What is it like to be politically indoctrinated at America’s most historic university? Let’s find out. To Harvard’s credit, its recent report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias makes it possible to experience the way political indoctrination at a prestigious university looks and sounds. If you’re willing to sift through some footnotes, take in some videos, and, above all, momentarily dip your feet in a baffling sea of academic jargon, you, too, can experience the blinkered existence heretofore exclusively reserved for America’s brightest young people.
Harvard’s antisemitism report exposes the process of indoctrination at several university programs — Harvard Divinity School’s program on Religion in Public Life (RPL), in particular. Moreover, something important has happened since the report’s release. One of the alleged indoctrinators at RPL, Notre Dame Professor Atalia Omer, an Israeli Jew who served as a visiting professor and fellow in RPL’s most controversial program, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, has struck back at Harvard by issuing rebuttals to the antisemitism report’s accusations. Last week, moreover, Omer and a number of Jewish scholars of Jewish studies, including the prominent postmodernist Judith Butler, weighed in publicly in defense of Omer, with an opinion piece as well as an amicus brief in Harvard’s case against the Trump administration. Omer and her fellow left-leaning, Israel-critical scholars of Judaism argue that Harvard’s antisemitism report unfairly defines scholarly criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
Thus, Harvard’s report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias has taken on new importance, although not in the way that its scholarly Jewish critics on the left claim. What the report actually does is to expose and document the workings of political bias within an academic program at a major university. I know of no other case in which a respected university has systematically criticized one of its own academic programs for political indoctrination, effectively dismantled that program — and then been publicly answered by one of the alleged malefactors and her academic allies. That makes the battle between the report and its professorial opponents an important test of the proposition that our finest universities have been corrupted by political propagandists. Let’s see who’s right.
Harvard’s report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias drew a good amount of attention from the press. Much of the coverage of this 300-page report, however, focused on spectacular anecdotes of the ostracism and harassment to which Harvard’s Jewish and Israeli students were subjected in the aftermath of October 7. That, of course, is of great importance. Yet the report’s deeper significance is the way in which it ties those acts of prejudice to underlying causes. One of those causes, says the report, was the existence at Harvard of several high-profile academic programs and events that treated Israel — and any students who refused to condemn it — as deeply blameworthy. The problem, according to the report, was not criticism of Israel per se but rather the failure to present both sides of this controversial question. In its most thorough review of a single academic program, the report hones in on Harvard Divinity School’s program on Religion in Public Life.
According to the report, RPL was plagued by “one-sidedness and the promotion of a specific political ideology under the guise of academic inquiry.” More specifically, RPL is said to have embraced “a pedagogy of ‘de-Zionization.’” RPL’s efforts to induce all students, Jewish students very much included, to reject Zionism, often involved the promotion of an alternative, highly revisionist and politicized Jewish religious perspective. According to the view promoted by RPL, says the report, Jews are guilty of two great sins: in the Middle East, the establishment of the State of Israel and the consequent calamity this represented for the Palestinians; in the United States, Jewish participation in white supremacy. From RPL’s perspective, says the report, Jews can only atone for these sins “by dedicating themselves to pro-Palestinian activism.”
So, for example, RPL events often featured Rabbi Brant Rosen, a nonresident fellow of RPL’s Religion Conflict and Peace Initiative. Rosen founded a “non-Zionist” congregation in Chicago that more recently redefined itself as “anti-Zionist.” Rosen became a nonresident fellow at RPL while writing a book of alternative Jewish prayers reflecting values of “justice, anti-racism, liberation, and solidarity with the oppressed.” In effect, Rosen is trying to reframe Judaism itself around the values of the American political left.
According to Harvard’s report, while RPL presented itself to the Divinity School, prospective students, and the larger Harvard community as focused on the relationship between religion and public life very broadly, in practice the program was dedicated to a remarkable degree to criticism of Israel and an attempt to restructure Judaism to reflect this perspective. Yet, oddly, in its initial public presentation, RPL never mentioned Israel or Palestine.
It’s important to emphasize, in light of last week’s pushback from leftist scholars, that Harvard’s report never condemns the presentation of Israel-critical points of view. Again and again, the report’s theme is “one-sidedness.” The argument is not that anti-Zionism is un-Jewish but rather that one-sidedly promoting anti-Zionist Judaism to the exclusion of mainstream Jewish support for Israel unfairly isolates and pressures mainstream Jewish students while depriving students in general of exposure to both sides of an important public controversy.
That, in brief, is the Harvard report’s indictment of the Divinity School’s program in Religion and Public Life. Now let’s see how one of the targets of that criticism, Atalia Omer, defends herself, and how Omer and her colleagues at Harvard’s RPL program actually taught.
The authors of Harvard’s antisemitism report say they received “considerable feedback” about alleged anti-Israel bias at RPL, and they quote from several complaints. One such complaint speaks of “a huge number of events, book talks, newsletter articles, academic appointments, and academic offerings, all focused on condemning the Israeli occupation.” We get no numbers in the report, but this piece on Harvard’s bias by a Jewish Divinity School student estimates 16 anti-Israel RPL events in the 2022–23 academic year and 20 in the post–October 7 (!) academic year of 2023–24.
Harvard’s report focuses on two examples, RPL’s inaugural webinar on Omer’s book, Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, and a 2022 webinar on Rabbi Rosen’s rewriting of the Jewish liturgy for Israel’s Independence Day, a webinar moderated by Omer. According to Harvard’s antisemitism report, these events illustrate the narrow, “non-mainstream” Jewish political theology effectively endorsed by RPL to the exclusion of mainstream pro-Israel Jewish perspectives.
Harvard’s report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias was released on April 29. Ten days later, on May 9, Omer responded with an op-ed in The Guardian. The following week, Omer and another guest appeared on the Occupied Thoughts podcast alongside Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic, to rebut the Harvard report.
Omer’s top-line objection to Harvard’s report is that it ignores the fact that she and her interlocutors in the webinar about her book are all Jewish. How can that webinar be antisemitic or anti-Israeli, she asks, if the participants are all Jewish? On top of that, Omer herself is Israeli. But the real message of Harvard’s report is that Omer and her colleagues at RPL, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are pushing a narrow “political theology” to the nearly complete exclusion of the perspectives of the vast majority of Jews.
Just as some Americans can favor the overthrow of the United States, or burn the American flag, some Israeli Jews can turn against Zionism. From the perspective of most Jews, Israelis, or Americans, nearly exclusive promotion of these perspectives by a supposedly wide-ranging and nonpartisan academic program would be a hostile and unscholarly act, no matter the religion or nationality of the professors.
I urge readers to view the webinar at issue, particularly the twelve minutes during which Omer explains what her book is about (4:15–16:50). Notable there is the jargon, entirely typical for academia. If you think about what is actually being said, it’s evident that the jargon is a cover for politics.
Omer’s book is a study of Israel-critical and outright anti-Zionist Jewish activists, many of whom would be pleased to “de-Zionize” Judaism. If Omer were to directly say, “I’m studying these political activists so we can all follow their lead,” she wouldn’t seem particularly scholarly. But if she says, instead, “I’m studying the narratives and narrativity of these activists because such questions have implications for protest, social action, and the reimagining or rewriting of political and social scripts,” she sounds scholarly. You’ve got to parse and mull her words before the political thrust of it all becomes clear. This is what the Harvard report means by “the promotion of a specific political ideology under the guise of academic inquiry.”
That webinar on Omer’s book is a lovefest. All the participants share the anti-Israel politics hiding behind the jargon. And the jargon likely produces a kind of fear — mixed with intellectual vertigo — in students who might not agree with what is being said. Instead of putting the political assumptions plainly on the table, justifying them, and addressing counterarguments, the academics create an atmosphere in which you feel half-crazy if you don’t buy into the taken-for-granted worldview. And if a few students do figure out a way to take issue with the political assumptions buried in all the gobbledygook, they risk coming off as the skunk at the garden party. A few events with pro-Israel scholars would have helped break the spell, yet no such events were forthcoming. This is what living in academia feels like nowadays.
Omer claims that the Harvard report misleads by cherry-picking statements from her and her colleagues that seem biased or extreme. Consider the webinar she moderates during which Rabbi Rosen rewrites the Jewish liturgy for Israeli Independence Day as a prayer of atonement for the sin of establishing Israel. Harvard’s report cites a statement by the discussant, Daniel Boyarin, a prominent Israeli-American academic now at the University of California, Berkeley, that he (Boyarin) was probably asked to participate in the webinar because RPL knew that he shared Rosen’s politics. Harvard’s report takes this as proof of a lack of intellectual diversity. Omer, however, claims that this supposedly cherry-picked quote from Boyarin misrepresents the tenor of the webinar as a whole.
After all, Boyarin says that he personally would not recommend the use of Rosen’s prayer. Omer thus claims that Boyarin and Rosen had a “debate,” but her claim is misleading. Boyarin says his objections to the prayer are simply a matter of “taste” and then emphasizes his political agreement with Rosen. If Omer really believes this is a “debate,” then it shows the pathetic state of what passes for intellectual diversity in academia — a debate between left and far left.
On the podcast with Beinart, Omer offers a supposed smoking-gun example in Harvard’s antisemitism report of a misleadingly selected quotation from her work. Omer is the lead author, along with two other faculty from RPL’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, of an academic article describing a class field trip to Israel. That Israel trip was the centerpiece of RPL’s signature course, “Narratives of Displacement and Belonging: The Case of Palestine/Israel.” Omer and her co-authors describe the trip’s effect on Jewish students as follows: “[Jewish American students on the trip] became overwhelmed with their sorrow at how the Jewish tradition has become indistinct from a settler colonial nation-state project. They aspire to extricate themselves from such a conflation, which implicates them in atrocities.”
Harvard’s antisemitism and anti-Israel bias report cites this passage as evidence of an unwarranted attribution of collective guilt to all Jews. Omer, however, accuses the report of wrongly omitting the very next sentence in the article: “As we walked a few days later, on Shabbat, through the horrors left after the settlers’ pogrom in the West Bank Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya, these same students deepened their determination to reclaim their Jewishness as a critical process of accountability to Palestinians.” In Omer’s view, the redemptive theme of that sentence counters the report’s accusations. Yet that sentence changes nothing. It only proves that the course’s goal is to use accusations of collective guilt to push Jewish students into repudiating Israel.
Harvard’s report also cited as political indoctrination the article’s claim that students on the Israel trip needed to be “de-Zionized.” Omer recently denied to the Chronicle of Higher Education that student “de-Zionization” was her goal, despite the fact that her article’s abstract declares it and quotes a passage on “de-Zionizing” from the body of the article itself.
All doubt is removed, however, simply by reading the article in question — if you can wade through the academic jargon. Omer’s article explicitly highlights the need for “unlearning Zionism,” an obvious equivalent of “de-Zionization.” This, in turn, is said to rest on the need to “unlearn” “Christian European modernity.” By the way, the contempt of Omer and her co-authors, each on the faculty of RPL, for Christian supporters of Israel is evident throughout. One of the co-authors is described in the article as a “queer Christian,” and another as a Palestinian whose political consciousness was formed by the First Intifada. A Christian co-author hardly means that this article and the course it describes are not biased against, and hostile to, traditional Christians as well as traditional Jews.
In a speech last year, Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Orthodox Jewish Divinity School student who sued Harvard for antisemitism, said his application to join the class whose Israel field trip was described in Omer’s article was rejected. According to Kestenbaum, the professors told him that “the process of unlearning” would leave him “so psychologically traumatized I will be unable to reassociate myself with my Jewish community at home.”
Is this not a confession that “de-Zionization” is in fact the goal of the course? Indeed, is this not a confession that there is a specific psycho-political goal to the course? Is this not a confession to indoctrination? And if it is thought that an Orthodox Jew who does not already agree with the professors would be in danger of deep psychological and social trauma just by taking this course, is that not a confession of the very antisemitism and anti-Israel bias alleged by the Harvard report? Finally, was Kestenbaum rejected only, or even mainly, out of concern for his well-being? Or was he in fact rejected to prevent a dissenter from interfering with the professors’ goal of “de-Zionizing” the class?
The left-leaning Jewish scholars of Judaism who’ve partnered with Omer in an opinion piece for The Guardian and an amicus brief in Harvard’s suit against the Trump administration make the same mistake as Omer. In fact, nearly the entirety of Omer’s original Guardian opinion piece is reproduced in the amicus brief. These scholars accuse Harvard and its antisemitism report of falsely defining Judaism as requiring support for Israel. Again, however, the report does not treat anti-Zionist forms of Judaism as un-Jewish. Rather, it argues that the nearly exclusive promotion of marginal, anti-Zionist forms of Judaism is academically irresponsible and an act of hostility to the vast majority of Jewish and Israeli students.
One question that Harvard’s antisemitism report neither raises nor answers is where the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program — and its most controversial component, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative — came from in the first place. Who founded RPL and RCPI, and what was the intention of those founders? A partial answer is already public. The Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative was founded in 2018 as a merger of existing programs in the Divinity School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The key personnel in that merger became core faculty in the Religion in Public Life program. And the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative formed by that initial merger was funded by Ramez Sousou and his wife Tiziana.
Who is Ramez Sousou? According to his biography at the U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP) and other sources, Sousou was co-CEO of Soros Private Equity Partners and a member of the Management Committee of Soros Fund Management. Sousou then left to found TowerBrook Capital Partners, the first mainstream private equity firm to adopt the now controversial practice of ESG investing — investing for environmental, social, and governance (i.e. political) goals. Sousou also has a strong interest in Palestine. According to his biography at USMEP, Sousou is the chairman of the steering committees of the Gaza Health Alliance and Teach for Palestine. The USMEP, on whose international board Sousou sits, is run by Daniel Levy, a co-founder of the lobbying group J Street (seen as anti-Israel by its critics) and a frequent target of criticism by conservatives and supporters of Israel.
Critics of Harvard’s antisemitism report often complain that it is merely the product of pressure from billionaires. Well, it would seem that there is more than one kind of billionaire. We can only offer informed speculation at this point, but if RPL and RCPI were formed to carry out a political mission dear to the heart of a donor, that would certainly help to solve some mysteries. The Harvard report spends a lot of time highlighting the striking discrepancy between the public presentation of RPL and its seemingly obsessive focus on criticism of Israel. Yet if the point was to disguise a political mission, this discrepancy would make sense.
A final question is whether the antisemitism report is correct to attribute the political bias it exposes chiefly to a few programs lacking in proper supervision from tenured or tenure-track faculty. A systematic critique of that claim is beyond the scope of this piece. Let me say, however, that I am highly skeptical of the report’s points on this score.
The inbuilt political bias of Harvard Divinity School’s program in Religion and Public Life is of a piece with the postmodern and neo-Marxist turn in the academy as a whole. Critical race theory, which originated at Harvard Law School, is an analogous example. And there is reason to believe that similarly politicized teaching is going on in many other parts of Harvard.
We can take up these issues down the road. What’s notable now is that America’s oldest and most prestigious university has exposed, condemned, and taken steps to root out political indoctrination in its own house. That is something new. As prominent faculty begin to push back, a larger battle is joined. If the political indoctrination practiced by Harvard Divinity School’s program in Religion and Public Life was wrong, then what a huge portion of today’s academy does is also wrong. Let’s see if this battle spreads.