Alexander (“Shabbos”) Kestenbaum, the Jewish student activist at Harvard University who gained national prominence for speaking at the Republican convention in July, recently shared how the chaplains at Harvard are falling Jewish students.
On Nov. 18, masked Hamas supporters gathered in front of the Harvard Hillel and screamed at Jewish students trying to enter.
Kestenbaum tweeted: “After Harvard Jews were told by masked students ‘Zionists aren’t welcomed here’ outside of the Hillel, the Chaplain Office finally released a statement that did not include the words Jew, Zionism, Israel or antisemitism. A total abdication of religious responsibility.”
How did Greg Epstein, a Jewish chaplain at Harvard, and his fellow chaplains respond after the incident at the Hillel? They were silent for three days and then, finally, the Chaplain Office issued their statement that incredibly read as if the pro-Hamas intimidation rally was a legitimate religious expression!
Still, Epstein and company conceded, noting that to say somebody is “not welcome here” is problematic. Not because it’s antisemitic, but because some students might perceive it that way. “Student groups who are singled out in this way experience such language and acts of vandalism as a painful attack,” read the mealy-mouthed word salad from the Harvard chaplains.
It’s bad enough that Jewish students at Harvard have to contend with pro-Hamas demonstrators and faculty members, but now, chaplains have failed them, including a Jewish one.
Epstein, a member of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet and a graduate of the rabbinical ordination program at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, was named chief chaplain at Harvard University back in 2021. Rabbi Jason Rubenstein is the executive director of Hillel. Rubenstein. Rubenstein, along with two other rabbis who serve at the Harvard Hillel, are officially the Jewish chaplains at the university.
The news media thought it was noteworthy that after nearly 400 years of having chief chaplains who believed in God, Harvard had chosen a self-proclaimed atheist for the position. Officially, Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University.
And maybe some parents of Jewish students at Harvard were less than thrilled at the prospect of their sons or daughters being influenced by a passionate advocate of atheism. After all, that’s pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.
But the bigger problem, I warned at the time, was that Epstein would use his new position as a platform to influence Jewish students’ perceptions of the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel.
For example, in 2019, Epstein tweeted that American detention facilities for illegal migrants “can LITERALLY [his caps], in a historically accurate way, be called concentration camps.” That’s a pretty twisted, shallow understanding of the Holocaust.
Epstein’s tweets about Israel have been equally disturbing.
A tweet from Epstein on April 28, 2021, employed the ugly term “Jewish supremacists” to demean Jewish nationalists who were marching in Jerusalem. That slur was invented by neo-Nazis and has more recently been adopted by the radical left.
Some years earlier, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, Epstein was part of a group of radical American rabbis who urged then-President Barack Obama not to reject the terrorist victors. “We urge you to maintain a cautious approach” towards Hamas, they wrote to the president. Yeah, that worked out well.
So now that we’ve seen where that “cautious” approach to Hamas led, has Epstein had a change of heart? On the contrary—in recent tweets, he has been bashing Israel over Gaza.
On Sept. 3, an X (Twitter) user named “Sofie” tweeted out some anti-Israel slurs. Sofie’s X account is adorned with a slogan denouncing “amerika” and proclaiming “glory to the resistance.” In case anybody doubts which “resistance” she has in mind, she has an illustration of a paraglider—the symbol used to glorify the Oct. 7 terrorists, some of whom entered Israel on paragliders in order to rape, mutilate and murder. Sofie’s paraglider symbol is followed by a hammer and sickle.
You get the picture: Sofie is an Israel-hating, America-hating fanatic.
That doesn’t seem to bother Epstein one bit, to judge by his response to one of her recent tweets.
On Sept. 3, Sofie tweeted that according to some sources, the actual death total in Gaza “is now over 92,000.” Note that even Hamas says the number is 44,000, and the real number is less than half that, according to Israel. But even 92,000 isn’t enough for Sofie. She continued by declaring in her tweet that the true number—which she called “a conservative estimate”—is 368,000!
You would think that Greg Epstein, a Jewish chaplain at Harvard, would either ignore or refute this anti-Israel slander. On the contrary, he responded: “I think about this every day. I personally have no idea how precise #s are but I can say the math has seemed *off* to me for months. Given conditions we’ve created in a Gaza Strip that was already an open-air prison before the war, estimates of 30-40K have long been inadequate.”
From the comfort of Harvard Yard, thousands of miles away, Epstein decided that the already exaggerated number of 40,000 “seems off” and is “inadequate.” The absurdly high number furnished by a Holocaust-denying terrorist group was not enough for him.
His claim that Gaza “was already an open-air prison before the war” is equally absurd. More than 15,000 residents left that “prison” every day to enter Israel for jobs—and to do surveillance for Hamas. We now know that some of those Arab workers provided information about towns in southern Israel that Hamas used for its murder-and-rape rampage. That’s the “prison” Chaplain Epstein has in mind.
Now thanks to Kestenbaum’s tweet, we see just where the Chaplain Office at Harvard can’t even do the decent thing and name Jews when they are victimized.
So, heads up, Jewish parents of prospective Harvard students: This is what your $51,925 in annual tuition (tuition alone, mind you) will get.
Moshe Phillips is national