‘He is not an answer to the problem that Harvard has with their Jewish students or with the exclusion of mainstream views,’ Rabbi David Wolpe, a former member of Harvard’s anti-Semitism advisory group, told the Washington Free Beacon
Harvard Divinity School (HDS) appointed Shaul Magid, a leftist Jewish philosopher who describes himself as a “counter-Zionist,” to a new position the university says it created as a way to combat “anti-Israeli bias.”
Magid, who has described the Jewish state as “illiberal” and “chauvinist,” will be the university’s inaugural Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence. Harvard says the new position is part of its effort to stem the tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel ideology in its classrooms after its anti-Semitism task force found that “politicized instruction” in four of its schools “mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism.”
The report’s authors said Jewish students were unable to “engage fully in academic and co-curricular life at Harvard” due to attacks from anti-Israel peers. They also warned about the “ease with which ‘anti-Zionism’ slips into what is effectively antisemitism,” citing an anti-Semitic cartoon students and faculty shared on social media.
The “politicized instruction” at the Divinity School, the report noted, includes subjecting Jewish students to “the embrace of a pedagogy of ‘de-zionization’” in which professors “attribute to Jews two great sins: first, in the Levant, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba; and second, in the United States, participation in White supremacy.”
In Magid’s November 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile, he argued in favor of a one-state solution that would have Israel become “both Jewish and Palestinian” in character without being “structured on the notion that this land ‘belongs’ to anyone.”
“Zionism had its time; it did its work; now it can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past,” Magid wrote.
Rabbi David Wolpe, who formerly served on Harvard’s anti-Semitism advisory group before resigning—stating that events on campus and former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony “reinforced the idea that [he] cannot make the sort of difference [he] had hoped”—told the Washington Free Beacon that Magid’s hiring demonstrates that HDS has not learned the proper lessons.
“He is not an answer to the problem that Harvard has with their Jewish students or with the exclusion of mainstream views,” Wolpe said, adding that Magid’s views are “very fringe” and do not “represent anything like the mainstream view of the American Jewish community.”
Magid wrote after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that, while he would not “justify a massacre, in any form,” he would not “justify viewing a massacre as if it happened in a vacuum, either.”
“So it must be said, decades of humiliation, domination, and the deaths of many men, women and children, must be part of the equation of mourning,” he wrote. “Because innocents die at the hands of terrorists does not by extension mean that we are all innocent.”
Magid wrote in a Harvard Crimson op-ed in August of last year that claims from students that certain professors at the university “[teach] their students to be antisemitic” are false, contradicting the task force report published less than a year later.
“As a rabbi and a professor at Harvard Divinity School, let me just say that this narrative couldn’t be further from the truth,” he wrote.
He has acknowledged rising anti-Jewish sentiment on college campuses but defended the anti-Israel protest movement. In a recent symposium titled “Has the ‘Zionist Consensus’ Collapsed?” Magid said he has seen “protests, chants, signs and so on, that I think do cross over into antisemitism.”
But he said that was “very different than saying that the protests are by definition antisemitic, or that they are all pro-Hamas.”
Magid told the Free Beacon that he disagrees with the notion that Harvard should hire pro-Israel professors in order to satisfy a task force recommendation.
“The task force should not say, ‘oh, hire some more Zionists, hire some more pro-Israel [people],'” he said. “I think that’s absurd, right? It’s like, you want to hire a scholar, you’re an elite university, hire the best person you can get.”
Magid also said the hiring process for his new role began over a year ago, long before Harvard claimed it would establish the position as part of its plan to “fight antisemitism [and] anti-Israeli bias.”
“The first time I saw that was when I read the task force memo,” he told the Free Beacon. “That was not conveyed to me at all.”
Harvard did not respond to the Free Beacon’s request for comment.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
