Antisemitism task forces at universities have done little to address the concerns of Jews about the pro-Hamas sentiment that has become more visible on campuses since the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel, experts say.
In the wake of pro-Hamas protests on college campuses and university presidents issuing responses that critics called inadequate to combat antisemitism on campus, some institutions of higher education have formed task forces or convened events to respond more fully to activists supporting the terrorist group in its war with Israel.
Some of those task forces, however, have come under scrutiny for including openly anti-Israel faculty members, providing simply “window dressing” to quell the criticism. The university efforts also face the additional challenge of balancing the safety and free speech rights of students and faculty, which are protected by the Constitution.
“The fact that university leaders have to assemble a task force to address antisemitism rather than simply exercising their power as leaders to combat Jew hatred is evidence of how weak and cowardly university leaders are on their issue,” Jay Greene, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, told the Washington Examiner. “It does not require a committee to identify and combat evil. But university leaders are unable to speak critically of the devil himself without hiding behind the skirts of a task force.”
Greene specifically criticized Harvard University’s task force, which was announced by interim President Alan Garber after a prior iteration formed by former President Claudine Gay “collapsed due to resignations and inaction.”
“It should be noted that Garber felt it necessary to form a task force of Islamophobia at the same time that he announced this new antisemitism task force,” Greene said. “This bizarre need to pair all efforts to address Jewish concerns with Islamic ones denies the reality that Jews are particularly facing a problem at Harvard in a way that Muslims are not. It’s as if Harvard paired the creation of a committee in response to the death of George Floyd with another to address the stress of police. Pairing these efforts together uses one to undermine the other.”
While not all members of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism are known, Jewish history professor Derek Penslar was appointed as co-chairman despite his statements against Israel, having called the country an apartheid regime.
Penslar, however, has also criticized the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, broadly seen as antisemitic, but he did sign on to a letter in August 2023, which states in part that Jews in America “have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Penslar said he sees the antisemitism task force as “an important opportunity to determine the nature and extent of antisemitism and more subtle forms of social exclusion that affect Jewish students at Harvard.”
Other schools have attempted to address the problem without forming a task force, including by convening panels to discuss the conflict in Israel and by elevating existing resources in their Jewish Studies departments or diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
At George Washington University, for example, a Dec. 4, 2023, panel discussion called “Understanding the Conflict in Israel & Palestine” featured academics who all have spoken publicly against Israel in some form.
One of the panelists, Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow who leads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, said in an X post on Sunday that “genocide is an incomplete descriptor of what Israel is doing in Gaza,” adding that “scholasticide, “medicide,” and “journocide” are “entirely new crimes that also need to be noted.”
“One of the poorest most war-torn nations on the planet had the temerity and dignity to stand up for the Palestinian people in Gaza facing genocide and that was just too much for the West to handle,” he also said in a Jan. 11 post.
Munayyer defended the comments, telling the Washington Examiner that criticizing the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism.
“The bad-faith effort to conflate criticism of the actions and policies of the state of Israel with antisemitism are deplorable and a double crime,” he said. “They not only attempt to silence voices for justice and human rights at a time when mass atrocities are being committed, they also cheapen the genuinely needed fight against antisemitism and all forms of bigotry.”
Another panelist, William Youmans, a GWU associate professor of media and public affairs and director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, said in a Friday X post that “Zionists called it colonization and no amount of revisionism can erase that.”
Two of the panelists had signed on to the same August 2023 letter labeling Israel a “regime of apartheid” that sparked the scrutiny of the Harvard antisemitism task force.
After the announcement of Penslar’s appointment to the Harvard task force and a subsequent Washington Free Beacon report about his past anti-Israel stance, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers said he had “lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.”
Criticism of Harvard has only grown since the announcement of the task force meant to quell it.
“Most Jews and supporters of Jews looking at Harvard’s ineptitude with respect to antisemitism feel the same way,” Greene said.
Harvard defended the decision to include Penslar on the antisemitism task force and praised his renowned scholarship of modern Jewish and Israeli history.
“He is widely respected across the Harvard community as someone who approaches his research and teaching with open-mindedness and respect for conflicting points of view and approaching difficult issues with care and reason,” a university spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “He is deeply committed to tackling antisemitism and improving the experience of Jewish students at Harvard.”
The situation is similar at other universities.
A professor at Cornell University recently called out the school for applying “window dressing” to the matter and using it as an excuse to be “doubling down on DEI.”
“Coming a day after a congressional letter putting Cornell’s federal funding at risk, the Cornell administration’s reaction seems like window dressing, to make it seem they are doing something,” law professor William Jacobson told Fox News. “The problem is not what some student put on his or her personal social media, as hateful as the statements may be, but the campus DEI culture that enables and encourages such hatred based on false oppressor-oppressed and decolonization narratives that leave Israel and Jews dehumanized.”
In response to calls for her resignation after congressional testimony, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth, who is Jewish, also announced an expansion of the elite school’s DEI initiatives to deal with antisemitism on campus.
The increased focus on what to do about pro-Palestinian activities on campus, which have included protests and explicit calls for genocide against Jews, forces schools to walk a tightrope when balancing free speech rights, academic discourse, and student safety, Zach Greenberg, senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Washington Examiner.
“Universities should protect students’ rights to express political issues and express their viewpoints on these issues,” he explained, noting that includes both sides of the argument on the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. “Where they get into trouble is if students are issuing true threats and threatening each other, they’re harassing each other, and disrupting university operations. When those occurrences happen, universities have to step in and address them, and in some situations, prevent the disruption and allow students to express themselves.”
The First Amendment sets a “very high standard because it protects the right to express political views and even offensive speech,” Greenberg added. “In general, universities should be protective of students who indeed call for genocide or call for violence, unless that call does develop into a true threat, a serious attempt at unlawful violence, or discriminatory harassment that’s so severe, pervasive, and offensive that it prevents students from getting an education.”
Part of the solution to the problem, Greene explained, is that university codes of conduct are not being enforced consistently across the board because when “certain kinds of actions would be impermissible if the targets were other racial/ethnic or sexual groups, then they must also be impermissible if the targets were Jews.”
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“The application of a double standard where Jews are less protected is a defining feature of antisemitism,” he said. “It is also important to note that blocking entrances, disrupting classes or lectures, or physically assaulting students are not covered by free speech.”
Greene added that if university task forces were looking to be effective, they should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which “clearly defines certain kinds of anti-Israel activity as antisemitic for the purposes of complying with their Title VI obligations,” build out academic exchanges with Israel, and bring pro-Israel speakers on campus.