Harvard’s New Hire Says She’s Boycotting Israel and Avoids Synagogues. She’ll Be Teaching Judaism.
“Left Zionism behind,” she says.
Harvard University, which faces lawsuits and federal investigations over antisemitism, is launching a new course this spring titled “American Judaism.”
The teacher?
In 2014 she called the term “anti-Semitism” “profoundly overused” and said it should not apply to those who boycott Israel.
In a 2016 article in Ha’aretz, she declared that she had “left Zionism behind.”
“The Israel I once loved was a naive delusion,” she wrote, calling Israel, “a place that I abhor visiting, and to which I will contribute no money, whose products I will not buy, nor will I expend my limited but still to me, meaningful, political clout to support it.”
She wrote that Israel’s immigration laws allowing Jews from abroad to become citizens “can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.”
She wrote, “I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel.’ I just do not go and avoid many Jewish settings where I know Israel will loom large as an icon of identity.”
In August 2023, along with Derek Penslar, who is now the director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, she signed the “elephant in the room” letter, denouncing Israel for “apartheid” and accusing the Israeli government of aiming to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” That letter also called on rabbis and educators to “Demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.”
She also signed an October 2023 follow-up to the elephant-in-the-room letter, calling for an “immediate ceasefire” after the October 7 terrorist attack. “One massacre does not justify another,” that letter said.
She signed a December 2023 petition demanding, “We call on the US to stop its unconditional support of Israel’s assault on Gaza and flagrant violations of international humanitarian law.”
In February 2024, she wrote that boycott-Israel activists are “not antisemites or bad Jews. They might indeed be the best the Jewish community has to offer.”
She signed a March 2024 “Academics for Peace” petition headlined “Genocide is plausible, stop arms to Israel,” contending, “Israel’s assault on Gaza appears to include both acts and intent stated in the definition of genocide.”
In a May 2025 interview, she praised, “Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and others at the local and national levels. These groups are not only speaking out in horror at the genocide taking place in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Israel in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank, but they are important and loud voices opposing today’s assaults on democracy by the Trump administration.”
She also recorded a video for “Academics for Peace” denouncing Birthright Israel, a program that takes young Jews on trips to Israel, as “propaganda,” mentioning “multi-millionaire Michael Steinhardt,” who was one of my partners in the New York Sun and indeed one of the founders of that program.
The incoming Harvard professor, Hasia Diner, is 79 years old and retired from a position at NYU in 2023. Her title at Harvard is “visiting professor of Jewish studies.” Her scholarly work focused on social history of immigrant Jews; she wrote the volume covering 1820 to 1880, “A Time for Gathering,” in a five-volume series on the Jewish People in America that was brought out by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1992 and that I own and have read.
At least one previous Harvard visiting professor of Jewish studies, Shaul Magid, recently burrowed his way into a modestly longer-term and higher-status position as “Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence,” with a renewable 5-year term. Magid’s latest book, “The Necessity of Exile,” declared that “Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project,” and said that he doesn’t think “that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way.” The book, he writes, is “in some sense, anti-Zionist” or “more precisely…counter-Zionist.”
Both Magid and Diner are based at Harvard Divinity School.
You can watch Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum’s 7-minute video of what happened at his Harvard divinity graduation ceremony, which he said showed “the shocking levels at which Harvard students are indoctrinated.” Students were shouting “free Palestine” in the middle of the graduation.
As Rabbi David Wolpe, who was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School in 2023-2024, wrote in the Free Press, the September 2024 introductory address of the new dean of the Divinity School, Marla Frederick—”after the congressional hearings, after Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard’s president in January 2024,” as Wolpe put it — referred to “The Maafa, the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, the Nakba. It is impossible to compare the real human toll of devastation.” Wolpe called it an “odious juxtaposition. Those two unspeakable tragedies: Auschwitz and the founding of Israel.”
The April 29, 2025, report of the Harvard Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias goes into a lot of detail about an annual trip the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life Program organized to Israel and the West Bank that the school’s own staff described publicly in writing as having the purpose of “denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The task force report says, “Setting out in an instructional program to ‘dezionize’ the ‘consciousness’ of Jewish students is to craft instruction to target students based on their religious identity.”
The task force’s recommendations say, “aspects of Harvard Divinity School’s academic programs require significant reform.” It says “HDS could become a key player in constructing a healthy approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish civilization….We urge Harvard Divinity School to consider whether the addition of a ladder faculty member who writes and teaches in the mainstream of the modern American Jewish community would provide a voice that is missing on their campus. Such an addition could contribute to ensuring that the richness and diversity of the modern American Jewish mainstream are fully represented within the HDS community.”
Instead of a ladder faculty member “who writes and teaches in the mainstream of the modern American Jewish community,” the Divinity School has hired a counter-zionist, in Shaul Magid, and someone, in Hasia Diner, who says she “left Zionism behind” and who says she avoids many Jewish settings. And both those hires were made in the middle of a supposed university-wide hiring freeze that would have offered a fine reason to say “no.”
The president of Harvard, Alan Garber, was recently interviewed by the chairman of the board of the University of Chicago, David Rubenstein, inside the David Rubenstein Treehouse. Rubenstein pressed Garber about antisemitism at Harvard. Garber mentioned the task force and its recommendations, and then said “which we have implemented—we’re well on the way to implement—those.” Good for Garber for catching himself mid-sentence and correcting the false claim that the task force’s recommendations had been implemented. When it comes to adding a mainstream faculty member teaching about Judaism at the Harvard Divinity School, two hires have been made, but the task force’s recommendation has not been implemented.
One might reasonably object that faculty political activities or opinion-piece writing should not be considered at all in the hiring process, what matters is teaching and scholarly research and publishing. Or one might object that what matters is not whether the teaching or research are “mainstream,” but whether they are true (ask Einstein, or Galileo, about the differences between mainstream and true). Fair, but if part of the job at Harvard is teaching students to understand the world as it actually is, maybe a class on “American Judaism” should be taught by someone who hasn’t publicly declared herself to “feel a sense of repulsion” from the community’s institutions? Are the classes in Christianity at Harvard, if there are any left, taught by people repelled by churches? In Islam, by those repelled by mosques?
As it is, the many Jews who haven’t abandoned the Jewish state may be justified in starting to feel a “sense of repulsion” from the Harvard Divinity School. Who approved this hire? The same amateur Harvard Crimson ethicist who recently advised in writing, “If what you are asking is whether you are justified in letting go of your Zionist friends, then the matter is simple. The answer is yes”?
I wrote to Harvard Divinity School spokesman Tyler Sprouse, one of nine people in the Harvard Divinity School Communications office, yesterday first thing, asking why Diner was coming to Harvard and whether the dean of the divinity school was aware of her strident anti-Israel activism or had any concerns about how it will contribute to the climate of hostility to Israel and Zionism on the Harvard campus. I got not even the courtesy of a “no comment” in response.
Rabbi Wolpe, who spent a year at the Harvard Divinity School, called the Harvard antisemitism task force report “spraying perfume on a sewer.” When that headline was published back in May 2025, I had thought it was a little harsh.
Thank you: The Editors is a reader-supported publication that relies on paying customers. Unlike Harvard, we don’t have a $50 billion endowment. We don’t have any endowment, even one with soft private-equity marks. 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.
Who is responsible for these hires? Disgusting and tone deaf.
My only response is that Harvard must have a learning disability.