Harvard Divinity School teaches a diverse set of opinions, all of which happen to be anti-Zionist ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, May 12, 2025

Harvard Divinity School teaches a diverse set of opinions, all of which happen to be anti-Zionist

The Harvard report on antisemitism on campus includes seven pages on Harvard Divinity School's relentless anti-Zionist bias. It notes that there is nothing wrong with teaching criticism of Zionism but the coursework is insanely one-sided and meant to indoctrinate students to hate Israel. Even their trips to Israel are meant to " denot[e] the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness."

The course material framed Zionism as Jewish sin. One speaker spoke of “a specific Jewish sinfulness against the Palestinians," another spoke on “extricating Judaism from state violence and from the idolatry of Israel." A moderator told that speaker, a prominent anti-Zionist "rabbi," that he had a responsibility to atone for being “complicit in power and abuse and displacement [of Palestinians].”

It is difficult to view this religious language aimed at demonizing Jews - sometimes by Jews, sometimes by gentiles - as anything but antisemitic.

Class materials deliberately excluded anything remotely Zionist. A class on “Religion and Peace in Israel/Palestine” started with the lecturer saying, “The discourse is saturated with the Israeli narrative. Therefore, I decided, with a heavy heart, to remove Israeli sources from the syllabus. We will focus solely on Palestinian literature because power disparities, methodology, and conscience demand it.”

One of the anti-Zionist professors at Harvard, an Israeli named Atalia Omer, was incensed by this description of her program. She wrote an article for the Guardian about how unfair the description of Harvard's Religion and Public Life Program was. Yet her criticism in no way contradicts the description of the program in the report. Every example she gives of the "diversity" of Harvard's RPL towards Israel is anti-Zionist:

The report also erases the rich diversity of Jewish voices we brought into our classrooms. It claims our program focused on “non-mainstream Jewish perspectives,” dismissing people like Noam Shuster Eliassi, a Mizrahi Jewish Israeli comedian whose work was supported by our fellowship program and is now featured at the Sundance Film Festival. It ignores events that engaged deeply with Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish experiences, including our commemoration of the Israeli Black Panthers’ Passover Haggadah—a powerful symbol of anti-racist struggle in Israeli history.

And it entirely omits our programming on antisemitism itself, including a discussion of alternative definitions of antisemitism like the Jerusalem Declaration, which, unlike IHRA, carefully distinguishes between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews.

In short, Harvard’s report does not just mischaracterize a program. It attempts to redraw the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy.

Not one of her examples can be described as remotely Zionist or positive towards Zionism. (The comedian she mentions is hostile towards the Abraham Accords. The Israeli Black Panthers' Passover Haggadah is about discrimination against Mizrahi Jews in Israel - in 1971.)

Omer's article proves that the Harvard antisemitism description of the RPL is accurate.

Considering that 95% of Jews are Zionists, to brag that her school does not seem to mention a single Zionist perspective in anything but a negative manner proves the point of the report - Harvard's Divinity School, the same one that just hosted Peter Beinart referring to terrorism as "armed resistance against civilians," is thoroughly anti-Zionist. and in many ways classically antisemitic when its only mention of Judaism in context of the conflict is to characterize Jews and Judaism as being evil.