By Stanley Kurtz
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
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.
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