During yesterday’s meeting of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), some of my Harvard colleagues argued that antisemitism does not exist at Harvard university because they do not see it. Their argument continued to say that Harvard’s president Alan Garber is Jewish, and so how could there be apparent antisemitism?
As it turns out, in May 2024 Garber himself was the target of encampment protesters on the Harvard campus, who made an antisemitic drawing of him with horns and a tail sitting on a toilet, with the caption: “Alan Garbage funds genocide.” This was only several months after Garber issued a letter about another cartoon, in which he wrote: “A few groups purporting to speak on behalf of Harvard affiliates recently circulated a flagrantly antisemitic cartoon in a post on social media channels. The cartoon, included in a longer post, depicted what appeared to be an Arab man and a Black man with nooses around their necks. The nooses are held by a hand imprinted with the Star of David, and a dollar sign appears in the middle of the star… Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us…We must approach one another with compassion, open minds, and mutual respect, our discourse grounded in facts and supported by reasoned argument.”
Two days ago, a White House task force announced that it is reviewing 8.7 billion dollars in multi-year grant commitments and 255.6 million dollars in contracts between Harvard, its affiliates and the federal government, because the university had allowed antisemitism to run unchecked on campus.
Members of Harvard’s higher administration, under the leadership of Alan Garber, are doing their best to cope with these challenging circumstances. But Harvard faculty in denial of antisemitism and in favor of combat with opposing views will attract retribution by the White House and ultimately bring Harvard to a devastating financial outcome. The fundamental question is whether the rest of us on the Harvard campus, including the young students and postdocs, deserve this outcome? The devastating circumstances appear as inevitable as a perfect storm.
In 1935, my grandfather, Albert Loeb, faced an even more dramatic storm in Nazi Germany. The denial then was by his family members. Albert left Germany to start a farm in what became Israel because he recognized the risk to Jews from the Nazi party. However, 65 members of his family chose to stay in Germany. They promised to leave in the last train, if necessary. They indeed followed through on their promise, but the last train led to concentration camps where they were killed in gas chambers. Despite Albert’s patriotic loyalty to Germany, he recognized the risks. Fast forward ninety years, and you can find faculty and students at Harvard University arguing in support of a terrorist organization whose declared goal is to kill as many Jews as possible in the land that my grandfather escaped to as a “safe haven” from the Nazis. What would Albert say to his grandson, Avi, who is named after him, a Harvard faculty member for 32 years who regarded the university as a “safe haven” from the dangerous middle east where he was born as a result of Albert’s move from Nazi Germany?
To my dismay, I have no access to materials that would allow me to train an AI avatar in the image of my grandfather and provide me with advice on this matter.
As a Jewish theoretical physicist, I can only close my eyes and wish to board a spacecraft that will bring me close to the speed of light, so that in my rest frame — antisemitism will go away instantly as if it never existed. The physical requirements are not impossible to accomplish based on physics as we know it. It takes only one year to approach the speed of light with an acceleration of 1-gee or 9.8 meters per second squared, the gravity we feel on Earth’s surface. NASA scientists recently studied mice on the International Space Station and found that their bone density was severely damaged by microgravity. Accelerating at 1-gee would avoid that health risk because the back of a spacecraft accelerating at 1-gee would feel just like Earth’s surface.
Like my grandfather, the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein also escaped Nazi Germany and found a safe haven at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. As it happened, I became a five-year fellow at the same place three decades after Einstein died.
Since the speed of light is constant in Einstein’s Special Relativity, time progresses more slowly for a moving observer. Antisemitic storms on Earth pass very quickly for passengers of a spacecraft moving close to the speed of light. With a proper spacecraft, one could plan a long enough journey to avoid the current antisemitic culture. In that case, one may be able to re-establish a more intelligent civilization from scratch upon returning to the new reality on Earth. This is far better than settling on Mars, which lacks an atmosphere and where the surface temperature varies by hundreds of degrees between day and night.
Traveling at the speed limit of photons that are returned by a mirror a million light-years away, Earth would appear older by two million years but there would be no aging whatsoever in the travelers’ frame. Reaching that speed limit is a truly safe haven from the troubles of Earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
