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Harvard University has created a task force to fight antisemitism on campus — and the effort is already embroiled in controversy.

The co-chair of the school’s newly appointed Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism once declared “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization,” according to his 2023 book.

“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,” Jewish history professor Derek Penslar claimed in his tome, “Zionism: An Emotional State,” in which he wrote, “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians.”

The task force, announced Friday, comes as the university continues to roil in the fallout from recently ousted president Claudine Gay.

“Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic acts on our campus have grown, and the sense of belonging among these groups has been undermined. We need to understand why and how that is happening—and what more we might do to prevent it,” Harvard’s interim president Alan Garber said in a statement announcing the new initiative.

In the days after Gay’s resignation, Penslar publicly downplayed the campus antisemitism he is now charged with investigating, telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency outsiders had “exaggerated” the issue.

In August 2023, Penslar signed onto a letter from a group called Academics4Peace, in which Israel was derided as a “regime of apartheid,” guilty of “Jewish supremacism.”

The letter, which was signed by 2,900 people, also accused the country of attempting to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

Harvard’s most ferocious critic, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, slammed the decision to appoint Penslar to the task force.

“@Harvard continues on the path of darkness,” Ackman said.

“Harvard is going to double down on its anti-Semitism. Firing Gay was just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. The problem remains the racist and anti-Semitic DEI ideology,” added Ted Frank, director of litigation at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a non-profit law firm.


Harvard has faced a raft of antisemitic incidents since the Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. The university’s response has sparked donor revolts and a full scale congressional inquiry.

Reps or Harvard and Penslar did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Post.

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“A newly formed Black Harvard alumnae group have demanded the prestigious college doubles down on diversity, equity and inclusion in the wake of Claudine Gay's resignation. 

The Black Alumnae of Harvard Equity Initiative (BAHEI) penned a petition to the board calling for DEI to be enshrined in almost all aspects of the university, including hiring professors and admissions from students.

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The Black Alumnae of Harvard Equity Initiative (BAHEI)

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Last month, Harry Lewis published a Harvard Crimson column that squarely laid the blame on Harvard for the crisis that has engulfed the great university. Fifty years of experience on the banks of the Charles River inform Lewis’ severe judgment: He is a longtime Harvard computer science professor, a 1968 Harvard College graduate, and, from 1995 to 2003, he served as dean of Harvard College. Nevertheless, while illuminating Harvard’s damaging politicization over the last 20 years of its undergraduate curriculum – and despite his half century at Harvard – Lewis overlooks the full extent of the crisis.

In “Reaping What We Have Taught,” Lewis maintained that the surge of antisemitism on campus following Hamas’ perpetration of mass atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7 was not the fault of Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president in early January. Nor, he asserted, had Harvard admitted antisemitic students or hired antisemitic faculty. The problem, rather, lies in Harvard’s curriculum: “Unapologetic antisemitism – whether the incidents are few or numerous – is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.”

Lewis performed a simple experiment. He typed into the Harvard online course catalog search box key words associated with fashionable progressive ideology. The word “decolonize,” he found, “is in the titles of seven courses and the descriptions of 18 more” – more than triple its appearance before 2000. The words “oppression” and “liberation” are each “in the descriptions of more than 80 courses,” while “‘Social justice’ is in over 100.” Lewis also searched for “white supremacy” and “Enlightenment” – these days, it is often said, the latter arises out of and perpetuates the former. He discovered that the terms’ appearances in the online course catalog run “neck and neck, both ahead of ‘scientific revolution’ but behind ‘intersectionality,’” which barely registered before 2000.

Although acknowledging his experiment’s limitations – “word frequency is an imperfect measure” – Lewis argued that the results reflect the Harvard faculty’s exploitation of the classroom to advance left-wing concepts and claims. The replacement of education by advocacy creates fertile soil for sowing hatred: “When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles – between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked – a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.”

The malign consequences are not confined to Harvard: “Merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing.”

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education by advocacy creates fertile soil for sowing hatred:

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Originally posted by bcereuss:
Columbia University president Minouche Shafik resigns after outrage over anti-Israel protests on campus



The president of Columbia University has resigned with immediate effect just a week after three of her deans quit over a leaked text message exchange which mocked concerns about anti-Semitism.

Minouche Shafik resisted demands for her resignation as protests against Israel brought the New York college to a standstill earlier this year but said on Wednesday that the 'turmoil' had taken 'a considerable toll on my family'.

Donations began to dry up as wealthy benefactors reacted with disgust to the protests, and Shafik herself was widely criticized after appearing before Congress where she refused to say whether the phrase 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', should be considered anti-Semitic.

-more at linky.