Harvard Professor Gets Anti-Semitic Postcard in the Mail
Image by YouTube
Sanford Levinson, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, on Monday received a postcard full of anti-Semitic threats that referenced President-elect Donald Trump, according to reports in the Dallas Morning News and Boston Globe.
“Hey Sandy, you just got your kike ass kicked… We are gonna drain the swamp at Harvard Law School, Juden Raus,” the letter read, invoking the Trump slogan “drain the swamp” and the Nazi-era phrase “Jews out.”
Levinson, who holds a permanent appointment at the University of Texas in Austin, teaches constitutional law and has written articles about his field for the popular press.
He spoke out about the letter to the Boston Globe. “It certainly is as hostile as it could be. But I don’t know what to make of it,” he told the newspaper, noting that the letter appeared to have been mailed from the United Kingdom.
Levinson, who reported the incident to Harvard administration, linked the episode to Trump’s electoral victory, which has coincided with a spike in hate crimes.
“This is a level of anti-Semitic hostility that I have not seen before,” he said to the Globe. “I see it as a very regrettable data point about the extent to which Donald Trump — intentionally or not — has liberated a kind of discourse we haven’t seen in a long, long time.”
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
