Duncan Kennedy Is a Perfect Example of Campus Israel-Hate

Plus, Biden’s $64 million anonymous donor; economists define newsworthiness

An anti-Israel protest at Harvard Law School, October 2023.

The Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, emeritus at Harvard Law School, Duncan Kennedy, may be the perfect topic for The Editors. He brings together in one package so many  of our regular themes—the failures of higher education and the failures of the press when it comes to free enterprise, religion, and America’s role in the world.

Kennedy has been on my radar screen for a while, but he landed on it again with a new piece in the Crimson headlined “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” He could have skipped the question mark, because his claim clearly is that it is.

Kennedy’s article is full of false claims. For example, he asserts, “the apartheid accusation is rarely discussed in the mainstream media.” That is simply inaccurate; a search for Israel and apartheid in the New York Times, for example, generates more than 300 results for the past five years. He refers to “approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers” in the West Bank; the actual number is more like 500,000, and the larger number is only attained by adding in Israeli residents of eastern Jerusalem, including neighborhoods, like the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, where Jews have lived for many centuries. He refers to “the basic legal structure of separation and domination in the West Bank, which is effectively race-based (Jewish vs. Palestinian).” Yet Jews are not a “race,” and in fact the distinctions that Israel draws between Israeli citizens of any race or religion and noncitizens are similar to those drawn by America at our own border crossings or in our own territories. 

What’s nice about Kennedy’s case, though, is that there is such ample biographical information about him available online that it makes it easy to trace where the errors and the radicalism come from. In a 2022 podcast, he tells the story of his education at Shady Hill School, Phillips Andover, Harvard, and Yale Law School. His step-mother Mary Brewster Kennedy was the sister of Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr.  He describes himself as an atheist. “It’s not like there’s a conflict between your elite background and your radicalism. The elite background is what constitutes the context, causes, generates, feeds your radicalism,” he explains, talking about one of his Shady Hill School teachers but in language that could have been about himself.

In an interview published in 2015, he explains how he started a Marx Study Group at Harvard in the 1970s and read Karl Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question.” “Marx’s theory of conflict as the motor of history, class struggle, ideology critique, and his exquisite polemical historical writings, especially ‘On the Jewish Question’, were foundational for my work,” Kennedy explains. That “On the Jewish Question” essay includes Marx’s infamous line, “Let us consider the actual worldly Jew…What is his worldly God? Money. …Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.” 

In another interview, conducted in 2014, Kennedy confessed that he hadn’t been to Israel since 1992 or 1993, and dilates on this theme of Jewish money: “you can’t underestimate everything from inter-marriage to the general social integration of educated, relatively wealthy Jews into the system, but also their own experience of Jewish success. So their paranoia about anti-Semitism is way, way down. They actually are likely to say, ‘we are fucking rich. Wow.’” 

In the same interview, Kennedy attacked Sheldon Adelson, a politically active philanthropist and businessman, blaming Jews themselves for bringing on anti-Jewish hate: “They don’t seem to realize that Las Vegas casino owners…if there is a form of money which is disreputable in American culture—it is that. So it’s inviting anti-Semitic stereotyping.”

One of Kennedy’s works proposed, as he summarized it, “equal pay for everyone, random admissions for law school, equalization of law schools by random assignment of professors within a given geographical area.”

The “equal pay for everyone” plan sure could help to cure the problem of rich Jews.

Kennedy’s piece for the Crimson argues against what he says is an overly expansive government definition of antisemitism that would penalize calling Israel racist. One can certainly  understand why Kennedy would be concerned about the definition of antisemitism. 

The nice thing about this particular story, though, for our purposes, is that it shows how the Jew-hate and the anti-meritocracy and the anti-capitalism and the disregard for truth all travel together, and how news organizations (in this case, the Crimson) and universities (in this case, Harvard) all too frequently enable and elevate the weak ideas rather than subjecting them to withering scrutiny.