“Be More Anti-Zionist,” New Harvard Law School Fellow Urged
Faulted Biden for aiding Israel’s “mass slaughter” in Gaza
Harvard Law School is paying to bring a far-left anti-Israel lawyer to campus as a “Wasserstein Fellow” with a $1,000 honorarium plus travel expenses and an assignment to “counsel students about public service.”
The lawyer, Azadeh Shahshahani, is posting to social media that she is “excited to visit Harvard Law School as a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow!” and inviting Harvard students to “sign up for an advising meeting.” Shortly after I wrote to her and Harvard law school asking about her posts on X, the posts were deleted. But there are screenshots.
Among the lowlights:
Reposting a post from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Harvard President Claudine Gay had condemned that phrase, saying, “our community must understand that phrases such as ‘from the river to the sea’ bear specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel and engender both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community. I condemn this phrase and any similarly hurtful phrases.
Reposting a post that said, “stop asking Palestinians for alternatives to Hamas.”
Reposting a post that said, “Zionism must be abolished.”
Reposting a post that said, “Be more anti-Zionist in 2024. Never waver. Boycott Israel. Divest.”
A February 26, 2024, “viewpoint” article that Shahshahani co-wrote for In These Times was headlined “Complicity in Genocide—The Case Against the Biden Administration.”
“By looking at the charges and evidence presented against the Biden administration, a clear picture emerges: The United States is actively aiding a campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza being carried out by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the article said. “the United States government is currently facilitating the annihilation of Gaza and the Palestinian people….now is the time to hold the Biden administration accountable for its complicity in the crime of genocide.”
Shahshahani did not respond to an email from The Editors asking what she would say to Jewish or Israeli students at Harvard who are concerned that she will contribute to an already hostile environment for them.
The associate dean for communications and public affairs, Jeff Neal, who heads Harvard Law’s 14-person communications office staff at a moment when the university has been claiming lack of government funding is threatening life-saving cancer research, did not immediately respond to an email from The Editors asking how and why Shahshahani was awarded the fellowship.
The criteria for the fellowship state that “Three-day Fellow applicants should primarily be focused on US domestic issues and be based in the US.” However, Shahshahani does not appear to be primarily focused on US domestic issues; on July 14, 2025, she published a long article in the Yale Journal of International Law headlined, “The Colonial Order Prevails in Palestine: The Right to Self-Determination from a Third World Approach to International Law.”
The article is riddled with errors, omissions, and tendentious uses of evidence. Among them:
She writes about the Balfour declaration, that it “did not mention the Palestinians even once.” Yet the Balfour declaration says “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” That sure seems like a mention of the Palestinian Arabs.
She writes, “Zionists carried out the Nakba, violently and forcibly expelling approximately 750,000 to one million Palestinians.” It’s pretty clear and widely accepted that some Palestinians fled voluntarily, or by their own wartime choice, at the encouragement of invading Arab armies, which she doesn’t mention. The article by Efraim Karsh in the July/August 2000 issue of Commentary, “Were The Palestinians Expelled?” is particularly good on this point.
She also writes, “Zionism is a political ideology tracing back to the nineteenth century that emerged in response to growing antisemitism.” Yet Zionism predates the 19th century and stems also from Jewish religious, cultural, and people-based desire to return to the land where they were indigenous and from which they had been forcibly exiled. The Yale Journal of International Law article by Shahshahani hyperlinks to a definition of Zionism from the website of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a fringe anti-Israel activist group, not any kind of scholarly resource. Why not let Zionists self-define Zionism rather than relying on a hostile group to provide the definition?
Shahshahani is scheduled to lead a November 4, 2025 discussion at Harvard Law School on “Movement Lawyering: from the U.S. South to the Global South,” with “lunch provided.” The description of the Harvard event on her LinkedIn says she “provides support to Social Justice Movements in the Global South, from Brazil to Palestine,” but Harvard’s website has truncated that to “provides support to Social Justice Movements in the Global South.”
The context here is that Harvard Law School marked the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel by publishing a gushy profile of a British politician who has been one of Israel’s nastiest critics.
It was the law school where, in March 2025, a current student sought to join an antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard. As we reported then, “Two Current Harvard Students Ask to Join Kestenbaum’s Antisemitism Lawsuit,” March 21, 2025:
The law student identified in the suit as John Doe #2 was “trapped in Wasserstein Hall by a pro-Hamas mob with no response from Harvard,” the complaint says, referring to an October 19, 2023 anti-Israel demonstration at Harvard. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, and hid under desks.” When one of the students emailed the law school’s assistant director of student life, Jeffrey Sierra, asking what could be done to address the rampant antisemitism, he directed her to campus mental health services and said he was “not in a position to do more.”
In May 2025 the Harvard Law Review gave a $65,000 fellowship to an anti-Israel student who faced misdemeanor criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student during a campus protest (the case was eventually dealt with via a pre-trial diversion to community service and in-person anger-management training).
Also in May 2025, a Harvard Law professor speaking at a graduation Class Day event decried “atrocities” in “Palestine.”
Additional context comes from Harvard Kennedy School, where a Senior Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, on October 25 posted a public statement that, as auto-translated, says, “Some tweets I posted about the events of October 7, 2023, which were understood as praising attacks against Israel, were a misjudgment. Had I realized at the time that they targeted civilians, I would have condemned them immediately. I express my regret for any misunderstanding they caused, as violence against civilians is unacceptable and contradicts my convictions as a Muslim and an Arab. Freedom is achieved through peace, not violence.”
That statement’s careful wording suggests that Abdulla still believes (or has to for some reason maintain a public posture of believing) that Israeli soldiers, even those deployed defensively during a ceasefire at a time when Israel had entirely and unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza, are legitimate targets for attack.
“Fellows” at Harvard can mean a lot of different things, from a medical specialist in training to a member of Harvard’s governing corporation (“The President and Fellows of Harvard College”) but in these two cases, it means someone who isn’t a senior or junior professor but has some more attenuated and shorter-term affiliation with the university.
Thank you: The Editors is a reader-supported publication that relies on paying customers. Unlike Harvard, we don’t have a $50 billion endowment or hundreds of millions in government grants and tax-exempt bond financing. If you know someone who would enjoy or benefit from reading The Editors, please help us grow, and help your friends, family members, and associates understand the world around them, by forwarding this email along with a suggestion that they subscribe today. Or send a gift subscription. If it doesn’t work on mobile, try desktop. Or vice versa. Or ask a tech-savvy youngster to help. Thank you to those of who who have done this recently and thanks in advance to the rest of you.