Harvard alum and PragerU contributor Shabbos Kestenbaum praised President Donald Trump for freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University after the Ivy League school rejected Trump’s demands to crackdown on campus anti-Semitism.
During a Wednesday interview with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak on The Alex Marlow Show podcast, Kestenbaum called Harvard “an elitist corporation” and said that it is a “no-brainer” that U.S. taxpayer money should not be funding “an institution that capitulates to the dumbest and worst and most radical elements” of society.
After being asked to provide his take on “what happened on campus specifically that got Trump’s attention, and what it was like living through it,” Kestenbaum told the Breitbart editors, “We filed a lawsuit last January against the university pertaining to their obvious civil rights violations of Jewish students.”
The PragerU contributor then elaborated on his experiences at Harvard:
In a nutshell, I could just list incidents — like about the Israeli student at Harvard who was told by her professor to leave the classroom because her nationality made others uncomfortable, about the Jewish undergrad at Harvard who was spat on for wearing a kippah, about the physical assault against a Jewish student at Harvard Business School.
By the way, the assailant is actually being honored by a department at Harvard Law School in two weeks, Ibraham. He’s on the Harvard Law Review, a position once occupied by Barack Obama.
I could tell you about the employee who vandalized our hostage posters, writing on Kafir Bibas, who’s the 9-month-old Jewish hostage who was killed in captivity. He wrote, “His head is still on, where is the evidence?” He wrote on Noa Argamani, who is another Jewish hostage, that “Jews are best friends with Jeffrey Epstein.” He then challenged me to debate him in a secluded underpass as to whether Jews orchestrated 9/11. And then posted a video of him waving a machete with a picture of my face saying he’s “coming after the Zionist mafia,” he’s “coming after more than blood,” and he wants to fight.
“I wrote to Harvard dozens of times inquiring about this individual’s employment status, and to this day, they’ve never once responded to me,” Kestenbaum added.
But “the most pernicious, nefarious aspect of anti-Semitism at Harvard,” the PragerU contributor said, is that after being harassed for being Jewish for weeks on campus, his tormentors were rewarded by the university.
Kestenbaum explained:
For three and a half weeks, every single time I — a visibly Jewish student — walked to class, cut through Harvard’s campus, went on Harvard’s yard, fellow classmates of mine, self-described safety marshals, they would put on these bright yellow safety vests, they would tell us where we can or can’t walk on campus. And when they would see me approaching, they would take out their phone and start recording me, and start following me. And I would ask them, “Why?” I would ask them to stop, they never responded.
We told the president of the university that Jewish students were being followed on their way to class and recorded. And, in fact, the National Lawyers Guild — which is a terrible organization — the last week of the encampments, they gave the safety marshals notepads so they could write down which room the “Zionist agitators” were learning in.
And not only did the president of the university, Alan Garber, never respond to our emails, he actually told the encampment leaders, “If you agree to pack up your tents, we will allow you to meet with the Harvard Management Corporation” — which oversees Harvard’s $50 billion endowment — “to discuss divestment from Israel.” “If you agree to pack up your tents, we will allow you to meet with senior Harvard faculty to discuss the establishment of a Palestinian study center.”
And of the hundreds of students and professors who took part in the encampments — in flagrant violation of internal Harvard policy and arguably federal law — none of them have been suspended or expelled.
“You know how many times I’ve been able to meet with the Management Corporation or senior Harvard faculty or the president? Zero,” Kestenbaum said.
“But if you call for an Intifada loud enough, and if you follow Jews on their way to class long enough, and if you vandalize enough property, you will be given a seat at the table,” he added.
The PragerU contributor went on to assert, “It is a no-brainer that an institution that capitulates to the dumbest and worst and most radical elements — not just of our campus, but of our society — that the American taxpayers should not be footing that bill.”
Kestenbaum also noted that Harvard “is an institution that already has billions and billions of dollars.”
“This is an elitist corporation,” Kestenbaum declared. “And I find it remarkable that the far left — that I used to be part of — they have made a martyr of Harvard University. It just shows the level of Trump derangement syndrome.”
Watch Kestenbaum’s PragerU video here:
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Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
