Two of Harvard’s New Anti-Israel Hires Already Had Full-Professor Spouses

“All of this is thanks to my wife,” explains scholar recruited despite “freeze”

A public Facebook post by Harvard’s new Ford Foundation Professor of Middle Eastern Studies says “all of this is thanks to my wife.” She’s a professor at Harvard, too.

Shaul Magid was named in July 2025 to a new post as Harvard Divinity School’s first ever “Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence.” 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.”

Adam Mestyan also started at Harvard this year as the newly arrived Ford Foundation Professor of Middle Eastern Studies. He signed a 2014 petition favoring a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and his social media feed included photos of a 2024 protest “against the occupation Massacres in #Gaza.”

What do Magid and Mestyan have in common, other than opposition to Zionism or Israel and being recruited as exceptions to what Harvard says is a university-wide hiring freeze?

They both have spouses who already worked at Harvard.