Harvard University announced the creation of an antisemitism task force late last week, and it’s already facing intense scrutiny for choosing as its co-chair a professor who has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and labeled the Jewish state “a regime of apartheid.”
Interim Harvard President Alan Garber named Derek Penslar, a historian and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, as the task force’s co-leader, an appointment that quickly drew the scorn of Jewish leaders and prominent figures within the Ivy League school’s ecosystem, Jewish Insider reported.
Listen to them on the latest episode of “Quick Start”
“Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” Penslar told JTA earlier in January. “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.”
Those comments, though, are mild in comparison to things Penslar said last year.
For a December column published in The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student-led newspaper, the professor in question argued the focus on the rise of antisemitism at Harvard has “obscured the vulnerability of pro-Palestinian students, who have faced harassment by actors outside of the university and verbal abuse on and
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN