Harvard loses advisory rabbi in wake of antisemitism controversy
December 8, 2023
Harvard’s handling antisemitism so badly that they’ve just lost their advisory rabbi.
David Wolpe, a rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned from Harvard University’s antisemitism advisory committee, he announced Thursday.
This is, of course, in the wake of that terrible performance by the three Ivy League presidents before Congress. Their refusal to agree that calling for the genocide of the Jews could be a violation of on-campus harassment codes was the most dreadful example of antisemitism. Of course, calling for that or anything similar about any other group would be against such codes. As we said:
And that’s antisemitism itself. Jews are being treated differently than others. That’s racist discrimination, and it’s coming from those very Presidential offices. We know that if anything like the same were said about people of color, Native Americans, women, and people of non-traditional sexualities, then the response would have been different. But it’s Jews, so it’s different.
As Bill Ackman has pointed out, this is so bad that those responsible – those three presidents, at the very least – must go.
What Ackman finds out is that it’s not just the students. It’s the faculty. Harvard has become what it never used to be: a place ruled by politics, not excellence. The DEI idea – that diversity, appropriate opinions on it, trumps scholarship – has not just taken hold; it is determining the future path of the entire place.
But it is, as there, more than just the presidents. Sure, it’s good that Columbia’s Law Dean has gone. But there’s more to do yet. As we are doing at Harvard.
But there really is more that needs to be done. From Rabbi Wolpe’s full statement:
Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.
American academia – especially the elite colleges – is in the grip of a series of delusions of which antisemitism is only one. The generation’s grand task is to educate those delusions out and reality in. It is not easy, but it is necessary for our civilization to survive. After all, the purpose of those colleges is to educate our children, not mis-educate them. So, we’ve got to sort them out, put them back on the right track.