A prominent rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard University quit the school’s antisemitism committee on Thursday, writing in X that the college helped turn Jews into “oppressors.”
“The system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips too many students and faculty, an ideology that works only along the axis of oppression and positions Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is evil,” wrote David Wolpe.
The dismissal comes just days after Harvard President Claudine Gay gave controversial testimony to Congress about the school’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
A visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School praised Gay as a “kind and thoughtful” person, but said his congressional comments were “grossly inadequate” in addressing rising antisemitism on the Cambridge campus and elsewhere.
“Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil,” he wrote. “Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including its unspeakable atrocities, is a great and ongoing catastrophe.
Wolpe, who also holds a rabbinical position with the Anti-Defamation League, warned that anti-Israel sentiment on Harvard and other campuses is growing and quickly becoming entrenched.
Wolpe blasts school officials for allowing antisemitism to run rampant on campus David Wolpe / X
“It won’t be changed by hiring or firing one person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post the way you want when you want, as if posting is the summation of one’s moral character,” Wolpe wrote. “This is the task of educating the generation, and also of not learning.”
Gay and other university leaders drew ire from lawmakers for arguing that virulent anti-Israel views are protected free speech.
“Let me ask you this … you understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews,” the Conference Chairman fumed. House GOP Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a Harvard graduate. “Are you aware of that?”
Wolpe was a member of the school’s anti-semitism committee before resigning. X/@RabbiWolpe Pro-Palestinian campus activists mass at Harvard. Reuters
Gay said he found the language personally repulsive, but insisted “the speech didn’t cross that barrier.”
Financier Bill Ackman, a champion of Israel who has previously called for a ban on hiring graduates who openly oppose the Jewish state, slammed Gay’s appearance before the congress.
Ackman went further Thursday, suggesting that Gay, who is black, was only hired because of the school’s emphasis on diversity.
Wolpe insists campus hostility toward Israel is less rooted in objectively weighing the country’s actions than in succumbing to “herd mentality.”
Students waved banners over the Harvard campus on Thursday. Reuters
Other groups, he said, try to monopolize suffering in an effort to improve their social status.
“Part of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the lone or biggest victim,” he said. “Some of it is simple, ancient Jew-hatred, an ugly arrow in the quiver of a dark heart for millennia.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
