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Many Jews criticized Harvard’s Oct. 7 response. Fewer are applauding President Claudine Gay’s resignation.
(JTA) — The pressure that built on Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to resign began after what many thought was a tepid campus response to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. It mounted following a disastrous congressional appearance in which she and two other university presidents gave lawyerly answers in response to grilling about antisemitism on campus.
But by the time Gay actually did resign this week — following a flurry of plagiarism allegations that drained her support — the antisemitism debate was relegated largely to the sidelines.
Instead, thanks to outside political actors — and deep-pocketed insiders with an array of ideological axes to grind — the resignation of Harvard’s first Black president took on wider significance than a campus dispute over antisemitism and free speech. As a result, Jewish concerns about antisemitism receded — or have been attached to other issues in ways that are already heightening Black-Jewish tensions and drafting Jews into ideological battles many never signed up for.
As a result, some Jewish groups appear to be laying low lest they get drawn into the discourse.
“We didn’t call for her head,” Laura Shaw Frank, the director of Contemporary Jewish Life at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “What we want is to create campus spaces that are secure and positive experiences for Jewish students and Jewish faculty and Jewish members of the community. We are under no illusion that a president is the only person who dictates campus culture.”
AJC did not issue a statement on Gay’s resignation. “That doesn’t mean we like what happened at the congressional hearing, which was absolutely horrible,” said Shaw Frank. “But the fact that there have been people who are calling for her resignation doesn’t mean that the entire Jewish people should be labeled as fighting for her resignation.”
Among the Jews seeking Gay’s ouster — and shaping the discourse around her presidency — was Harvard grad Bill Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who tied her tenure to the fight against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, whose most vocal opponents are conservatives who say DEI programs instill a rigid leftist ideology. In a lengthy post on X after Gay stepped down, Ackman said Havard’s DEI office expresses a philosophy that is the “root cause of antisemitism at Harvard.”
“This is the beginning of the end for D.E.I. in America’s institutions,” agreed the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who played a lead role in spreading the plagiarism allegations, in response to Gay’s resignation. In a Wall Street Journal essay Thursday, Rufo boasted about the “reputational, financial and political” campaign he orchestrated to “squeeze” Gay out.
Defenders of Gay in turn fired back against a campaign they saw as racist, sexist and whipped up by the anti-woke right. “So they’re using the guise of pretending that this is about concern over antisemitism, which is, of course, something that all of us should be concerned about. It’s really just furthering their propaganda campaign against racial equity,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who faced conservative attacks in a tenure battle at the University of North Carolina, told CNN.
Perhaps because the discourse around Gay had become so muddied — involving plagiarism, charges of misogyny and racism, conservative attacks on DEI, donor pressure, questionable leadership and antisemitism — many of the major Jewish groups were either silent or muted in the wake of her decision. One of the few statements forthrightly welcoming her resignation came from a group that didn’t exist before the war: the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, launched in November to fight what it called “a toxic culture on campus.”
“In her repeated failures to condemn calls for complete and utter obliteration of Jews, Claudine Gay tacitly encouraged those who sought to spread hate at Harvard, where many Jews no longer feel safe to study, identify, and fully participate in the Harvard community,” spokesperson Roni Brunn said in a statement.
The most important of the groups fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League, issued a terse statement alluding to the plagiarism charges, saying “leaders at the highest level are accountable to the highest standards. Whoever emerges to lead the university must embody the highest ideals of integrity and demonstrate moral clarity and total commitment to fight antisemitism with #ZeroTolerance in a way we have not fully seen at Harvard.” (The ADL declined a request for further comment.)
Harvard Hillel was similarly circumspect in its statement.
“The most important priority for Harvard Hillel is that our university is a safe and inclusive environment for Jewish students and for all students,” Getzel Davis, whose title at Hillel is campus rabbi, said in its statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the next president of Harvard and the rest of the senior University administration, to ensure that Jewish students are able to safely express their identities on our campus.”
Davis said Thursday he did not have time in his schedule for an interview.
A woman prays aloud for the Israeli hostages outside the Harvard Divinity School, Oct. 25, 2023. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Such groups may have had good reason to be cautious in claiming Gay’s resignation as a victory, especially when some defenders of Gay were accusing Harvard of submitting to pressure from powerful Jewish and pro-Israel alumni, including Ackman, investor Seth Klarman, businessman Len Blavatnik and Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
“How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — Ackman, Blum, Summers and others — push out the first Black woman president of Harvard!” wrote the African-American philosopher and presidential hopeful Cornel West, a former member of the Harvard faculty, on X.
West appeared to be referring to Edward J. Blum, a conservative Texas legal activist, and former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers. Both are Jewish. Blum’s nonprofit led a successful challenge to Harvard’s affirmative action policies earlier this year but Blum has not appeared to weigh in on Gay’s current woes. Summers had tweeted on Oct. 9 that he was “disillusioned and alienated” over Harvard’s response to Oct. 7 but also did not call for Gay to step down. When she did, he issued a statement saying he admired Gay “for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment.”
West’s statement went on to connect charges of racism with support for Israel. “This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable!” he wrote. “I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large!”
Conspiratorial sentiments like West’s — accusing wealthy pro-Israel donors of “dictating” both university and foreign policy — may not represent the Black mainstream. But even Black leaders who often ally with Jews and against antisemitism were disturbed that legitimate concerns about antisemitism and speech on campus morphed into a challenge to DEI and the credentials of the first Black president and only second woman president in Harvard’s history.
“We start with the conversation about how to protect Jewish students and end up in a conversation about an assault on programs that benefit Black and brown people,” Cornell William Brooks, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former president and CEO of the NAACP, said Wednesday on CNN. “It’s really about an attack on higher education, anti-DEI, and the reason we know that is because her critics spend more time talking about DEI and affirmative action than they talk about the legitimate concerns about antisemitism.”
A Jewish communal leader who asked not to be named because they wanted to protect their relationships with colleagues in the community said they had heard similar comments from Black allies. Like Brooks, such allies are wondering where the defense of Jewish students ends and the attack on DEI begins, and are asking if Jews are more interested in a conservative agenda than the fight against antisemitism.
As a result, many see signs of yet another clash between two groups with a history both of cooperation and deep tension.
“We already are seeing the backlash,” said Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history who directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. “With so many reasons for Jews and Blacks to work together, it is tragic to see these kinds of wedges driven between them.”
Amy Spitalnik, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said people of color who have been allied with Jews believe that antisemitism was “weaponized” to bring down Harvard’s first Black president.
“That doesn’t take away from the ways in which [Gay] needed to be held accountable for Harvard’s failures,” said Spitalnik, whose organization’s affiliated Jewish “community relations” councils often do interfaith and intergroup work. “Two things can be true at the same time: The congressional testimony that the presidents gave was horrendous and certainly was indicative of a larger failure on their part in terms of protecting their students. And there were extremists who exploited this situation in a way that doesn’t make any of us safer.”
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec.5, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Jeremy Burton, who as CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston has advocated for Jewish issues on Harvard’s campus, said the focus on Gay — by donors, outsiders, DEI critics and Jewish activists — is a “false context” for addressing antisemitism.
“She was president for about a month before Oct. 7, if you count her actual time in office on campus,” said Burton. “The problems at Harvard have been building for years, if not decades.” Burton cited reports of Israeli faculty and visiting students being harassed, Jewish students in certain departments not being welcomed if they are “insufficiently anti-Zionist” and professors investigated for hostility toward Jews and Israeli students.
In her brief term, Gay gave gave a speech at Harvard Hillel saying “Antisemitism has no place at Harvard,” and on Dec. 8 attended an interfaith vigil, organized by the Harvard Chaplains, including Rabbi Davis, grieving for all those killed on Oct. 7 and the subsequent war. The same day she also apologized for the pain she caused in her congressional testimony, saying she should have made clear that “calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
“That’s not to say that she didn’t make serious mistakes,” said Burton. “But her departure does nothing to get at the root causes on campus.”
At the same time, many are convinced that one of those root causes is DEI — or at least an interpretation that doesn’t make room for Jewish concerns.
“I think buzzwords like DEI are a little imprecise,“ Jacob Miller, a math major and the Harvard Hillel president, told Fox News Channel. “But I do think that it’s true that there is a double standard when it comes to antisemitic hate speech at Harvard. I do think Jews are looked upon as the oppressors and our history of being oppressed is ignored.”
Others are wondering if the prominent role played by Jewish and pro-Israel donors will give fodder to antisemites.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of labor, wrote in The Guardian that pressure brought by wealthy donors at Harvard and other schools was “an abuse of power.” He also warned about the optics of Jewish and pro-Israel donors wielding their wealth and influence on campuses.
“As a Jew, I also cannot help but worry that the actions of these donors — many of them Jewish, many from Wall Street — could fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose, based on the age-old stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world,” wrote Reich.
Ruth Wisse, who during and after her long tenure as a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard criticized what she sees as the university’s tilt to the left, says such concerns are misplaced. “Antisemitism has nothing to do with the Jews. Antisemitism has to do with the antisemites,” said Wisse, author of the 2007 book “Jews and Power.” “Jews should never go on the defensive when they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s a great moral error.”
Wisse said donors were only reacting to a “war against Israel” in academia, where Israel’s legitimacy is questioned and where “it’s being taken for granted that the Arabs and the Muslims could not accept the principle of coexistence.”
Gay’s critics, Wisse continued, “are not the ones who brought in DEI and they’re not the ones who brought in foul teachings to replace American teaching. When they act to try to improve the university, they act as Americans. And if we [Jews] have a special role now it’s because of the war against us.”
Wisse is famously conservative, but across the spectrum of Jewish opinion there has been an emerging consensus that since the war Jewish students feel under siege. The political storm swirling around Gay’s resignation, however, threatens to sweep away that consensus and force potential allies to take sides.
“Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” said Penslar, who describes himself as “left of center.” “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.”
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Ritchie Torres Announces Intent to Vote for Sanctions Against ICC, Citing Anti-Israel ‘Ideological Crusade’
US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) speaks during the House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, Sept. 30, 2021. Photo: Al Drago/Pool via REUTERS
US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) announced on Wednesday that he intends to vote in favor of imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
In statements posted on X/Twitter, Torres lambasted the ICC over its “weaponization of international law,” arguing that the Hague-based court has waged an ideological propaganda campaign against Israel and unfairly maligned Israeli leaders for “daring to defend” their country against terrorist groups.
“The ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants against the leadership of Israel represents the weaponization of international law at its most egregious,” Torres said. “The ICC has set a precedent for criminalizing self-defense: any country daring to defend itself against an enemy that exploits civilians as human shields will face persecution posing as prosecution.”
Torres accused the ICC of brushing aside Israel’s motives for prosecuting its war against the Hamas terrorist group. He also castigated the ICC as a “kangaroo court,” criticizing it for ignoring Hamas’s intentional use of the Palestinian people as human shields to maximize civilian casualties — a tactic employed by the terrorist group to tarnish Israel’s international reputation.
“The ICC ignores the cause and context of the war. Israel did not initiate the war. The war was imposed upon Israel by the unbridged barbarism of Hamas on Oct. 7 [of 2023],” Torres said. “Not only did Hamas wage war on Israel, causing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, it carefully constructed a battlefield designed to maximize the loss of civilian life. None of that context seems to matter to the kangaroo court of the ICC, which cannot let facts get in the way of its ideological crusade against the Jewish State. The ICC should be sanctioned not for enforcing the law but for distorting it beyond recognition.”
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, initially made his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation infuriated US and British leaders, according to Reuters, which reported that the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Following the official issuing of arrest warrants in November, a slew of US lawmakers vowed to seek retribution against the ICC after President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
“These allegations have been refuted by the US government,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), Trump’s pick to serve as White Hous national security adviser in the incoming administration, wrote on X. “Israel has lawfully defended its people & borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January.”
Incoming US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has also threatened to push legislation imposing sanctions on the ICC if it does not halt its efforts to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. However, Hamas, which rules Gaza, has in many cases prevented people from leaving, according to the Israeli military.
Another challenge for Israel has been Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
The post Ritchie Torres Announces Intent to Vote for Sanctions Against ICC, Citing Anti-Israel ‘Ideological Crusade’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Administration Shifts $100 Million in US Military Aid From Israel and Egypt to Lebanon
Lebanese army soldiers gesture as they secure the area near the US embassy in Awkar, Lebanon, June 5, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
In the final days of US President Joe Biden’s time in office, his administration has redirected over $100 million in military aid from Israel and Egypt to Lebanon, citing a need to strengthen a ceasefire agreement to halt fighting between the Jewish state and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The US State Department issued two separate notices to Congress dated Jan. 3, announcing that it would shift $95 million in military aid intended for Egypt and $7.5 million intended for Israel toward the Lebanese military and its government, the Associated Press reported.
The move came after some lawmakers in Congress expressed concerns about Egypt’s human rights record, particularly the arrests of thousands of political prisoners.
Most of the money will go to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which has a central role in enforcing the November ceasefire that stopped nearly 14 months of war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist terrorist organization that wielded significant political and military influence in Lebanon.
“Successful implementation [of the ceasefire] will require an empowered LAF, which will need robust assistance from the United States and other partners,” the State Department said in its letters.
Hezbollah relentlessly pummeled northern Israeli communities with daily barrages of missiles, rockets, and drones in the months following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel from Gaza in the south. Roughly 80,000 Israelis were forced to evacuate Israel’s north due to the unrelenting attacks.
Israel intensified its military efforts against Hezbollah in September, using airstrikes and ground operations in southern Lebanon — bolstered by sophisticated intelligence operations — to decimate much of the terrorist group’s leadership and weapons stockpiles.
In late November, both Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, which in part requires Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon over 60 days. Meanwhile, the Lebanese army will enter these areas and ensure that Hezbollah retreats north of the Litani River, located some 18 miles north of the border with Israel.
The newly shifted US aid is largely meant to help the LAF in dispatching troops throughout southern Lebanon to supplement UN peacekeeping efforts there.
“US security assistance to the LAF increases its capacity as the country’s only legitimate military force and defender of Lebanon’s territorial integrity, enables the LAF to prevent potential destabilization from ISIS and other terrorist groups, and enables the LAF to provide security both for the Lebanese people and for US personnel,” the State Department said in its notices.
The department also rejected the claim that members of Hezbollah are serving in the LAF, insisting that the Lebanese army serves as a valuable “counterweight” to Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon.
“US support to the LAF reinforces the LAF as an important institutional counterweight to Hezbollah, which receives weapons, training, and financial support from Iran,” the State Department wrote. “The LAF continues to be an independent, non-sectarian institution in Lebanon, and is respected across all sectors.”
Critics have noted that UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and is the basis for the current ceasefire, failed to disarm Hezbollah, with the terrorist group becoming more powerful despite the presence of the LAF and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
Nonetheless, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) applauded the Biden administration’s announcement, arguing that the diversion of funds to Lebanon helps bolster American priorities in the region.
“Our military aid should advance US values and national security interests in the Middle East — not reflexively reward the Egyptian government, despite its failures to meet human rights conditions set by Congress,” Murphy said.
However, Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, argued that shifting money toward the LAF was ill-advised.
“If we actually saw the LAF take on Hezbollah, there might be value in this support, but right now, we are throwing away taxpayer money to a Hezbollah enabler. Egypt should be pressured to do much more to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas, but moving money from a Hamas enabler to a Hezbollah enabler makes no sense,” Goldberg said in a statement.
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Israeli Minister of Culture Urges FIFA to Remove Senior PA Official for Inciting Terrorism Against Israel
Palestinian Football Association head Jibril Rajoub speaks during a press conference regarding the cancellation of the soccer match between Argentina and Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sunday, June 6, 2018. Photo: Flash90.
Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called on Tuesday for FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, to remove Jibril Rajoub as president of the Palestine Football Association (PFA) for inciting, justifying, and supporting violence against Israel.
Zohar wrote in a letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino that Rajoub’s alleged incitement to violence is a “blatant infringement of the core values that international sports aim to promote — values of peace, unity, and mutual respect.” He urged Infantino and the FIFA Executive Committee to act swiftly and expel Rajoub from his senior position.
“There is no place for individuals who incite or support terrorism and violence within sports institutions,” he added. “His continued membership in senior roles within the sports world undermines public trust and sends a dangerous message — that the platform of sports can be exploited for political agendas and the promotion of hatred and violence … It is our collective responsibility to ensure that sports remain a unifying force that brings people together, rather than a stage for incitement and terror. I trust in your leadership and in FIFA’s commitment to upholding the integrity of international sports, and I am confident that you will act to safeguard its moral future.”
Zohar noted in his letter that following the Hamas-led deadly terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct, 7, 2023 — in which 1,200 people were murdered and over 250 were kidnapped – Rajoub “publicly justified these acts of terror, stating that they were a ‘natural response to the occupation.’”
“He has repeated this appalling justification on several occasions,” Zohar added. He additionally pointed out that on Sunday, Rajoub made a guest appearance on television and “openly called for continued violent attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. He even encouraged the Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for overseeing such acts.”
“Tragically, within 24 hours of Mr. Rajoub’s statement, multiple terrorist attacks were carried out in Israel, resulting in the deaths of three innocent civilians: a 70-year-old woman, a 73-year-old woman, and a 35-year-old man,” Zohar explained.
Rajoub was fined and temporarily suspended by FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee in 2018 for inciting hatred and violence. He received the suspension after he called on soccer fans to burn jerseys of the Argentinian Football Association as well as pictures of Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi ahead of a soccer match between Argentina and Israel. The Argentinians ultimately pulled out of the soccer game.
Since the start of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the PFA has repeatedly called for FIFA to suspend Israel from all international soccer matches because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. FIFA is expected to make an announcement regarding the matter in May. A number of international soccer organizations have voiced support for the PFA’s efforts to have Israel suspended from FIFA, including the Asian Football Confederation and the Norwegian Football Association (NFF).
“The Norwegian FA is not indifferent to the disproportionate attacks Israel has subjected the civilian population of Gaza to over time … The NFF is actively advocating for FIFA to address the Palestinian FA’s proposal for sanctions against Israel,” NFF President Lise Klaveness said in December. “We are also closer to the region and the Palestinian Football Association than most other European associations. For over 10 years we have worked on the ground in the region and the Palestinian West Bank to train female football coaches and create football activities for children in schools and refugee camps.”
Kaveness also denied reports that Norway has refused to compete against Israel.
“Israel is currently part of UEFA’s competitions. We are following the situation closely, and follow the policies set by FIFA, UEFA, and the Norwegian authorities,” Kaveness added. “This means our national team will play against Israel — in March away on a neutral pitch, and in October at home at Ullevaal Stadium. Everyone now has a clear responsibility to protect and respect the football matches and the players on both teams.”
The post Israeli Minister of Culture Urges FIFA to Remove Senior PA Official for Inciting Terrorism Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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