https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/speech-under-the-shadow-of-punishment
At Harvard’s graduation ceremony, more than a thousand people participated in a mass walkout and marched to a “People’s Commencement” off campus. Afterward, unease rippled across the stage, when Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist, stated that, for agreeing to be Harvard’s commencement speaker, she was “attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.” The Harvard Chabad rabbi Hirschy Zarchi confronted her when she finished, and then he walked off the stage because he believed that her comments were antisemitic. Looking out at graduates in black robes, I saw that the overwhelming majority had also donned color-coded stoles for identity groups to which they belonged. Many of them had participated in separate affinity ceremonies, for students who were Black, Asian, Latinx, Arab, Indigenous, disabled, first-generation or low income, and, for the first time this year, Jewish or veterans. They looked almost like representatives of rival armies, and I winced at Ressa’s final thought for the class of 2024: “Welcome to the battlefield.” ♦