BDS at Harvard
City Journal| J.J. Kimche and Angélique Talmor
A Harvard PhD student and MPP student argue that the hatred of Israel on Harvard’s campus, including some departments becoming “fortresses of anti-Israel ideology,” not only raises doubts around the quality of a Harvard eduction, but begs the question of whether Jewish students have a future at Harvard.
“The routine vilification of the State of Israel—both inside and outside the classroom—indicates that something in the contemporary Harvard education has gone seriously awry,” Kimche and Talmor explain. It is “symptomatic of larger trends: a retreat from robust critical thinking and a surrender to the most hysterical, least rigorous elements of campus activism.”
“Why have Harvard students, supposedly loyal to the value of veritas, abandoned the pursuit of complex truths in favor of wholesale condemnation of the world’s only Jewish country?” they ask.
Kimche and Talmor point to something more grave: “Inside many classrooms, Jewish students are too intimidated to speak out against the new intellectual and social orthodoxy that deems Israel to be the world’s worst human-rights violator… we can’t avoid the suspicion that such hatred of the world’s largest Jewish collective is a smokescreen for something darker,” begging the question, “do Jewish students have a future at Harvard?”
This article also appeared in the New York Post (7/9/22)
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