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Harvard extends fellowship offer to leading Israel critic Ken Roth after weeks of controversy
(JTA) – Harvard University will extend a fellowship offer to former Human Rights Watch Director Ken Roth after previously rejecting him over his past comments on Israel, capping weeks of controversy that ensnared the Ivy League school in a global debate about academic freedom and criticism of Israel.
In an open letter Thursday, Harvard Kennedy School dean Douglas Elmendorf said his previous decision not to offer the fellowship to Roth had been an “error,” and that “the broader faculty input I have now sought and received has persuaded me that my decision was not the best one for the School.”
The school’s Carr Center for Human Rights had been in talks with Roth to take a fellowship shortly after he resigned from his position as Human Rights Watch’s director last year. Roth had held the role since 1993. Elmendorf initially vetoed the Carr Center’s decision to offer Roth the fellowship, and an affiliated professor told The Nation, the progressive magazine, that she had been told Roth’s “anti-Israel bias” was the reason.
Human Rights Watch tracks human rights abuses around the world. Roth’s critics — including Human Rights Watch’s Jewish co-founder, Robert Bernstein — alleged that the group was spending a disproportionate amount of its time and resources on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under his leadership. A year before Roth left, the organization released a landmark report condemning Israel as an “apartheid” state for the first time.
Roth, whose father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, also frequently tweets criticism of Israel that his critics say sometimes veers into antisemitism.
The report in The Nation, and Roth’s own account of the incident in The Guardian, set off a firestorm as the Harvard community, alongside pro-Palestinian groups and academic free-speech organizations, strongly opposed the school’s decision and called on it to reverse course.
“Withholding Roth’s participation in a human rights program due to his own staunch critiques of human rights abuses by governments worldwide raises serious questions about the credibility of the Harvard program itself,” PEN America said in a statement. The group’s CEO was an executive at HRW under Roth.
More than 1,000 Harvard students, faculty and alumni signed an open letter calling for Elmendorf’s resignation.
Meanwhile, some pro-Israel figures, including an executive at Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston and a student activist at Harvard, had defended the dean’s decision to turn down Roth.
In one notable comment, Lawrence Summers, the Jewish former Harvard president and former U.S. treasury secretary with strongly pro-Israel views, also criticized the school’s decision.
“I loathe Ken Roth’s views on Israel and think some of his statements border on antisemitic,” Summers wrote in a series of tweets. But, he added, “preventing a human rights center from having the fmr head of a leading human rights center as a visiting fellow on grounds of the person’s views/modes of expression is not consistent w/profound commitment to intellectual diversity that should be a bedrock value in universities.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, objected to another element of The Nation’s report. The story, Greenblatt said, “concocts a conspiracy theory” that the dean’s decision had been swayed by a number of Israeli donors to the Kennedy School.
“It’s a textbook case of classic antisemitism: It’s not the leadership of the Kennedy School that made this decision, oh no,” Greenblatt wrote in an op-ed. “It’s the powerful and monied Jewish elite that really influences things behind the scenes.”
Through a spokesperson, Elmendorf declined an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week. In his letter to the school Thursday, he said his decision on Roth “was based on my evaluation of his potential contributions to the School.”
In a statement Thursday responding to the decision, Roth seemed to indicate he would accept the fellowship offer. “I have long felt that the Carr Center, and the Kennedy School, would be a congenial place for me to work on the book that I am writing. I look forward to spending time there with colleagues and students,” he wrote.
But Roth continued to criticize Elmendorf and said “I remain worried about academic freedom… The problem of people penalized for criticizing Israel is not limited to me, and most scholars and students have no comparable capacity to mobilize public attention.”
NGO Monitor, an Israeli nonprofit that acts as a watchdog of Israel criticism among NGOs, condemned Harvard’s reversal.
“In 30 years as head of Human Rights Watch, Roth has consistently singled-out Israel uniquely for demonization and delegitimization, using numerous false and distorted claims. These campaigns contributed significantly to antisemitism, and added to the targeting of Jewish students on university campuses,” the group wrote in a statement on Thursday.
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The post Harvard extends fellowship offer to leading Israel critic Ken Roth after weeks of controversy appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Feds say Cisco likely failed to protect pro-Palestinian workers from harassment
(JTA) — Cisco Systems likely violated the civil rights of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees, a federal agency has found, after employees were subjected to harassing messages — some of them posted by employees in an internal forum called the Connected Jewish Network.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined in June that there was “reasonable cause to believe” Cisco subjected the employees to a hostile work environment based on their national origin, religion or association in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The determination follows on media reports and an EEOC probe into an ugly climate at the tech company following the Oct. 7, 2023, deadly attacks by Hamas on southern Israel. Pro-Palestinian employees called on the company to end its business dealings with Israel, while Jewish employees said the company had failed to protect them from harassment by pro-Palestinian employees.
The EEOC case, however, turned in part on messages shared in the internal Connected Jewish Network forum. A complaint filed by Legal Aid at Work, which represented the Muslim and pro-Palestinian employees, said employees on the Jewish forum had “repeatedly glorified violence, joked about sending people to their deaths” and “labeled Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as murderous, violent, terrorists.”
“This is a massive multinational corporation with all the resources in the world and they couldn’t get it right,” Christopher Ho, a director at Legal Aid at Work, told the Guardian, which reported on the EEOC finding last month. “Thankfully the EEOC did.”
Ho said Cisco had “at best failed to take their harassment seriously” and through its inaction had sent “the implicit message that its pro-Palestinian employees were unworthy of protection.”
The letter is not a binding ruling, and both sides said the EEOC has indicated it will not sue. The finding could nonetheless strengthen employees’ cases if they pursue their own lawsuits. The employees are considering collective and individual litigation, according to media reports.
The case examines the period after a group of mostly Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees called Bridge to Humanity circulated an open letter urging Cisco to end its business dealings with the Israeli military. More than 1,700 employees signed the letter. The employees said they were subsequently subjected to racist and Islamophobic harassment.
In August 2024, employees — including some concerned Jewish employees — filed a 76-page ethics complaint accusing more than a dozen colleagues of creating a hostile work environment through posts on the Connected Jewish Network, which was visible to all company employees, according to the Guardian.
The episode was not one-sided. Wired magazine, in a 2024 investigation into the dispute, reported that some Jewish Cisco employees also believed the company had failed to protect them from harassment by pro-Palestinian employees. One former employee told the magazine that Cisco leadership could have done more to “reduce the mess across the board.”
Legal Aid at Work believes this is the first EEOC finding against a major tech company involving discrimination against workers engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, the EEOC has made combating workplace antisemitism a major policy and enforcement priority, with scrutiny on academia and the private sector increasing under the Trump administration.
Cisco has disputed the EEOC’s determination, saying it had “thoroughly investigated all concerns and took appropriate action.” The company previously said it had removed some comments, issued discipline warnings and provided coaching to multiple employees.
The post Feds say Cisco likely failed to protect pro-Palestinian workers from harassment appeared first on The Forward.
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Mahmoud Khalil sues Columbia University citing ‘hostile environment’ for pro-Palestinian students
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University alum who was detained by the Trump administration last year, is suing his alma mater along with an Israeli dean of the school he attended for facilitating a “hostile environment” for pro-Palestinian students.
Khalil became a national symbol of the campus pro-Palestinian protest movement when he was detained in March 2025 after the government accused him of being aligned with terrorists. On Monday, he filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court accusing the school of engaging in months-long “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of pro-Palestinian students on campus, including at the hands of right-wing pro-Israel groups.
He contends that Columbia’s alleged indifference ultimately helped to lead to his 104-day detention by federal immigration authorities, during which he missed the birth of his first child, before being released after a federal judge ruled his detainment was likely unconstitutional. He is joined in the suit by members of the School of International and Public Affairs Palestine Working Group, a pro-Palestinian student group on campus.
“Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students,” Khalil told reporters at a press conference in New York on Monday.
SIPA’s Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo speaks during a book talk for Fareed Zakaria’s new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present” at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on April 3, 2024 in New York City. (Shahar Azran/Getty Images)
In addition to the university, the suit also names Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, who is Israeli-American, as a defendant. The complaint says that Yahi-Milo had unfairly accused Khalil, while a student in the school, of antisemitism and harassment.
In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Columbia representatives defended Yarhi-Milo in general terms.
“Throughout her time at Columbia and during her service as dean, Dean Yarhi-Milo has worked with and supported students of all backgrounds, including our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students,” the statement reads. “The University is grateful for her tireless efforts on behalf of our students and her commitment to a campus free of discrimination and harassment.”
Columbia representatives declined to comment further on the lawsuit but said that “creating a campus environment where every member of our community feels welcome, supported, and safe is fundamental to who we are as a university. It is also a responsibility we take seriously.”
A leading figure of the encampment movement that began at Columbia before spreading to schools across the country, Khalil was the first pro-Palestinian student protest leader to be detained by the Trump administration and spent months in an immigrant detention center despite holding a green card.
In the months since a federal judge ordered his release, Khalil has filed a number of lawsuits, including against pro-Israel groups that he said “conspired” with the government to target him. He has also sued Columbia before, for disclosing student records as part of a congressional investigation.
Khalil’s latest lawsuit against Columbia claims the school violated Title VI protections for him and his fellow plaintiffs based on their ethnic identity, national origin or “affiliation with Palestine.” The lawsuit invokes the same federal civil rights law that Jewish and Israeli students have used in discrimination claims against universities, some of which have resulted in settlements.
Columbia itself signed a controversial agreement with the Trump administration last year to resolve federal civil rights investigations, paying $221 million and agreeing to a number of concessions in order to free up hundreds of millions in federal funding. During his press conference Monday, Khalil called such settlements “disgraceful.”
The suit notes that, as a student, Khalil called Yarhi-Milo “genocidal” in a message to fellow students. The suit then describes a subsequent internal university investigation into Khalil as “unfounded and retaliatory,” and claims the school “repeatedly launched meritless allegations of antisemitism against Mr. Khalil” prior to his federal detention.
During the press conference, Khalil accused Yahi-Milo of being someone who “weaponizes her identity to shield herself from legitimate concerns and criticism.” Khalil added, “Her priority has never been her students, me and my fellow students here. Her priority has always been Israel.”
The lawsuit’s examples of indifference include a claim that Columbia failed to intervene when a right-wing group, Accuracy in Media, labeled some of the members of Palestine Working Group as “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites” in messages on the side of trucks driven near campus for months after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. The group had targeted pro-Palestinian students in a similar fashion at several campuses.
Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia who is Jewish, spoke at the press conference in support of Khalil, whom he called a friend. “We all see how the university’s anti-Palestinian racism has directly endangered its students,” said Howley, who wore a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice hat and a “Not In Our Name” shirt. “I won’t be wasting any more time on town halls or listening sessions or imagining anything.”
In a statement to JTA, Accuracy in Media president Adam Guillette said his group “uses publicly available information, and we are steadfastly opposed to doxxing. We pledge to continue delivering accountability to pro-Hamas radicals across the country.”
The post Mahmoud Khalil sues Columbia University citing ‘hostile environment’ for pro-Palestinian students appeared first on The Forward.
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Ed Sheeran says it wasn’t his call to drop Macklemore over ‘Free Palestine’ remarks
(JTA) —
Pop superstar Ed Sheeran said he wasn’t behind his tour’s recent decision to drop opening act Macklemore following the rapper’s recent pro-Palestinian remarks at a stadium show.
“I am not complicit,” Sheeran wrote in a statement on Instagram Tuesday, saying that Macklemore leaving the tour “was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.” These were his first public words on the controversy that has gathered steam over the last 24 hours.
Hours after Sheeran’s comments, three of his other supporting acts announced they would be leaving his tour. All three acts — Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Finneas — posted pro-Palestinian solidarity statements to Instagram in their announcements.
Sheeran’s own note added, “I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” The British singer-songwriter wrote that he had been “involved in direct talks” between Robert Kraft and various promoters “to try and find a mutual resolution for all.”
Kraft, the Jewish and pro-Israel billionaire who owns one of the stadiums where Sheeran and Macklemore had been scheduled to play, said on Monday that he had told Sheeran’s team that Macklemore wouldn’t be allowed to perform there.
In his own statement to JTA, Kraft had said that Macklemore’s recent performance at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, at which the rapper accused Israel of genocide and broadcast images from Gaza, “has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.” Pop star Pink, who is Jewish, also criticized Macklemore following the performance.
Sheeran didn’t mention Jews in his statement, but noted, “I have always used my platform and music to bring people from all backgrounds and cultures together and this won’t ever change.”
US rapper, singer, dancer and DJ, Benjamin Haggerty, known as Macklemore, performs at the Goldencoast Rap Festival in Corcelles-les-Monts, near Dijon, central-eastern France, on August 30, 2026. (Arnaud Finistre / AFP via Getty Images)
He also had some veiled criticism of his tourmate’s methods. “Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum,” Sheeran wrote. “I respect Macklemore’s strength of purpose to stand up for what he believes. However, there is room for multiple approaches to the same end: peace… If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change.”
The other acts who announced they were leaving Sheeran’s tour didn’t agree. Some had strong words for Kraft and Zionism.
“As Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation,” Rowe wrote in his own statement. “I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children.”
“It’s important that everyone knows that the real enemy is the zionist lobby,” Beoga, also an Irish act, wrote in the band’s own statement. “Research how much Robert Kraft has done to fight the BDS movement. That will give you a sense of what we’ve all been up against.”
In a shorter statement, Finneas said, “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.” He added, “I stand with Palestine and its people.”
The Israeli-American Council, which organized a boycott against Macklemore following his New Jersey show, criticized Sheeran from the other direction in a new statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“It’s time to take responsibility for giving a stage to antisemitic messaging,” the IAC said, of Sheeran. “This isn’t just ‘criticism of Israel.’ It’s a message that crosses the line between legitimate political criticism and antisemitism. This is Ed Sheeran’s stage, it’s the tour that carries his name — and so the responsibility for what happens on it is his too.”
The post Ed Sheeran says it wasn’t his call to drop Macklemore over ‘Free Palestine’ remarks appeared first on The Forward.
