Harvard Makes Exceptions to Hiring Freeze to Add Jewish Studies Professors

Raiding USC; Beyond courtroom faceoff, academic talent search moves slowly

An anti-Israel “die in” protest on the steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, March 2025. Photo: The Editors

The courtroom faceoff this week between lawyers for Harvard and the federal government over billions of dollars in research funding and Harvard’s antisemitism generated front-page headlines and a social media post from President Trump describing the federal judge, Allison Burroughs, as a “TOTAL DISASTER” and Harvard as “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.”

Trump said this afternoon in the Oval Office that he’d also cut back future funding of Harvard, an issue the court case doesn’t directly address. “We want money to go to all universities, not Harvard…They’re not going to get very much,” he said.

Yet behind the scenes, and not previously reported elsewhere, Harvard has been quietly and very slowly moving to improve its academic standing in the field of Jewish studies. It once dominated this field, with star professors such as Isadore Twersky, who in addition to serving as the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Philosophy at Harvard was also an Orthodox rabbi who served as the rebbe of the Talner hasidic sect. Those professors attracted undergraduates and graduate students.

Harvard’s hiring spree is not quite the academic equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wooing artificial intelligence whizzes to Meta from Silicon Valley startups by offering nine-figure offers. But there are certain parallels, starting with the realization by Harvard that if it doesn’t make some high-profile hires, it will fall further behind. Yet Harvard’s hiring differs from private-sector technology companies in that even a well-funded university that is trying with apparent sincerity to improve is moving at what seems to non-academics like a glacially slow pace, and with only mixed success. In comparison to the accelerated and costly legal, lobbying, and public relations effort Harvard has devoted to the research funding court battle, the faculty hiring project is happening on a more leisurely academic timeline, which means some students currently at Harvard may be gone before they benefit from any improvements.

Even that slow pace risks angering other constituencies on the campus. On July 14, Harvard President Alan Garber, Provost John Manning, Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick, and Vice President for Finance Ritu Kalra announced that “the University-wide hiring freeze for faculty and staff will continue, with accommodations for extraordinary cases such as positions essential to fulfilling the terms of gift- or grant-funded projects.” The same letter mentioned “painful layoffs.” With some parts of Harvard laying off staff and most of Harvard facing a hiring freeze, newly arriving Jewish studies scholars may face a somewhat ambivalent embrace from the rest of the university.

Here’s a rundown, with names, of what’s happening, in detail, on the faculty hiring front at Harvard, in Jewish studies: