Harvard University is raising eyebrows for its decision to appoint a “counter-Zionist” as the divinity school’s first Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence — a role that the school created in an effort to combat “antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.” 

Shaul Magid, an ordained rabbi who has taught Jewish studies at the university level for more than three decades, was named the recipient of the five-year residency on Wednesday. In an announcement, the graduate school praised Mr. Magid’s “blend of traditional Jewish learning and innovative critical scholarship” and lauded his appointment as “pivotal in enriching Harvard’s strengths in Jewish studies.”

The residency is also meant to serve a specific purpose. The position was opened by Harvard as part of a new initiative to combat “antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.” That effort was launched after Harvard released a long-awaited report that painted a grim picture of campus antisemitism. 

Mr. Magid, though selected to fill a role meant to address antisemitism, expresses doubt that antisemitism at Harvard “is as bad as people are saying,” he tells the Sun. In respect of the antisemitism report, he says that it was useful in providing “a real sense of how students were feeling” though he argues “that’s a little different than talking about antisemitism on campus.” 

“To use their feelings to make an assessment about a kind of systemic problem on a college campus, I think is not what the report intended to do,” he tells the Sun. 

Mr. Magid’s work centers on Jewish mysticism, Hadisim, and modern Jewish thought, though his unconventional views on Zionism and the relationship between Jews and Israel have set him apart from traditional Jewish scholars. 

Mr. Magid details his case for rejecting Zionism and reconceiving “Jewish national and collective identity in a new exilic mode” in his most recent book, “The Necessity of Exile.” In it, Mr. Magid suggests that Zionism “had its time; it did its work” and now “can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.” 

He goes on to propose a vision of Israel that’s akin to a one-state solution: An Israel that’s divorced from Zionism and is “both Jewish and Palestinian” in character. He characterizes his views as pro-Israel but not Zionist — a position that he coins as “counter-Zionist.”

Mr. Magid’s writings on Israel have made him among the leading Jewish scholars seeking to reconsider Jewish self-sovereignty. They have also drawn serious criticism. In a review of “The Necessity of Exile” for Commentary Magazine, Jewish intellectual Daniel Kane branded the book a “scandal” and chastised Mr. Magid for his “flippant disregard” of his proposal’s major practical challenges.  Jewish Review of Books called his counter-Zionism “not so much a political program as it is a utopian posture or attitude.” 

Harvard’s decision to hire Mr. Magid — particularly as it faces scrutiny from the federal government over its anti-Israel bias — has thus stirred controversy. “Harvard’s new professor of Jewish studies is an anti-Zionist Jew, in case you were wondering whether it should sink even faster into the Charles River,” wrote John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. “Is this a joke?” he wrote in another post. 

A leading figure in the Jewish conservative movement, David Wolpe, who formerly taught at Harvard Divinity School, responded to the announcement by sharing the title of Mr. Magid’s recent book — “The Necessity of Exile” — before adding, “I await HDS appointing someone who believes in the necessity of Zion.” 

Mr. Wolpe was one of eight Harvard affiliates who joined an antisemitism advisory committee that the school created in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack. He resigned just two months later when president Claudine Gay failed to answer “yes” when asked by Elise Stefanik before a House panel if calling for the genocide of Jewish students would violate university policies. He shared at the time that Ms. Gay’s “painfully inadequate testimony” as well as “events on campus” had “reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.” 

A year and a half after Ms. Gay’s disastrous testimony, Harvard published — under pressure from the administration — dual reports on antisemitism and islamophobia on campus. Mr. Wolpe reflected on the findings and suggestions of the reports in an Op-Ed for the Free Press, identifying that “What the university’s report offers no solution for is the fact that there is a deep ideological commitment among much of the faculty that is anti-Western, anti-Israel, and often antisemitic.” Anti-Israel bias, according to the report, was particularly pervasive at Harvard’s divinity school. 

Mr. Magid, however, rejects the suggestion that his appointment was because of — or in spite of — his views on Israel. “ Anybody that has any inside view of academia would say that’s just nonsense,” Mr. Magid tells the Sun. The year-long process it took to hire him was “very slow and very deliberate. Universities take it seriously,” he says.  

Some, though, view Mr. Magid’s hiring as a missed opportunity for Harvard to improve its anti-Zionist ideological skew. “I have enormous respect for Professor Magid,” Harvard Divinity School graduate Shabbos Kestenbaum says. “I do wonder though, why in a Divinity school, especially one with a strong history of antisemitism, is there still no voice of normative Zionism, a central part of the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans’ religious identity?

Mr. Kestenbaum, who was one of the students who sued Harvard over its mishandling of antisemitism, raises that Mr. Wolpe, “a staunch Zionist and voice of moral clarity,” ended his one year fellowship with “numerous” divinity school students petitioning him to stay longer. Harvard, however, “never responded to the students nor Rabbi Wolpe.”