Ruth Wisse: Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost
The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948. It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name. Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.The age-old link between antisemitism and misogyny
The goal of destroying Israel remains central to Arab and Islamist identity and was admitted to Harvard along with some foreign students and investors. The Education Department reports the university received more than $100 million from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bangladesh between January 2020 and October 2024.
In 2007 I began warning successive presidents and deans that academic standards were being violated by the substitution of anti-Israel propaganda for a comprehensive program in the Center for Middle East Studies. They acknowledged the problem but refused to address it. As long as other institutions took Muslim money and ignored the war against the Jews, why should Harvard be holier than the pope?
Oct. 7, like Kristallnacht in 1938, forced some people to confront what they had tried to ignore. Students and faculty celebrating the atrocities against Israel could have been perpetrating them, given the chance. A committee of the new Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance investigated the campus “hatred” and found it “worse than we had anticipated.” Ideological anti-Zionism governed not only the Center for Middle East Studies but also the School of Public Health and the Divinity School and figured in departments ranging alphabetically from anthropology and African American Studies to the Weatherhead Institute of International Affairs, and academically from music to the medical school. Harvard undertook a similar review only under pressure from Congress.
The university had taken steps to prevent campus unrest—by curtailing the Jewish and Christian presence. The Semitic Museum, established by Jacob Schiff in 1907 to make the same point as the Abraham Accords about the common sources of the three religions, was renamed the Museum of the Ancient Near East. The only vestige of Schiff’s intention remains in carved stone above the entrance. Archeological projects in Israel were discontinued and museum collections that once centered on the Bible and Jerusalem were refocused on the pyramids. The Harvard Divinity School restructured its curriculum to reflect that it was no longer a Christian or Unitarian seminary but a “pluralistic” religious-studies program.
Just when Harvard’s proud heritage should have been strengthened, biblical studies were degraded, and its traditions put on the defensive—Christianity even more than Judaism. Islamism was on the rise against America in decline.
There are still good people and programs at Harvard, and I am grateful for my time there. In an ideal world the government wouldn’t micromanage universities. But if Harvard shirks its responsibility to shore up the foundations of America and allows itself to be hijacked by an Islamist-inspired grievance coalition, why would it expect any support from the government?
Whether this is what most trans people want is an open question. We only hear the loudest, most extreme advocates of a cohort whose national numbers are unclear, and whose consensus view is thus unknowable. How many trans people are more concerned with, say, the lack of tailored healthcare, but have very good reasons not to put themselves in the issue’s white hot spotlight, we can only guess.Seth Mandel: Zoning Out the Jews
It’s worth noting that trans rights are not inherently incompatible with the interests of women. To navigate a way forward between the sex-based rights of women and the equally valid civil rights of trans people is possible. But not when one side forever rejects – furiously, implacably, intractably – any hint of such an accommodation. If that sounds familiar to any Jewish person who supports a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and despairs at just who Israel is supposed to negotiate with towards such a goal, then well it might.
This is what happens when an initially legitimate cause becomes a quasi-religious hybrid of a fandom and a cult. Thus does Hamas’ butchery of Jews and cruel oppression of its own people become “legitimate resistance”; thus does misgendering a rapist in a blond wig become a more grievous offence than the predator’s own. The welfare, the real lives, of the people involved are sidelined in favour of what gratifies their self-selecting advocates: the thrill of absolutism; the utter absence of doubt or self-reflection; the gleeful, self-valorising flights of grandiose rhetoric; the cosplay; above all, the joy of lighting upon an enemy for whom one’s exultant hatred far surpasses one’s advertised compassion for those one champions.
It is revealing that at the apex of The Good People™’s demonology stand the twin evils: Zionist and Terf. Jews and women. Jack Holland’s 2006 book Misogyny, which bears the subtitle The World’s Oldest Prejudice, details the frequent historical conjunction with the second-oldest. This unholy alliance offers a perfect example of what The Good People™ would call intersectionality; one to which their cognitive dissonance blinds them, given their camp’s delight in directing vitriolic abuse towards insubordinate Jewish women in particular. Antisemitism and misogyny: hand in glove down the ages, long before the state of Israel was ever dreamt of, long before gender identity was conceptualised. There is perhaps no vanity more risible than the unblinking conviction of The Good People™ that they are “on the right side of history” as they refashion for the 21st century its two most archaic wrongs.
It’s not difficult to suss out town officials’ motives. Last year, Mayor Derek Armstead was recorded telling school officials that hiring practices should be in accord with “what has to happen in order to keep our community being taken over by guys with big hats and curls.”
Landa wondered why towns keep doing this to themselves: Clifton, Toms River, and Jackson (towns near where I was born and raised) all tried zoning discrimination and eventually all lost lawsuits.
But there’s another aspect to this that has always bothered me. Having reported on land-use law and property disputes in New Jersey early in my career, one theme was hammered home: Residents wanted construction that wouldn’t add school-aged children to the town’s population, because that would cost the public-school system more money and that, in turn, would necessitate higher property taxes.
What happens when a large group of Orthodox Jews moves into town? It’s a municipal dream come true: They don’t put kids in the school system, so their taxes essentially subsidize the existing student population, and because of holidays and other observances they spend less time on roads and using other public services.
Orthodox Jews tend to be a massive gift to a town’s finances, paying into services they don’t use and driving up property values. The only reason to work so hard to prevent them from living in your town is if you hate Jews more than you like the town you claim to serve. Anti-Semitism is self-defeating, rarely more so than for a municipal official.
And that’s the truly disturbing thing about the rise in anti-Semitism in America. Jew-hatred trumps every other concern. It is irrational, and much of the time its purveyors cannot be reasoned with. In Jersey City in 2019, it ended in a mass shooting of Jewish establishments.
And as always, the supposed provocation is Jews merely living somewhere. A chunk of America is trying to drag the country back to where it was 100 years ago regarding its treatment of Jews. And some of the worst cases barely make headlines outside of local news.
