"To me, what makes this most dangerous and nefarious and scary is I was on a panel about two weeks ago with Martin Luther King, Junior's niece, and she reminded me of this great line from her uncle. We will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. And at Harvard, we would have been lucky to have the silence of our friends, but when you have those in a given society who are at the peak of their intelligence, who are at the the the climax of their their moral and ethical barometers, who are the future leaders of our society, who are the most sophisticated and nuanced and sensitive, when you have those individuals who who see the largest mass of Jews the Holocaust, who see unvarnished evil and terrorism, and their inclination is to side with that evil and terrorism, then I hope you and your listeners can appreciate this is not just a Jewish problem."
Alexander Shabbos Kestenbaum is a religious American Jewish activist. Until not long ago, he was a Harvard Divinity School student and that’s evolved since October to where he’s suing Harvard University in a landmark case that alleges Harvard failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
While at Harvard he founded and was President of the Harvard Divinity School Jewish Student Association and active member of both Harvard Chabad and Harvard Hillel. He didn’t just become a campus leader and a Jewish activist on October 8th.
Like many of us, Shabbos is on the frontline of the fight for Israel right now especially for Jewish students, but really all Jewish Americans, with one of the world’s most prestigious universities.