In court documents and public statements amid Harvard’s multi-billion-dollar fight with the Trump administration over antisemitism, the university has pointed to new faculty hires as evidence of what Harvard calls its "commitment to combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias."
"Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has dedicated additional resources for the study of Hebrew and Judaic studies, including … an offer out for a chair in Jewish history and culture," the university said. Harvard Divinity School "hired for the position of the Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence."
Those two new professors are scheduled to appear next month at what is being billed as a "symposium and book launch" on "Jewish Anti-Zionism." To judge by the book and the speakers invited, the event seems less aimed at critically assessing the ideas and more at promoting them. The keynote speaker is the University of California, Berkeley’s Judith Butler, who has been backing a boycott of Israel since at least 2014 and who described October 7, 2023 as "not a terrorist attack, not an antisemitic attack" but rather "an act of armed resistance." Butler has called it, "an uprising born of a state of subjugation and directed against a violent state apparatus."
According to Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, which is hosting the event, Harvard’s Jessica Marglin, who is the newly installed Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, will spend three hours there, moderating one hour-and-a-half-long panel on "Jewish Anti-Zionism in History" and participating in a second hour-and-a-half-long session on "Jewish Anti-Zionism Now."
The event is a book kickoff for Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, edited by Shaul Magid and Zev Mishell. Magid is the Harvard Divinity School’s Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence. Mishell is a 2025 graduate of Harvard Divinity School whose personal website describes him as "a graduate student at Harvard University’s Committee on the Study of Religion," though he is not listed as a student on the committee’s website.
The introduction of Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, available from its publisher, Princeton University Press, makes it fairly transparent what the authors are up to. "For decades, Jewish Zionists have systematically marginalized Palestinian voices from Jewish schools, camps, and mainstream institutions while pushing a one-sided narrative of Jewish identity and Middle East history," they write. They complain about "a veritable cottage industry that has blossomed over the last half-century, where spurious accusations of antisemitism are unleashed on social justice activists, particularly those involved in pro-Palestine activism."
"For too long, Jewish anti-Zionists have been demonized as ‘self-hating,’ as traitors, and, more recently as ‘Un-Jews’ rejecting a supposedly monolithic Zionist Jewish consensus. This is more than just slander: it is a form of tacit dehumanization, even of internal antisemitism, that deliberately marginalizes non- and anti-Zionist Jews from any legitimate claim to Jewish identity and politics," they write. "It speaks to a wider supersession of Jewish identity to further a certain kind of right-wing politics, particularly through the adoption of IHRA’s working definition on antisemitism and its weaponization to attack free speech." Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as part of a legal settlement with Jewish students that federal courts have found Harvard failed, so it’s interesting to see the Harvard types now pushing a book that denounces the definition that their own discriminated-against-students demanded.
"Given Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the moral and political abyss we now find ourselves in … we are elevating these anti-Zionist traditions from the dustbin of Jewish history," the introduction says.
"Even though Jews were often visibly present at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, many in the media, government, and establishment Jewish organizations sought to paint these protests as antisemitic," the book says, calling such characterizations "often spurious."
Marglin and Mishell did not respond to emails from the Washington Free Beacon seeking comment.
The situation is likely to fuel the view that Harvard is unsalvageable. On Tuesday, October 13, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy hosted an event to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Martin Kramer’s book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. It featured Kramer, who has been a visiting professor at Harvard; Gary Samore, who earned a doctorate from Harvard; Robert Satloff, who has a masters from Harvard; and Rachel Fish, who also has a masters from Harvard.
"I don’t see the potential for reform," Kramer said, attributing an idea to Ruth Wisse: "I know Harvard, and Harvard’s not going to change … the focus has to be on creating alternatives."
