Harvard’s Message to the Jews

Any thoughts that Harvard’s antisemitism woes began and ended with its erstwhile president, Claudine Gay, are put paid by the curious case of a scholar of Zionism who appears to loathe Israel. Derek Penslar is newly minted, by the interim president, Alan Garber, as the co-chairman of Harvard’s latest Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. Talk about putting the mice to guarding the cheese.Mr. Penslar’s opinions on the Jewish state appear better suited to promoting antisemitism than combating it. Our columnist Ira Stoll, writing on X, has the particulars. Mr. Penslar says that “settler colonialism” is “very important” in understanding Zionism, endorsing the Fanonian primal scream of Israel’s foes. He calls antisemitism worries “exaggerated.” In a book published last year, he writes that “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.”Mr. Stoll notes that in that book, “Zionism: An Emotional State,” Mr. Penslar writes that “Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians from their land and oppression of those who remain have made it one of the most disliked countries on the planet.” After Hamas’s assault on Israel was met with a spasm of antisemitism from Cambridge to Djerba, this is the man Harvard has tasked with protecting its Jews. He signed an open letter calling Israel a “regime of apartheid.”It’s clear that Mr. Penslar misses one of the basic principles of antisemitism — it is not about Jewish behavior. We marked that point in the first editorial we issued when we picked up the flag of The New York Sun. The editorial was called “The War Against the Jews.” Antisemitism, we marked, isn’t a reaction to Zionism. Antisemitism is never about Jewish behavior. Zionism itself is “precisely an answer to antisemitism.”Antisemitism, after all, was a problem at Harvard before October 7. And before the creation of the modern Jewish state. Antisemitism existed before the United Nations partitioned Palestine. And remember the Holocaust. It, too, took place before the creation of the Jewish state. Antisemitism came before the Balfour Declaration. It has nothing to do with Israel’s alleged “dispossession of Palestinians from their land and oppression of those who remain.”There are those that grasp this, even at Harvard. President Summers, writing on X, declares that Mr. Penslar “is unsuited to leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious antisemitism problem at Harvard.” He reports that he has “lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.”Mr. Summers references a Title VI lawsuit Harvard faces, which alleges “rampant antisemitism.” He calls it “inconceivable” that Harvard would allow any group other than Jews to be targeted for similar abuse.” The economist is “unable to reassure” anyone — including “prospective students” — that “Harvard is making progress in countering antisemitism.” It’s hard to imagine anyone will be reassured by Harvard having put Mr. Penslar on the job. We do not know Mr. Penslar personally. He wrote some years ago a number of fine book reviews for the Sun. We wonder with Mr. Summers, though, if Harvard would name as the “head of anti-racism task force someone who had minimized the racism problem or who had argued against federal anti-racism efforts?” To ask that question is to answer it. Where in the world, then, did Mr. Garber and his camarilla come up with Mr. Penslar? In a December 11 essay in Jewish Currents, an organ of the anti-Israel left, journalist Peter Beinart, who has spurned Zionism and is Jewish Currents’ editor-at-large, writes that Mr. Penslar “would have seemed an obvious choice” to advise Harvard on antisemitism. He cites an unnamed professor who compared snubbing Mr. Penslar to “creating a task force on AI without consulting the chair of the department of computer science.”Mr. Beinart on Friday praised Mr. Penslar’s appointment, insisting that the professor “doesn’t think anti-Zionism=antisemitism.” Not only naming Mr. Penslar to the task force, but also putting him at its head, sends a message to those who might hope that Ms. Gay’s defenestration signals a turning of the tide. “Don’t get too hopeful” is the message to Jews, whose numbers as a percentage of the student body have plunged in recent years. Wonder why.

Harvard’s Message to the Jews

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