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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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Pentagon Preparing for Weeks of Ground Operations in Iran
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, the Washington Post reported Saturday, citing US officials.
The plans could involve raids by Special Operations and conventional infantry troops, the Post reported. Whether President Donald Trump would approve any of those plans remains uncertain, according to the Post.
The Trump administration has deployed US Marines to the Middle East as the war in Iran stretches into its fifth week, and also has been planning to send thousands of soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne to the region.
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America’s oldest synagogue closed. Then an unlikely group tended its cemetery.
In 1833, Herald of the Times, a Newport, Rhode Island, newspaper, reported that the remains of Mrs. Rebecca Lopez had been brought from New York by steamboat and placed inside Touro Synagogue.
Dedicated in 1763, the building is now recognized as the nation’s oldest surviving synagogue. Newport had once been home to a thriving colonial Jewish community, but after the Revolutionary War and the city’s economic decline, that community had largely faded. The cemetery remained, and so did the synagogue. It was during that long interval of near-absence that Lopez’s funeral briefly reopened Jewish ritual life in Newport.
After prayers were read by Rabbi Isaac Seixas of New York, the body was carried to the cemetery on Touro Street, with “the clergy, town council, and a numerous concourse of spectators” joining the funeral procession. The paper noted that a Jewish ceremony had not been performed there “for the space of forty years.”
Newport’s Jewish burial ground dated to 1677. In 1822, Abraham Touro left money for the upkeep of the cemetery, the synagogue, and the street on which they stood. The fund was placed under trustees appointed by the Rhode Island legislature, and Newport’s Town Council was later authorized to use the interest for repairs.
While Newport’s Jewish population declined, the endowment ensured that the synagogue building and cemetery grounds continued to be maintained. In 1826, the Town Council reported that it had tried to repair the synagogue using the Touro fund, but could not proceed because it had not been able to obtain the keys from Shearith Israel in New York. Many of Newport’s former Jewish residents had relocated there, and the congregations had longstanding ties.
In 1842, the council contracted to enclose the synagogue lot with a substantial stone wall and an ornamental cast-iron fence, modeled on the fence around the Jewish cemetery. The work included a Quincy granite base and a gateway on Touro Street designed to correspond with the synagogue’s portico. The project cost $6,835.
The synagogue’s doors rarely opened, and often only for moments of mourning. In June 1854, Newport received the body of Judah Touro, one of the most prominent American Jews of his era, a native of the town and brother of Abraham Touro. The Herald of the Times reported that “the streets was [sic] crowded with people, the stores all closed, and the bells tolled.”
The City Council assembled at City Hall and marched in procession to the synagogue, where “thousands remained outside” during the service. At the funeral, Newport’s mayor, William C. Cozzens, spoke of the trust that had long existed between the city and local Jewish families, recalling that the synagogue and cemetery had been left in Newport’s care and maintained there “with ample means for their preservation.”
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport’s Jewish cemetery that same year, he wrote of the graves as “silent beside the never-silent waves.” He noticed, too, what endured there: “Gone are the living, but the dead remain,” he observed, “and not neglected.”
Newport’s preservation of Jewish sacred space was shared. Jews endowed these places and returned to bury their dead there. Christian officials repaired, protected, and publicly honored them. In this way, a Jewish inheritance was carried forward until communal life returned.
In 1883, Touro Synagogue was rededicated and a new Jewish community established in Newport. But even in the window of years when the congregation was gone, the dead were not abandoned.
The graves were kept.
The post America’s oldest synagogue closed. Then an unlikely group tended its cemetery. appeared first on The Forward.
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Milwaukee rabbi and son ordered to pay $1,000 to muralist who reportedly praised Hamas in court
(JTA) — A retired rabbi and his son were sentenced Wednesday in Milwaukee for having destroyed a local mural in 2024 that depicted the Star of David transforming into a swastika.
Rabbi Peter and Zechariah “Zee” Mehler were ordered to pay $1,000 total in restitution to Ihsan Atta, the property owner who had put up the mural. Peter, who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge for criminal damage, was also fined $50, while Zee, who had pleaded guilty in December, was given a withheld sentence of 25 hours of community service.
The sentencing hearing took another turn when Atta, who is Palestinian, praised Hamas and walked out of the courtroom before being brought back in by deputies to finish the proceedings, according to local news reporters who were present. A transcript of the exchange could not immediately be obtained.
Zee Mehler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that, despite pleading guilty, he felt “vindicated.”
“What we did was illegal and needed to be answered for. But at the same time, what we saw was a very strong response from the city and the court that showed that they have no patience or time for this anti-Israel narrative,” he said. “They recognize the way that it has spread antisemitism, and they recognize the way that it’s caused so much global harm to the Jewish community.”
The case dates back to September 2024, when the Mehlers used a hammer and other tools to tear down Atta’s recently installed mural in full view of security cameras. They have long maintained that, while they understood it was illegal to destroy the mural, they did so out of concern for the safety of the local Jewish community.
Atta’s mural included the words “The irony of becoming what you once hated” surrounding a Star of David transforming into a swastika; the background of the mural appeared to depict scenes of destruction in Gaza. The Mehlers viewed the mural as incitement. At the time of their actions, it had already been condemned by local Jewish groups and the Milwaukee City Council.
In the courtroom, Zee, wearing long dreadlocks, escorted his father, who is 74 years old and has Guillain-Barre syndrome, in a wheelchair. Peter recently lost the ability to walk, his son said: “This has been a really rough few years for him.”
According to reports, circuit court judge Jack Dávila interrupted Atta when he began praising Hamas and instructed him not to make comments unrelated to the crime.
“We’re not going to solve the world’s problems with this hearing,” the judge reportedly told Atta, who apologized for his actions. In a video posted after the verdict, Atta called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” and stated, “We must have judges that are on the Epstein files, because we’ve got clowns running the courthouse.”
Atta’s actions in court, Zee Mehler said, meant “I didn’t really need to do much.”
“He was called to testify, and he absolutely buried himself,” Mehler said. “I can’t believe he said that he supports Hamas in a court, on the record. That’s a crazy thing to do.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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