Elise Stefanik’s vendetta against Harvard isn’t about antisemitism; it’s political — and personal
In a recent statement, Elise Stefanik, the third most powerful Republican in the US House of Representatives, broadened her frontal attack on Harvard University by decrying the appointment of professor Derek Penslar as cochair of the university’s Antisemitism Task Force. She condemned his appointment because Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, she claimed, is
“known for his despicable antisemitic views and statements.”
Stefanik has been on a vendetta against Harvard since she was ousted from an advisory committee of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics for defending former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud in 2020. In reality, she is more interested in waging a cultural battle against academia than fighting antisemitism.
Stefanik has been joined not only by some of the usual suspects, like editorialists in The Wall Street Journal and hedge fund billionaires, but also by former Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Abraham Foxman, the former director of the Anti-Defamation League. Some critics have absurdly accused Penslar of helping “make the world safe for antisemitism” or misinterpreted his scholarship to suggest his views are defamatory to Israel and the Jewish people.
None of these detractors appear to have heard that the American Academy for Jewish Research — the most prestigious body of Jewish studies scholars in the country — endorsed the choice of Penslar, stating it is “precisely this kind of expertise that is needed in the current moment.” So too did the Association of Israel Studies, which recently recognized him with a lifetime achievement award.
These are the facts: Penslar is recognized as one of the finest historians of Jews in the world today, especially in the history of Zionism and Israel. His primary antisemitic “sin,” according to his prominent critics, was to join hundreds of colleagues on a petition in August called “The Elephant in the Room,” which called for the pro-democracy protests against the Netanyahu government to stop ignoring Israel’s failure to address the Palestinian issue in a just manner. In particular, critics object to its use of the claim, quoting Israeli legal experts and most major human rights groups, that Palestinians
in the West Bank “live under a regime of apartheid.” However, it did not endorse this politically wrought label on Israel itself. Using the label on Israel could suggest that the entire enterprise is illegitimate (like the apartheid regime in South Africa).
The absurdity of the attacks on Penslar is underlined by the fact that the primary evidence against him, the “Elephant in the Room,” was endorsed by almost 3,000 signatories, among whom are many of the best scholars in the field of Jewish studies and Holocaust studies in the United States, Israel, and around the world. Calling all of them “antisemitic” would be a sign of madness in any other circumstance apart from the political assault on Harvard and higher education.
Ironically, the same cannot be said about some of Penslar’s accusers. Stefanik is a prime example. Less than two years ago, in May 2022, this supposed crusader against antisemitism at Harvard was happily echoing, as The New York Times reported, white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which used to be seen as the ne plus ultra of what used to be understood as antisemitism. If anyone is pandering to antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, it is, by all reports, Stefanik — the person who is at the center now of rooting out “antisemites” like Penslar. Stefanik symbolizes how concepts of antisemitism have been turned on their head.
This is precisely why there needs to be the space of “intellectual honesty” that the university has traditionally afforded: to point out such perversion of concepts, how what is not antisemitic is defamatorily called antisemitic, and how what actually is antisemitic is covered up. Scholars such as Penslar have only been doing their job, insisting on calling out hypocrisy and false myths. As academics should, they strive to empower truth. That is what makes them such tempting targets for the Stefaniks of this world, and why this space, the independence of academe, needs to be defended from this onslaught of those rushing to silence freedom of thought on campus.
We do not have to defend the conclusions of this particular scholar now in the firing line. Penslar’s own record of excellence and insight can do that. But we must defend the process of evidence-based, logical argumentation and reasonable interpretation of primary texts that have gone through the rigor of peer review and publication. Even scholars — and laymen — who vehemently disagree with Penslar’s conclusions should want to defend the process by which they, too, transmit knowledge and demonstrate their expertise.
We are not simply affirming the value of expertise or academic freedom. It’s about setting ground rules for disagreement. Scholars may disagree with each other, or with Penslar, about the function of hatred or about a variety of political issues that have come to the fore since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Nonetheless, they should all agree that we transgress an important norm when we are intellectually dishonest and misrepresent scholarship in the course of expressing those disagreements.
If anyone is playing the destructive, exclusionary game of antisemitism, it is the Stefaniks of this world. It’s tragic that the opponents of antisemitism involved in this affair, who genuinely see themselves as defending Jews and Israel in their actions, cannot see the terrible danger of allying with such political forces. They would help destroy the very type of academic context that both encourages scholarship of the highest quality and honesty, like Penslar’s, and helps resist the ideological darkness that real antisemitism is part of. They are empowering the very forces they claim to be opposing.
For the sake of the survival of American higher education, and of America itself, as a beacon of enlightenment and freedom, they should cease.
Steven Beller is the author of “Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction.” Joshua Shanes is professor of Jewish studies and director of the Arnold Center for Israel Studies at the College of Charleston.