Harvard Rabbi Resigns from Anti-Semitism Committee After President’s Testimony: ‘The System at Harvard… Is Itself Evil’

(AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned from the university’s anti-Semitism advisory committee on Thursday, just two days after President Claudine Gay’s controversial congressional testimony earlier this week.

“As of today I have resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard. Without rehashing all of the obvious reasons that have been endlessly adumbrated online, and with great respect for the members of the committee, the short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped,” announced Wolpe in a statement on X.

He continued:

Still, there are several points worth making. I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person. Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas, and there are many, many honorable, thoughtful and good people at the institution. Harvard is still a repository of extraordinary minds and important research.

However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.

Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning. Part of the problem is a simple herd mentality – people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of, or not wishing to be disliked by taking an unpopular position. Some of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the sole or greatest victim. Some of it is simple, old fashioned Jew hatred, that ugly arrow in the quiver of dark hearts for millenia.

In this generation, outside of Israel, we are called to be Maccabees of a different order. We do not fight the actual battle but we search for the cruse of oil left behind. Remember the oil was to last one night, but lasted eight – which means there were seven nights of miracle. But of course the first night was the greatest miracle — because the motivation to light the initial candle, to ensure the continuity and vitality of tradition in each generation, that is the supreme miracle. Dispute but also create. Build the institutions you value, don’t merely attack those you denigrate. We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see. Time to kindle the first candle. Create that miracle for us and all Israel — Blessing to you and Hag Urim Sameach.

On Tuesday, Gay cited Harvard’s ostensible commitment to free speech during a back-and-forth with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) in which she refused to say whether calls “to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally” violated Harvard’s code of conduct.

Gay’s performance at the hearing on Tuesday was widely pilloried, including by the White House.

“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting – and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”

Wolpe himself had previously declared that Harvard had an anti-Semitism problem.

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