David Wolpe, once a visiting rabbi at Harvard’s Divinity school, says there’s no doubt about the school’s antisemitism
Harvard has simultaneously released its reports about antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, a prime example of trying to be prefectly balanced ideologically. I haven’t read either yet (they’re long!), but the links are below. What I have read about them suggests that neither is an “analysis” but merely a collection of anecdotes, and the recommendations of … Continue reading David Wolpe, once a visiting rabbi at Harvard’s Divinity school, says there’s no doubt about the school’s antisemitism
Harvard has simultaneously released its reports about antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, a prime example of trying to be prefectly balanced ideologically. I haven’t read either yet (they’re long!), but the links are below. What I have read about them suggests that neither is an “analysis” but merely a collection of anecdotes, and the recommendations of the two reports are conflicting (see below)
Rabbi David Wolpe, who spent the year of 2023-2024 as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, reports on the antisemitism he cncountered at Harvard. (He eventually resigned from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory committee because of his perceived pervasiveness of Jew hatred at the University.
But all rabbis, I am most willing to listen to Wolpe because he’s thoughtful and responsive, and even debated Christopher Hitchens, as you can see below (I’ve listened to this, and it’s worth watching). Of course I don’t accept any of Wolpe’s religious beliefs, but if you want to argue with a Jew about their faith, he’s the one to encounter. For one thing, his views about God and Judaism are sufficiently mushy that you find it hard to come to grips with them. (Hitchens, I think, took him apart.)
Here’s a section of Wolpe’s bio from Wikipedia:
David J. Wolpe (born September 19, 1958) is an American rabbi. He is Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi of Sinai Temple. He previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hunter College, and UCLA. Wolpe was named the most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek in 2012, and among the 500 most influential Angelinos in 2016 and 2018. Wolpe now serves as the Inaugural rabbinic fellow for the ADL,and a Senior Advisor for the Maimonides Fund. Wolpe resigned from an advisory group on antisemitism assembled by Harvard President Claudine Gay in December 2023 in response to what Wolpe characterized as a hostile environment to Jews at Harvard.
Wolpe wrote a scary report for the Free Press about his year at Harvard, and although you can dismiss the antisemitic anecdotes told by students because they’re students telling anecdotes, it’s not so easy to dismiss Wolpe’s own experiences. For one thing, he gives links. Of course he can’t recount anti-Palestinian anecdotes, but read the report below for yourself. Click on the title to read it, or find it archived here. I’ve put a link to both reports below.
I’ll just give some quotes about Wolpe’s experiences. He’s a good writer for a theologian/rabbi:
Let’s start the clock with what I saw in the year I was at Harvard as a visiting scholar.
I attended my first Jewish event at the Divinity School on the holiday of Sukkot in the fall of 2023. The ceremony began with a speaker reassuring us, “This is a safe space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists and those struggling with their Zionism.” In other words: not for me.
That happened one week before the attacks of October 7, 2023.
Hamas leaders have reportedly bragged that they have allies on campus. Who knows if they mean that literally or seriously? What I know, because I saw it myself, was that the Hamas massacre intensified hatred against Jews on an already hostile campus.
In posts on Sidechat, a campus social network, student comments ranged from “She looks as dumb as her nose is crooked” and “We got too many damn Jews in state supporting our economy” to far more sinister comments: “Decolonization is not a metaphor” (with Jewish blood dripping from the text). There were endless references to “Judeo-Nazis,” including by tutors in a student house, and swastikas made frequent appearances.
Students were insulted, shunned, harassed, and hounded in a hundred ways. An Israeli student was mobbed and assaulted at a “die-in” protest days after October 7. “Privilege trainings” for Jewish students were run by the university. Another student, a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, told me she was afraid to walk alone to her dorm room. Students were ghosted by longtime friends for expressing sympathy with Israel; one was told by friends it would hurt their careers to “associate with a Zionist.” Professors, in courses on Israel, removed all Israeli sources from the syllabus. Required reading in a Public Health course titled Settler Colonial Determinants on Health teaches that “Zionism manipulated Judaism as a religion to reinterpret history and redefine Jewishness in terms of ethnic belonging.”
So as anxious students flocked to my office, I was shocked but not surprised to see the hostility continue unabated. There was memorably a cartoon posted by a Harvard faculty group on Instagram showing a Jewish hand hanging an Egyptian and a black man—a retread of a cartoon from the 1960s that was condemned at the time by black leaders as antisemitic. This cartoon was, to quote the report, “circulated by groups of pro-Palestinian Harvard students, staff, and faculty on social media.” Faculty! That is Harvard in 2024.
. . . . Critically, the report also explains the ideological roots of the abuse. It explains that anti-colonialism has become the ideological battering ram to mobilize a diverse cult of anti-Western sentiments. The challenge to Zionism becomes a first step in turning disillusion with the West into a wholesale indictment of it. The old antisemitism of the Soviet Union had this double purpose as well—destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization. Harvard is not just a host for this worldview. It is the dominant view on campus.
I taught as a visiting scholar in Harvard Divinity School—which is singled out, as it should be—for special censure. The Religion and Public Life program became “a focal point for concerns about one-sidedness and the promotion of a specific political ideology under the guise of academic inquiry.” Religion and Public Life commenced a six-year program inquiring into Israel-Palestine (since that is the only issue) with no real instruction in Judaism, a Zionist perspective, or Palestinian terror. The only people invited to speak were either explicitly anti-Israel or Jewish professors on the very far left of the Israel debate.
. . . Save a discussion before October 7, 2023, on Zoom with a pastor about forgiveness in our traditions, not once did the Divinity School ask me to present anything. Not once. Meantime, the Religion and Public Life program, an integral part of the Divinity School, was a nonstop parade of anti-Israel speakers without rebuttal.
And some of Wolpe’s conclusions. This first part could also apply at the University of Chicago:
There was also a striking asymmetry of action: Zionist students did not camp out in Harvard Yard; they did not break into classrooms; they did not come with bullhorns (as I myself witnessed) into local restaurants and chant in Arabic, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” Their teaching assistants did not offer passes on exams to attend rallies, or attend rallies with them. They did not insist on wearing masks outdoors, so they could yell slogans with impunity. They did not continually yell slogans in the yard after they were understood to be eliminationist.
Another similarity is that the epicenter for antisemitism at Harvard was at, of all places, the Divinity School. Would you have expected that? I would have thought that the atmosphere of love would be greater there, but in fact the atmospher of Jew hate was predominant. This also seems to be true at the University of Chicago. And if this is true, then I expect Divinity Schools elsewhere in America might also be anti-semitic, aligning with “Social Justice” departments. I still don’t understand this phenomenon, and would be glad if readers explained it to me or at least took a guess. To Wolpe, it’s based on factors already in place in Divinity Schools, but he doesn’t explain why those factors are there:
These two reports should not have been issued in tandem; it is an example of “bothsidesism” on steroids.
The antisemitism report has some important recommendations on admission, encouraging a more ideologically pluralistic and tolerant student body, creating rules for protest, and offering ideas for building a genuinely diverse community.
But what the report offers no solution for is that there is a deep ideological commitment among much of the faculty—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—that is anti-Western, anti-Israel, and often antisemitic. The Islamophobia report mentions “donors” (read: Jewish donors) who influence policy, but the antisemitism report does not focus on millions flowing from places like Qatar. The confluence of Islamism, old-line Christian antisemitism, and hard progressive antagonism to the Western and Israel project produced a perfect storm in places like Harvard Divinity School. Without a vast unlearning—among the faculty, not just the students—all the reports in the world will not change the atmosphere on campus. We will only be spraying perfume on a sewer.
I agree that the two reports should not have been issued in tandem. I am eventually going to go through them both, but (and remember my pro-Jewish bias), I suspect that the atmosphere of anti-Semitism at Harvard was stronger than the atmosphere of anti-Palestinianism. (I do deplore the doxing of anti-Israel students by a truck adorned with videos, but that was not done by students or faculty at Harvard.) This dichotomy of atmospheres was certainly true at Chicago, where there was constant broadcast of Israel or Jew hatred from organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, but the Jewish students limited to themselves to anodyne banners saying things like, “Bring the hostages home.”
But of course I am biased, and you should take my sentiments, like those of Wolpe, with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, when even Harvard’s President said he encountered antisemitism at his school, you have to take that accusation seriously.
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This part comes from Greg Mayer. The comments are his and he provided the links.
President Garber’s announcement of both reports is here.
There’s a thread reader here on the antisemitism report.
Click on both reports’ titles to read them:
More from Greg:
As usual, Harvard Magazine provides a useful, non-administration perspective on Harvard’s actions:
