Some rip Harvard’s pick to lead bias panel
Choice for antisemitism task force criticized for saying worries overblown
Harvard University’s spring semester started Monday where its fall semester ended: with fierce debates about speech and antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, prolonging a period of upheaval that has spanned two seasons and two presidents.
In the latest flare up, some alumni, Jewish advocacy groups, and conservative media figures are denouncing interim Harvard president Alan Garber’s choice of a Harvard professor of Jewish history to lead a new task force focused on combating antisemitism.
The critics, including former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, contend that Derek Penslar, a leading scholar of Zionism, was an inappropriate choice to lead the task force because of his criticism of Israel, his opposition to a frequently used but disputed definition of antisemitism, and his view that some claims about the extent of antisemitism at Harvard have been overblown.
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who helped mobilize opposition to former Harvard president Claudine Gay, joined the chorus of critics with a social media post. Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, called Penslar’s selection “absolutely inexcusable.”
Penslar pushed back Monday. He said in a statement that he views the task force as “an important opportunity to determine the nature and extent of antisemitism and more subtle forms of social exclusion that affect Jewish students at Harvard. Only with this information in hand can Harvard implement effective policies that will improve Jewish student life on campus.”
Reports of antisemitism at Harvard, and
other universities, have multiplied in recent months since the Oct. 7 attack, which included the murder of families in their homes, widespread rape, and the kidnapping of about 250 people, including children.
Students returned to campus Monday and found posters about hostages taken by Hamas defaced, Penslar and others said.
One poster, showing a kidnapped baby, had the words “Israel did 9/11” scrawled over the baby’s face, according to a photo seen by the Globe.
Students protesting Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 24,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, have sometimes used controversial protest slogans some consider antisemitic.
Some Harvard students have also praised the attack in social media posts or invoked antisemitic tropes such as the idea that Jews control the media, according to public posts seen by the Globe. In addition, anonymous social media platforms have been riddled with bigotry, targeting Jews, as well as Muslims and Arabs, in recent months.
Garber announced a separate task force to address Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias.
Some high-profile instances of purported campus antisemitism have been sharply contested, including a physical confrontation between an Israeli student and pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Harvard Business School last October.
Penslar is one of several Jewish Harvard professors who have expressed concern about antisemitism, but also questioned the idea that it is now rampant on campus.
“It’s not a myth, but it’s been exaggerated,” Penslar said in a recent interview, before he was publicly named as the task force’s co-chair.
Penslar said that even before Oct. 7, some Jewish students with attachments to Israel had been “shunned” from “progressive political communities” at Harvard.
“Is that vicious antisemitism? No, but it’s a form of social exclusion and social pressure,” Penslar said.
Penslar is co-chairing the antisemitism task force with Raffaella Sadun, a professor of business administration. She didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.
Other Jewish campus leaders have pushed back against Penslar’s view. “At best, he’s simply misinformed,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, president of Harvard Chabad, a Jewish campus group. The idea that the problems for Jewish students are a matter of social isolation, rather than something “more nefarious is not the lived experience of the students,” he said.
A handful of Harvard graduate and law students filed a federal lawsuit against the university earlier this month, accusing the administration of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment on campus, which the suit describes as “severe and pervasive.”
“We really do feel vulnerable,” Shabbos Kestenbaum, a graduate student and the only named plaintiff in the suit, said in a recent interview. “We do feel that there can be attacks both verbally and physically and we’re incredibly . . . apprehensive about going back to campus on Monday, and at worst, we’re genuinely fearful.”
Summers, the former Harvard president, said he doesn’t doubt that Penslar is “a profound scholar of Zionism and a person of good will without a trace of personal antisemitism who cares deeply about Harvard.”
However, he wrote on social media, “I believe that given his record, he is unsuited to [be] leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious antisemitism problem at Harvard.”
Among the critics’ complaints is that Penslar signed an open letter last year, before the Oct. 7 attack, that said that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories had “yielded a regime of apartheid.”
The usage of the term apartheid, a reference to South Africa’s past system of racial segregation, to describe Israeli policies is bitterly contested. Some critics of Israel say it is an apt description of the political situation in the West Bank where Palestinians are subject to Israeli military justice and Israelis accused of wrongdoing are tried in civil courts. The Anti-Defamation League says “the label is inaccurate, offensive, and often used to delegitimize and denigrate Israel as a whole.”
Penslar, in an interview Monday, acknowledged the controversy over the term, but stood by its usage in some contexts.
“There are certain words like apartheid or settler colonialism that have become slogans used by supporters of Palestinians to delegitimize the state of Israel,” he said. “I do not see these words as delegitimizing Israel. I see them as understanding a state that is deeply troubled, a state that is deeply divided, deeply discriminatory, but a state that has every right to exist.”
Penslar added that Israel is “a country I care about deeply.”
Some Jewish alumni and students have been calling on Harvard to adopt a definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which some scholars, including Penslar, say is too broad and does not leave room for criticism of Israel.
According to that definition,“calling Israel racist or subjecting it to criticism not directed toward any other democratic country is antisemitic,” Penslar wrote in a recent essay in the Harvard Crimson. He said that other definitions of antisemitism “leave more room for criticism of Israel, and in that sense they are more conducive to the essential, though difficult, conversations happening within the Harvard community.”
Jacob Miller, a Harvard undergraduate and former student president of Harvard Hillel, a Jewish campus group, said that Penslar “is a great scholar,” but his “support for fringe definitions of antisemitism is an opportunity for improvement.”
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government, said in an interview that “there isn’t a lot of faculty debate about” Penslar being the right person to co-lead the antisemitism task force. Both his scholarship and temperament make him fit for the job, Levitsky added.
“The debate has been generated again from the outside by people with political objectives,” Levitsky added. “A university only works well . . . when we are free from outside political interference. I consider this to be a serious threat to academic freedom.”
Levitsky, like Penslar, believes that some accounts of resurgent antisemitism at Harvard have overstated the case.
Several professors of Jewish history at other universities applauded Penslar’s scholarship on Monday.
“If Derek Penslar, preeminent scholar of both antisemitism and the history of Israel, is not fit to lead a task force on antisemitism, nobody is,” said Kenneth Moss, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Chicago.
Former president Claudine Gay faced criticism that she was too slow to respond to resurgent antisemitism after the Hamas attack.
In a speech to Harvard Hillel weeks after the attack, Gay said, “The ancient specter of antisemitism, that persistent and corrosive hatred, has returned with renewed force.”
“For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presence,” she added. “No longer.”
She faced additional blowback, and calls for her resignation, when she offered legalistic answers at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s rules. She resigned on Jan. 2.