that has an implication across all of Harvard,” said Zehra Imam, a recent graduate and former intern. “You gut an entire program — that’s gonna set a precedent. It’s already set a precedent.”
Though President Donald Trump targeted Harvard and other universities over allegations of antisemitism, public scrutiny of Religion and Public Life predates his current term.
It started in October 2023, when, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, the program’s leaders issued a statement calling on people to consider the “complexity” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“When these ‘decades of oppression’ are left out of the story about Hamas’ horrendous attack on Israeli civilians,” they wrote, “a narrative about an ‘innocent’ state of Israel’s right to ‘defend’ itself against supposedly ‘unprovoked’ aggression is legitimized.”
Hilary Rantisi, associate director of the program's Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative, which ran the course and annual trip to the region, was one of the faculty members who signed the statement. Though she received some supportive emails, Rantisi said, there was also an immediate backlash. In an open letter, some Harvard faculty members criticized the statement. The divinity school’s interim dean, David Holland, quickly disavowed the remarks, according to The Harvard Crimson.
Rantisi said the statement was meant to counterbalance others that didn’t address the Palestinian viewpoint. The staff felt justified in sharing their thoughts, she said, because it was a subject they taught.
“Our statement was saying there is a context, there is a history of this conflict. It didn’t start today,” Rantisi, who is Palestinian, told NBC News in her first interview since she was told her contract wouldn’t be renewed after June. “In an academic institution, of course you should be able to say this.”
Over the following year, as pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept campuses, including Harvard, criticism of the program grew. The statement and the program’s events were cited in a lawsuit by former divinity school student Shabbos Kestenbaum and a recently formed nonprofit organization called Students Against Antisemitism Inc. as examples of ways that antisemitism allegedly permeated Harvard.
In an interview, Kestenbaum referenced the program’s screening of the documentary “Israelism,” for instance, about Jewish people who questioned Israel’s policies, saying the event was one-sided and lacked the perspective of the Orthodox community, to which he belongs.
Harvard tried unsuccessfully to have the suit thrown out on technical grounds last year and argued in court filings that it was engaged in numerous efforts to combat antisemitism on campus. It reached a confidential settlement with Kestenbaum in May.
Though Kestenbaum didn’t pursue a master’s degree in religion and public life, he said he wanted to explore different ideas and learn from different faiths but felt that it wasn’t reciprocal. “The only time Israel was explored was in the exclusive negative light of settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, racism,” he said.
Rashid and Rantisi told NBC News they didn’t indoctrinate students and explicitly encouraged critical thinking.
Atalia Omer, a professor born in Israel, taught the course on conflict and peace with Rantisi and learned last spring that her contract wouldn’t be renewed. Omer later wrote in an op-ed that she was the “wrong kind of Jew” for Harvard, because of her “dissent from Zionism.”
“If Harvard or other universities want to fight for academic freedom,” she told NBC News, “they have to stop using the Palestine exception, because it works against that argument.”
In interviews, six former students praised what they described as the program’s interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach, and some noted its ability to attract students from across the campus. Notable alumni of the program include musician Maggie Rogers, novelist Alice Hoffman and actor André Holland.
One former student, Destiny Magnett, now leads church engagement for a charity called Churches for Middle East Peace. She said Religion and Public Life helped her decide on this career.
“The RPL critically examines religion,” she said. “It’s not only looking at the role that religion can play in the pursuit of peace and justice and all that comes with it, but also the ways that it can cause harm, and has caused harm, for people all over the world, throughout history.”
It was a quiet Friday in January, several days before classes resumed. Religion and Public Life Associate Dean Diane Moore had just met with her students to chart their academic plans for the term ahead. Hours later she stunned those same students when she unexpectedly announced that she was stepping down from her role as director of the program.
Attempts to reach Moore by phone and email were unsuccessful. Harvard Divinity School said she was employed as a senior lecturer there until June 30.
Moore’s announcement came as a surprise to Rashid, whom she had hired two years prior as an assistant dean. He assumed that she’d been forced out. The next day, Rashid sent his own scathing resignation letter, accusing Harvard of failing to intervene on behalf of the program against what he viewed as months of defamatory attacks.
“My program was being attacked using extremely Islamophobic, anti-Arab language, and the school refused to respond, saying that they couldn’t get into an intra-Harvard fight,” he said.
In a June 2024 Instagram post, for example, Harvard Chabad said the program and others “essentially function as Hamas or Palestinian embassies” and called for its dismantling. Rashid said divinity school administrators told him he couldn’t file a complaint through an internal grievance process because Harvard Chabad isn’t considered an official part of the university.
In response to Rashid’s allegations, the school said in a statement that employees who feel they’ve faced discrimination are encouraged to seek assistance through “internal problem solving or the formal complaint processes,” adding that Dean Holland followed up with Rashid in writing and in person after he resigned.
Through its twin task forces, the university has publicly acknowledged that it is grappling with anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bias on campus, along with antisemitism.
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, head of Harvard Hillel, was glad to see Moore and Rashid leave the program. He said in a February newsletter that he spoke with Terrence Johnson, the newly named head of Religion and Public Life, and was promised the program would no longer have a “peculiar preoccupation with Israel” and would “sympathetically showcase a variety of Jewish religious and political stances.”
Harvard Divinity School didn’t respond to questions about that account. In a July 10 statement announcing Johnson’s new role, the school said “Johnson aims to broaden the program’s reach by convening conversations across faith traditions, political ideologies, and institutional sectors.”
Kestenbaum, who spoke at the Republican National Convention and in a congressional hearing about antisemitism at Harvard, celebrated Rashid’s resignation.
“I don’t want to pat myself on the back,” he said. “But I did all I could in a personal capacity to get people to understand what was happening at Harvard Divinity School.”
Support for Religion and Public Life began to fray well before Trump took office, but it fully unraveled as the president sought to bring Harvard to heel. On March 28, two weeks after the administration announced that it was investigating Harvard over its alleged mishandling of antisemitism, the divinity school issued an update saying that the program’s curriculum would be overhauled and the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative would be paused “to rethink its focus.”
On April 3, a top official on the government’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism named Religion and Public Life in a memo to Harvard lawyers as one of the “problematic depts” that needed new oversight or receivership, according to a recent court filing. The same memo also approvingly detailed items “Already Done by Harvard.” Near the top of the list was the suspension of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative and the sudden departure of Religion and Public Life leadership.
Kirsten Weld, president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors and a history professor, said it’s “hard not to draw certain kinds of conclusions” from the timing of the gutting of Religion and Public Life, even if the government didn’t explicitly demand it.
“Now we have a precedent for how to successfully shut down parts of university programming that these folks don’t like,” Weld said. “It does not speak well of the state of academic freedom at Harvard, or more broadly in the United States, and faculty are very deeply concerned.”
Some alumni of the program say they are, too.
“How tragic that something so rare and precious should be destroyed,” Keystone said, “because of opposing voices.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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