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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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From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places
(JTA) — Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.”
It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” said she saw something deeply Jewish in them.
“The really beautiful thing about these shows is that when you’re in such a pressure cooker, for me, it’s not about the challenges, although those are fun to watch, but it’s about watching people be people and make mistakes and grow and foster connections between one another, and I’ve found so much Torah in these moments,” Field said in an interview. “I know it’s very rabbi to say.”
Two years later, Field is bringing that approach to the Netflix show’s second season, which premiered Tuesday. She was chosen to be one of over 456 contestants from around the world competing in a series of physical and mental challenges for a $4.56 million prize.
While Jewish contestants have competed on a number of reality TV shows, ordained rabbis have been rarer. Field said she went into the experience feeling a weighty responsibility around portraying Jewish clergy even as she was shackled to a team of players and competed in a relay race of mini games like stacking a house of cards and swinging a ball on a string into a cup.
“I never expected to be the very best of the challenges,” she said. “I’ve always said, I have a heart of gold, but I’m not very dexterous, and so for me, it was about trying my best and giving it my all, and also trying to be true to myself and bringing my values and wisdom and sense of community and representing the rabbinate as best I could into the show.”
Field grew up in Los Angeles and where her family attended Temple Ahavat Shalom, a Reform congregation in the San Fernando Valley.
After graduating from Boston University in 2017, she worked for the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., before enrolling at HUC in 2019, spending her first year in Jerusalem.
After being ordained in 2024, Field began working as the director of education at Beth El Temple Center, a Reform synagogue in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Just four months later, she received a call back from “Squid Game: The Challenge’ asking her if she was still interested. She was soon on her way to London for an extended break for filming.
A year later, in a post on Instagram announcing her appearance on the show, Field said her experience reminded her of what she has learned from Jewish tradition.
“I often share that the Torah is a sacred story of people being people — of being hurt, of making mistakes, of building connections, of adventure, and of finding the divine in it all,” she said. “I felt this so deeply during my experience on Squid Game.”
Among her co-competitors was a NFL cheerleader, a former bomb technician and an Anglican priest with whom Field said she connected on set.
“I had a really good conversation about religion and what it means to sort of be a faith leader on the show with the priest,” said Field. “I actually found that I had conversations about faith with almost everyone I talked to because, you know, people bring things up when you tell them you’re a rabbi.”
The post From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places appeared first on The Forward.
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Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner
(JTA) — An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”
The post Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel, India Sign Deals to Boost Defense, Industrial, Tech Cooperation
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh sign new agreements in Tel Aviv to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation between the two countries. Photo: Screenshot
Israel and India on Tuesday signed new agreements to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation during high-level talks in Tel Aviv, as both nations aim to deepen ties amid shifting Middle East power dynamics and rising regional tensions.
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during the annual bilateral Joint Working Group meeting.
“This strategic dialogue with India takes place at a critical juncture for both countries. Our strategic partnership is based on deep mutual trust and shared security interests,” Baram said during a joint press conference.
“We view India as a first-rate strategic partner and are determined to continue deepening cooperation in the fields of defense, technology and industry,” the Israeli official continued.
Strengthening Defense Cooperation: Israel MOD Director General and Indian Defense Secretary Sign Strategic Memorandum of Understanding
@SpokespersonMoD
Read more: https://t.co/ito3P1sCQg pic.twitter.com/FjxBkwFf1C
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) November 4, 2025
As part of the visit, the Indian delegation — which included senior officials from the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces — met with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and participated in a forum with CEOs of Israeli defense companies to advance industrial-defense cooperation between the two countries.
Among other areas of cooperation, the newly signed agreement aims to advance joint efforts in defense manufacturing, research, and technological development.
Israeli-Indian diplomatic relations have been steadily growing since India established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992.
Since then, the two nations have signed multiple agreements to deepen cooperation across industries, further strengthening defense and security ties.
In recent years, trade between the two countries has been rapidly expanding, with India now being Israel’s seventh-largest trade partner globally. Israeli exports to India rose from $200 million in 1992 to $2.5 billion in 2024.
Over the past decade, Israel’s exports to India have grown by about 60 percent, and investments in the tech sector are becoming increasingly significant.
Military cooperation has also grown, with Israel selling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons systems to India and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Indian military regularly participating in joint exercises.
India is one of the largest consumers of Israeli military equipment, accounting for almost 40 percent of Israel’s total arms exports.
According to media reports, India is set to acquire rockets for its ground forces and surface-to-air defense missiles developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for approximately $3.75 billion.
IAI is also expected to convert six commercial planes into Indian Air Force refueling aircraft for $900 million.