The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

“Harvard Derangement Syndrome” is the headline that the New York Times put over a 4,000-word article by Steven Pinker that it recently published. Pinker’s point is that “the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.”

Yet if anyone has “become unhinged,” it is Pinker and his editors at the Times, who look silly in their eagerness to minimize Harvard’s antisemitism problem. Pinker calls it Harvard’s “alleged antisemitism,” which gives you a flavor of just how detached from reality the overall article is.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is a White House Memo in the Times from Maggie Haberman: “On substance, there are several Republicans and Democrats who share Mr. Trump’s view that Harvard and other major colleges are long overdue in addressing cultural issues. They welcome a focus on the antisemitism that was on display at some of the campus protests against Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.” Haberman writes antisemitism, not “alleged antisemitism.”

Here is a staff editorial in the New York Times: “some universities have failed to stand up to antisemitism.” Not “alleged antisemitism.”

Here is an email to the Harvard community from Harvard’s own president, Alan Garber, about a cartoon posted to social media by student and faculty anti-Israel groups: “The Antisemitic Cartoon.” Not “allegedly antisemitic.” Garber called it “flagrantly antisemitic.” The image was of a hand with a star of David and a dollar sign holding nooses around the necks of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Ali.

Pinker goes on to write, “though the 300-page antisemitism report reviews every instance it could find in the past century, down to the last graffito and social media post, it cited no expressions of a goal to ‘destroy the Jews,’ let alone signs that it was the ‘dominant view on campus.’”

The antisemitism report was extensive, but it made no pretense of being either exhaustive or comprehensive. And even so, Pinker’s straw-man standard of a publicly expressed goal to destroy the Jews being the dominant view on campus is ridiculous. There were student groups cheering on the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas as a justified act of liberation and resistance. There were mobs chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “intifadah, intifadah, globalize the intifadah.” What does Pinker imagine is going to happen to the Jews in such a scenario? If he thinks Hamas is going to let the Jews live in peace, he’s deluding himself. The reason that members of Congress were asking then-Harvard president Claudine Gay questions about whether it was acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews on the Harvard campus wasn’t that the members of Congress were fantasizing, it was that the Jewish students at Harvard at the time and their allies perceived it as an ongoing problem.

Pinker also writes, “I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members.”

Did Pinker not see the cartoon that Garber called “flagrantly antisemitic”? Did he not attend the Commencement last year when the speaker and honorary degree recipient “delivered off-the-cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power,” according to the report of Harvard’s own task force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, which described them as “seemingly antisemitic remarks”? Does he not read the Crimson or watch social media accounts of protests with students changing slogans such as “We don’t want no Zionists here?” If Pinker really hasn’t experienced any antisemitism, he must not get out much.

And anyway, what kind of allyship is this by Pinker to students, faculty, and staff who have been targeted by antisemitism? After a spate of campus rapes, would the Times publish a piece from a professor who feels an appropriate response is asserting, I have taught on this campus for twenty years and have never once been raped?

Writing in National Review, Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center observes, “Pinker is underplaying the problems.” Kurtz sure has that correct.

Pinker teaches psychology, so he’s an expert. But it may not be only Harvard’s critics suffering from what Pinker calls “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.” Professor Pinker seems to have come down with a variant of it himself—a variety that manifests itself by writing New York Times opinion pieces that minimize genuine problems. That doesn’t help improve the situation for those Harvard Jews who have been less lucky than Pinker or who are more perceptive than he is in understanding what is happening around them.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. He writes frequently at TheEditors.com. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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