A prominent rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard University quit the school’s antisemitism committee Thursday, writing on X that the college is helping to cast Jews are “oppressors.”
“The system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” Wolpe wrote.
The exit came just days after Harvard President Claudine Gay’s controversial congressional testimony on the school’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School praised Gay as a “kind and thoughtful” person, but said her congressional comments were “painfully inadequate” in addressing spiraling antisemitism on the Cambridge campus and elsewhere.
“Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil,” he wrote. “Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe.
Wolpe, who also holds a rabbinical position with the Anti-Defamation League, cautioned that anti-Israel sentiment at Harvard and other campuses is expanding and quickly becoming entrenched.
“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,” Wolpe wrote. “This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.”
Gay and other university leaders drew fury from lawmakers for arguing that virulently anti-Israeli viewpoints were 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,” fumed House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a Harvard graduate. “Are you aware of that?”
Gay said she found language personally abhorrent, but asserted “that speech did not cross that barrier.”
Financier Bill Ackman, a champion of Israel who previously called for a hiring ban on graduates who openly oppose the Jewish state, bashed Gay’s appearance before congress.
Ackman went further Thursday, suggesting that Gay, who is black, was only hired due to the school’s fixation on diversity.
Wolpe asserted campus hostility towards Israel was rooted less in an objective weighing of the country’s actions than surrender to a “herd mentality.”
Other groups, he said, are attempting to monopolize suffering in an effort to boost their social status.
“Some of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the sole or greatest victim,” he said. “Some of it is simple, old fashioned Jew hatred, that ugly arrow in the quiver of dark hearts for millennia.”