HOSTAGE PARENTS, HARVARD ALUM ACTIVIST ADDRESS REPUBLICAN CONVENTION:
Shabbos Kestenbaum introduced himself as a past Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) supporter and lifelong Democrat, who has seen it as “my party” since registering at 18 . He still received some of the largest standing ovations Wednesday evening at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The proud Orthodox Jew and first-generation American, who is “the proud plaintiff suing Harvard University for its failure to combat antisemitism,” recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
The Democratic Party “has become ideologically poisoned, and it is this poison, it is this corruption, that is infecting far too many young Americans,” he told the crowd. “Far left antisemitic extremism has no virtue, and the radicalism on our campuses and on our streets has no moral legitimacy.”
Kestenbaum, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of Harvard since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel, told JNS that the Trump campaign contacted him a few weeks ago. It asked if he would discuss his experiences and “how we’ve been really disappointed in the far left of the Democratic Party and the inability of the Democratic Party to stand strongly with the crucial ally in the Middle East, the State of Israel.”
Channeling a famous quote from Ronald Reagan, Kestenbaum told JNS, “I did not abandon the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party abandoned me, and I want to work from within.”
“I want to fix it, but I also recognize that in the short term, there are a lot of problems in my party,” he added.
‘Sick and tired’
At Harvard, Kestenbaum told the packed convention audience at the Fiserv Forum on Wednesday night, he came to study religion and found “not theology but a contempt for it.”
Within 24 hours of 1,200 Israeli and U.S. flags being installed on campus in Cambridge, Mass., the memorial for the victims on Oct. 7 was vandalized, he told the audience.
Related: From Kestenbaum at Tablet: Being a Jew at Harvard is way worse than you think: Harvard’s Golden Age Turns to Mud.