Harvard Divinity School Professors to Headline Jewish Anti-Zionism Symposium
Two newly hired Harvard professors are set to appear at a Boston University symposium and book launch promoting Jewish anti-Zionism, an event that raises questions about Harvard's stated commitment to combating antisemitism.
Two newly appointed Harvard professors are scheduled to appear next month at a Boston University symposium and book launch devoted to Jewish anti-Zionism, an event that is drawing scrutiny as Harvard points to those same hires as evidence of its commitment to combating antisemitism.
Jessica Marglin, the newly installed Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization at Harvard, and Shaul Magid, Harvard Divinity School's Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence, are listed among the featured participants at the gathering hosted by Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies. According to the school, Marglin will spend three hours at the event, moderating a ninety-minute panel titled «Jewish Anti-Zionism in History» and taking part in a second ninety-minute session on «Jewish Anti-Zionism Now.»
The event serves as a kickoff for Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, edited by Magid and Zev Mishell, a 2025 graduate of Harvard Divinity School. The keynote speaker is Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, who has backed a boycott of Israel since at least 2014 and who described the October 7, 2023 attacks as «not a terrorist attack, not an antisemitic attack» but rather «an act of armed resistance.» Butler has characterized the attacks as «an uprising born of a state of subjugation and directed against a violent state apparatus.»
The book's introduction, available from Princeton University Press, frames its purpose in explicitly advocacy terms. The editors argue that «for decades, Jewish Zionists have systematically marginalized Palestinian voices from Jewish schools, camps, and mainstream institutions while pushing a one-sided narrative of Jewish identity and Middle East history.» They complain of «a veritable cottage industry» in which «spurious accusations of antisemitism are unleashed on social justice activists, particularly those involved in pro-Palestine activism.»
The introduction further contends that Jewish anti-Zionists have been «demonized as ‘self-hating,’ as traitors, and, more recently as ‘Un-Jews’ rejecting a supposedly monolithic Zionist Jewish consensus,» calling this «a form of tacit dehumanization, even of internal antisemitism.» It criticizes what it describes as «the adoption of IHRA's working definition on antisemitism and its weaponization to attack free speech.»
That passage is notable because Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as part of a legal settlement with Jewish students, a settlement that federal courts have found the university failed to honor. The book's introduction thus denounces the very definition that the discriminated-against students had demanded.
The introduction also situates the volume in the aftermath of the war in Gaza. «Given Israel's destruction of Gaza and the moral and political abyss we now find ourselves in … we are elevating these anti-Zionist traditions from the dustbin of Jewish history,» the editors write. They add that although Jews were often visibly present at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, «many in the media, government, and establishment Jewish organizations sought to paint these protests as antisemitic,» a characterization the book calls «often spurious.»
Neither Marglin nor Mishell responded to emailed requests for comment. The event is likely to intensify an ongoing debate over whether Harvard can reform its approach to the study of Jewish history and antisemitism, or whether, as some critics argue, the institution's direction is beyond correction.
The symposium comes as Harvard remains locked in a multi-billion-dollar dispute with the Trump administration over antisemitism on campus. In court documents and public statements, the university has cited new faculty hires as proof of what it calls its «commitment to combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias,» noting that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has dedicated additional resources to Hebrew and Judaic studies, including an offer for a chair in Jewish history and culture, and that the Divinity School hired for the position of Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence.
The juxtaposition of those hires with an event promoting anti-Zionist thought has fueled skepticism among critics. At an October 13 event marking the 25th anniversary of Martin Kramer's book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Kramer said he saw no potential for reform at Harvard. Attributing an idea to Ruth Wisse, he remarked: «I know Harvard, and Harvard's not going to change … the focus has to be on creating alternatives.»
5
