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.
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“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
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