Dear Harvard Ethicist

Dear Harvard Ethicist,

Should I let go of my [Black/Muslim/Republican/Hindu/French/Wiccan] friends?

I am an alumna of Harvard Law School. I read with a mixture of fury and dismay. The Crimson’s Nov. 5, 2025 “Dear Ethicist” column responding to the question, “Should I let go of my Zionist friends?” It is a question that deserves just as little validation and copy space as the equivalent statement posited above. Its premise is prima facie discriminatory and racist. Obliging it with a response unethically validates it as a query worthy of examination.

Ethicist, would you have written a column in response to a question asking whether a student should dismiss his Christian friends for believing in the divinity of Christ, a central tenet of the religion? Would you have responded to a student asking whether it is ethical to reject one’s African American friends based on the amount of melatonin in their skin? Would you have expended energy lending credence to a question of whether a student should dismiss her friends for being Ukrainians who support Ukraine?

I have used my law degree to engage in a career in ethics and compliance. But one does not need to be an expert in ethics to recognize the inherently unethical nature of this query and your choice to lend it oxygen. You very well know that you would never publish a response to the question of whether someone should reject their Palestinian friends qua-Palestinians. You would have passed over any such question and chosen a different submission. Your lack of ethics extended to the content of your response, in which you made the determination that Zionists are responsible for committing a genocide based on discredited figures and in the knowledge that no court has found this to be the case.

The fact that a non-Zionist Jewish student posed the question does not render it any less offensive or immoral. It only serves to demonstrate the peer pressure Jewish youth face in Harvard’s current climate to reject key aspects of their own identity and their own people in order to feel accepted and loved. Unfortunately for these students, they will learn the hard way that jettisoning their identity and their Jewish friends to please Jew-haters only renders them more contemptible to the antisemites whose approbation they foolishly crave and will never receive.

I conclude by asking you a few non-facetious questions. How do you ethically justify lending credence to the rejection and isolation of fellow students based on a characteristic held by at least 85 percent of people who identify as Jewish? How do you engage in an ethical discussion that offers potential validation for ostracizing the vast majority of Jews on campus and thereby breathes life into the antisemitism that has raged at Harvard for two years? Is it ethically responsible to entertain and thereby validate a line of thinking that would socially sideline an already beleaguered group of students? If so-called “ethicists” at Harvard University are willing to entertain the notion of rejecting the company and social acceptance of Jewish people based on key tenets of their identity, what does that say about Harvard’s ethical culture and the future of Jewish students in its halls?

Ellen Ginsberg Simon, HLS 2005