New York Times Opinion Writer Explains Lack of Pro-Trump Columnists

Harvard Jewish Studies lecturer says Mamdani poses no threat

A poster advertising yesterday’s Harvard event with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and Professor Derek Penslar. Photography and video were banned inside the event, and I complied with that rule, so readers will have to settle for this image. Photo: The Editors.

The New York Times opinion section lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a hard time finding people who are “pro-Trump, honest, and not racist,” Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg says.

“There’s not that many people in the middle of that Venn diagram,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg made her remarks Thursday afternoon October 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the annual Doft Lecture of Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. The event, “Authoritarianism, Antisemitism, and the Future of America,” attracted about 30 people, including maybe ten students and one armed Harvard University Police officer who loomed outside the room as a security presence. It was sponsored by the Alan and Elisabeth Doft Lecture and Publication Fund.

I had heard about the event from a newsletter of Harvard’s “intellectual vitality” initiative. The moderator of the event, Derek Penslar, who is William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, said he’d appreciated Goldberg’s “The Argument” podcast with Ross Douthat, a conservative. America “is suffering from a lack of civil argument,” Penslar said.

Alas, the Doft Lecture featured only the left-leaning Goldberg, not the more conservative Douthat, so for “vitality” the audience had to settle for Penslar, a liberal, pushing Goldberg with questions. He appeared to be doing his best, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the event from turning into a kind of anti-Trump rally and group therapy session—an strange look for a university that intermittently claims to be recommitting itself to serious scholarship and research and to viewpoint diversity rather than to politicized groupthink.

Where this was headed was clear almost from the start. “I grew up in Buffalo. I got out as soon as I could,” Goldberg said. That condescending comment was greeted by the Harvard audience with appreciative laughter. Compare it with the more gracious way another prominent journalist, Tim Russert, described the same hometown: “I was surrounded by beauty and history and the sense of possibility that a great city instills in its residents. Buffalo captured my imagination and remains a part of me to this day.”

Goldberg described her youth in Buffalo as an activist forming human chains to defend abortion clinics from Operation Rescue protesters who had been invited in, she said, by the city’s Catholic mayor.

“My parents forced me against my will to go to temple, which I absolutely hated,” Goldberg said by way of explaining her Jewish background.

Goldberg said antisemitism is far worse on the right than on the left. “I just think the antisemites on the left have dramatically less power,” she said, describing them as on “the absolute outskirts of anything like mainstream politics.”

“I do not believe that antisemitism and antizionism are the same thing,” she said.

As for Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, while she said his answer to a recent question about whether Hamas should disarm was “a bad answer,” she said she did not find him threatening.

Much of the event was devoted to commiserating about the evils of the Trump administration. “Trump Two is Trump One with the guardrails off,” Goldberg said, complaining about what she said was the capitulation of certain universities, the media, and tech companies to the administration instead of forming “more of a kind of united front.”

“Our institutions have failed. Not just our media. All our institutions have failed,” she said.

“Things are looking pretty bad right now,” Penslar said. “Do you actually think there’s going be elections in 2026 and 2028?”

Goldberg said she thought there would be elections but questioned whether they would be “free and fair.”

“You have elections in Russia,” she said, citing Governor Pritzker of Illinois who said Trump is getting people used to troops on the street. She accused Republicans of trying to tilt the result by “rigging the system” with the “way that these maps are being redrawn.”

Goldberg said that Republican efforts to “go after the universities” echoed authoritarian tactics seen in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. She spoke of Governor DeSantis’s effort to remake New College in Florida. “They recruited a lot of Christian homeschooled athletes,” she said, a line that drew a reaction of derisive laughter from the Harvard audience in the same way that the initial put-down of the city of Buffalo did.

In response to a questioner who asked about whether anti-Israel obsession does constitute antisemitism, Goldberg insisted, “there are real nuances here.” She said a singleminded focus on Israel might stem from its actions being done with American aid money. “I think you can be anti-Israel because you think that Israel is committing grave human rights violations,” she said.

In the question and answer period, one questioner—it’s possible it was the interim Harvard history department chair, Daniel Smail, who is Frank Baird Jr. Professor of History, though I am not certain—asked about an email from Israel saying Trump should be given “enormous credit” for the ceasefire and hostage release deal. “I could not read after this point,” the questioner said, seemingly flummoxed by the notion of giving Trump credit for anything.

Goldberg replied, “I actually do think he deserves a lot of credit for bringing this about.” Goldberg claimed Trump “twisted Netanyahu’s arm to get to yes.” Penslar replied that some of the same traits that make Trump “such a disaster for this country” may “be helpful” in negotiating with Middle Eastern leaders.

In response to an audience question about something she has changed her mind about, Goldberg said she had come around to Douthat’s belief “about the social utility of religion.”

“I’m still not a religious person myself,” she said. Yet, “secularism isn’t enough for a lot of people. I mean, it’s enough for me,” she insisted. For others, though, the “absence of meaning” may prove “destabilizing.”

I was mildly tempted to ask a question rebutting some of Goldberg’s statements.

For example, on the “troops in the streets” issue, I might have noted that the National Guard is deployed routinely for major events ranging from disaster recovery to providing security for the Boston Marathon, without sending America sliding toward martial law. Or on the rigged-election issue, I might have noted that New York Democrats also tried to gerrymander congressional districts to their advantage in ways that courts ruled illegal. On the “New College” issue, I might have noted that it is a sideshow to the more substantive higher education reform under way at the University of Florida, which is getting real traction in attracting high-quality talent. On the crediting of Trump for the ceasefire deal, I might have noted that the deal was achieved in part by Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces and Air Force putting pressure on Hamas and Qatar and by weakening Hamas’s allies in Iran and Hezbollah. And that Trump built trust with Israel by providing arms, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing sovereignty in the Golan. I might have pointed out that U.S. elections are run by state and local officials, and wondered how doubting their integrity in advance of 2026 or 2028 is so different from Trump questioning the 2020 outcome. Or I might have asked her to go into some more detail on why Mamdani’s answer on disarming Hamas was bad, and why she thinks he gave it, and why she finds that not threatening. (In last night’s mayoral debate, asked the same question, Mamdani said the ceasefire meant both sides should lay down their arms, but he again stopped short of backing the disarmament of Hamas that the deal calls for.) Or I might have asked whether, if Jew-hate is as fringe a phenomenon on the left as Goldberg claims, why Rep. Seth Moulton kicked off his Massachusetts primary campaign against Senator Markey by announcing that he’d refuse and return money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. I might have said it seems pretty closed-minded to appear to dismiss all 77 million people who voted for Trump in 2024 as either racist or dishonest. Or I might have asked her whether she is bringing her own kids to synagogue the way her parents did to her, and, if not, what identity and values and meaning she expects them to grow up with.

But I was at the event to observe and report, not to provide to Harvard on a volunteer basis the intellectual vitality it claims to seek.

I would offer to speak myself next year, but my own sense is that an annual Jewish studies lecture is best delivered by a genuine scholar, not by a journalist who already has a platform. The best Jewish learning I had all week came not from anything Harvard- or New York Times-provided but rather from Rav Yosef Zvi Rimon, who offered a two-page source sheet with guidance on “What Should One Say Upon the Release of the Hostages?” It came to me via a student who could easily be at Harvard but is in Jerusalem instead.

Rimon turns out to have been a student of Aharon Lichtenstein, who got a doctorate in English literature from Harvard in 1957. That was a long time ago. I don’t want to overly romanticize Israeli West Bank Orthodoxy (or any other kind of Orthodoxy), but I have a pretty highly developed sense of quality, and it resonated with the Rimon source-sheet in a way that it just didn’t with the Penslar-Goldberg conversation. With an annual lecture, as with the Red Sox and the annual holiday and Torah-reading cycle of Judaism itself, there’s always next year.

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