Why a Rabbi Resigned From Harvard’s Antisemitism Committee

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: And now, news today from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard’s highest governing body announced that Claudine Gay will remain as president. This after an uproar about the handling of antisemitism on campus and controversial testimony on the matter in front of Congress. Rabbi David Wolpe was on Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group, but resigned over what he says was the university’s failure to take its advice. Here is Rabbi Wolpe talking to Hari Sreenivasan about that decision.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Rabbi David Wolpe, thanks so much for joining us. Before we get to the congressional testimony, I want to back up a second here. And what was the purpose of the committee that Harvard formed that you were a member of?

RABBI DAVID WOLPE, VISITING SCHOLAR, HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL: After October 7th, the president realized once letters had come out and protests had been exploding all over campus that we had, in her own words, a problem with antisemitism at Harvard. And so, she called me and a couple of other people and said, would you be willing to be on a committee to help us address this? And of course, I said yes, and so, did a number of other faculty and alumni. And we were supposed to advise the president on how to tackle this problem.

SREENIVASAN: Got it. So, what has been the work of the committee so far? Have you met? Have you made progress toward things?

WOLPE: Well, we met many times. We met twice a week. Our — in advance. It was said that our deliberations were going to be confidential, but I would say — I can certainly say that we tendered a lot of advice.

SREENIVASAN: OK. And did you feel that the committee was making progress towards the goals?

WOLPE: If I had felt that we were making progress towards the goals, I think I would have stayed on the committee, but it seems to me that the situation was getting progressively worse and many of the things that I individually certainly felt needed to happen almost immediately didn’t happen.

SREENIVASAN: OK. So, now, let’s kind of, get our audience up to speed of what happened this past week, and the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn all testified in front of Congress and they were asked by Representative Elise Stefanik, if calling for the genocide of Jews violated the school’s code of conduct. Now, each of the three gave very carefully worded answers. What was your concern about that?

WOLPE: My concern was actually even less the content of the answer than the tone of the answer. That is, I was hoping for some indignation for some, I’m president of a university and I can’t stand that there’s antisemitism at my university and I’m going to do everything I possibly can to address it because this is unacceptable and wrong. And instead, you got a sort of, you know, a parade of legalese and equivocation and qualification and I won’t (ph) envision.

SREENIVASAN: Look, I know you’re a rabbi and you deal with the matters of the soul a lot more than everyone else, but do you think this is the core of these three presidents or, you know, look, were they. prepped by their lawyers to mind their Ps and Qs and not say something that might be used against them later, and ironically, which is what happened?

WOLPE: So, first of all, I mean, my interactions with Claudine Gay, I like her and think she’s very thoughtful and good and kind. I mean, I’ve always had very good interactions with her. One of the things that you learn as a rabbi is it’s very easy to leap to conclusions about people’s souls. And if you don’t believe me, just, you know, look on social media, people are doing it all the time, saying, this person is like this and that person is like that. I think certainly the legal advice played a role, but I also think that self-conception might have something to do with it. If you think of yourself, as I am leading this great institution, and it doesn’t matter what other people are going to say about it, I have to take this stand because I am the leader of this great institution, maybe that puts a little rocket fuel under your rhetoric, and we didn’t see that.

SREENIVASAN: This weekend, the University of Pennsylvania president, Liz Magill resigned. She said in a video that she posted. I want to quote here, “In that moment, I was focused on our university’s long-standing policies aligned with the U.S. Constitution which say that speech alone is not punishable.” She went on to say, “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.” What did you make of that?

WOLPE: I think that that’s exactly right. I think that it is when you create a climate of anger and intimidation on a college campus, you can’t do what campuses are intended to do, which is to learn and to teach. And that should have been the focus. And I think what you hear in her words is that she was worried that there would be some stepping over some kind of imagined legal boundary, and in fact, what she should have been worried about is the stepping over of the moral boundary.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Claudine Gay also made a statement, she also apologized, in her words, “Let me be clear, calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.” Let’s talk a little bit about your resignation. So, these events, as we’ve sort of said them, there’s been a committee for antisemitism, you were invited on board. This testimony happens in front of Congress and then you resign. How come?

WOLPE: Because the testimony reinforced the sense that I already had, that, in fact, our council was not being helpful, was not advancing the cause that I wanted to advance. And so, it seemed to me actually easier in some ways to be a spokesperson outside of there. Students were coming to me and saying — not only students, but also members of the Jewish community, why are you on this panel? It gives it legitimacy when nothing is happening. And I heard that and I thought that that there was a lot of — it’s a lot of force to that critique. And at a certain point, I thought, I can’t associate myself with a panel that gives me a lot of accountability and no authority.

SREENIVASAN: So, you felt that being on the committee was like you could not activate the change that you wanted to see being part of the structure, because there’s going to be a lot of people saying, hey, look, you kind of gave up the keys to be able to affect change from the inside?

WOLPE: I really think that my experience since leaving is that my voice is amplified. It isn’t reduced, and I am still in touch with the members of the committee and with the administration, and as I said with faculty, students, alumni, donors. I really believe that this is a critical institution in American life and in world life. And anything that we can do to try to save our key campuses and make them homes of ideological diversity and real discussion and deep learning is a noble and even a sacred effort.

SREENIVASAN: And I want to go through parts of your resignation statement here, too. You said, “Part of the problem is a simple herd mentality, people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of, or not wishing to be disliked by taking an unpopular position. Some of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the sole or greatest victim. Some of it is simple, old fashioned Jew hatred, and that ugly arrow in the quiver of dark hearts for millennia.” Now, to most people, it’s that last line that constitutes antisemitism, right? But for you, other reasons, kind of explain those. Are they just as bad? How did we get here?

WOLPE: They’re not just as bad, but their effects can be just as toxic. So, if you have people screaming from the river to the sea, and even though they don’t know what river and what sea, which we’ve found again and again when you ask them, they say, wait, the Nile? I don’t know. But nonetheless, the effect on the Jewish students is the same because of those 200 students masked on the steps of Widener Library screaming from the river to the sea, you don’t know who’s expressing genuine hate and who just said — who came along because their roommate said, come, it’ll be fun. So, the motivation may be less poisonous, but the effect can be the same.

SREENIVASAN: Another part of your statement you said, “Ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self- determination as a Jewish nation, accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic and evil.” Now, I understand a little bit of the historical context and the concerns that Jewish people have. But, you know, is there a place for a legitimate criticism of the actions of a country, Israel, without a negation of Israel’s right to exist or the Jewish people’s right to exist?

WOLPE: Absolutely. I criticize Israel. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t criticize Israel, but even those — among those who love Israel, Israelis are brutal in their criticism of Israel. We saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting before October 7th, criticizing Israel. But here’s what I haven’t heard. I hear people criticizing Russia, I hear no one say Russia shouldn’t exist. I hear people criticize Germany after the Second World War when the worst country in the history of humanity, nobody said there shouldn’t be a Germany anymore. That is reserved solely for the one Jewish state in the world. There are 50 Muslim states. I’ve never heard someone say one of those Muslim states shouldn’t exist. Only the Jewish state shouldn’t exist. And that you have to ask yourself, why is it that that is the only state that receives that imprecation over and over and over again? And if it isn’t antisemitism, then it confounds me what it could possibly be.

SREENIVASAN: Well, what is it about our climate today that has created this kind of campus culture, I guess, where, you know, I spoke to a student that =was — is attending Columbia and, you know, she said she’s never felt so constrained about her view in her entire academic life? If she says, for example, she is for a ceasefire, something that used to be an innocuous phrase, now, she gets called out for saying she’s supporting Hamas. And she’s like, no, I just want people to stop fighting. Is that so crazy? But I don’t feel like I can even say something like that because of such a charged environment right now where everything I say can and will be used against me.

WOLPE: I think at this moment, tensions are so high that it is really difficult for people to have genuine dialogue about that. I spoke yesterday at a synagogue and someone stood up and made a long and eloquent plea about why he thought a ceasefire was justified. And I said to him, I appreciate your point of view and I think it comes from a humanistic place. I really do. And I want to tell you why it is that I disagree with you. And that kind of exchange is the way adults speak to each other. And we’re trying to train our students to do the same, but it’s not always easy when, you know, people line up into teams. Look, this is not — by the way, this is not unique to college campuses. When I was a kid if you asked people, would you marry someone of another race, most people said no. And if you ask, would you marry someone of another political party? Most people say yes. Now, it’s exactly reversed. If you ask, would you marry someone of another race? Most people would say yes. Of another political party, most people would say no. Which tells you two things. One is that progress can be made in our world, which is an optimistic thing. And the second is that the polarization is very bad right now. And that’s something that we really, really have to work on, how to have dialogue across views.

SREENIVASAN: So, one of the concerns that came out from that testimony that was delivered by the college presidents was, are we essentially asking colleges in some way to codify boundaries on speech?

WOLPE: I would say that, again, it’s not about the speech in particular, it’s about creating a climate of intimidation and fear, which some of the speech is designed to do. It’s about bullying and harassment, not about expression of opinion. And when you scream at students who are walking their way into the library baby killer, that’s not a function of opinion expression, it’s a function of seeking to intimidate and harass with speech. And those are the kinds of boundaries that I think we’re used to actually in normal everyday discourse and universities do have to grapple with that.

SREENIVASAN: So, we have some apologies from these campus presidents. But what can and what should campuses be working on to create an environment where you can have that intellectual debate without taking specific communities and, you know, attacking them?

WOLPE: So, I’ll suggest a couple of things. One is the enforcement of current policies, which I think have been under enforced because people are afraid of blowback. The second is to educate people about the history of — just as Harvard did with its long racism project to do that with the antisemitism, because the hatred of the Jews stands in the center of western civilization. It’s not peripheral to it, and we need to deal with that and with the place of Jews in the creation of our civilization. And I would say third, we need serious, sustained, and immediate training in what we’ve been talking about, which is how to disagree with someone else without screaming, threatening, shouting, in other words, civil discourse.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the things that you call for at the end of your resignation statement, we are now in the period where Jews around the world are celebrating Hanukkah, and you encourage people to make a choice to bring light into the world. So, this is a time when it seems like we could use a lot of light, not just on college campuses, but given what else is happening on the planet today. How do we do that? What’s an easy prescription for someone watching this program wherever they are in the world to try to bring light into the situation?

WOLPE: I think you bring light, first of all, by listening, genuinely listening to the other. By responding with decency, with kindness, with respect, with goodness, and also, as has been true for millions of years, you bring light with love. And I think that bringing love to the world and light to the world is the task of every faith, and I wish that it were more manifest on our campuses and in our country. And as this new year is about to begin and we’re celebrating Hanukkah, I’m hopeful that maybe the future will be a little brighter than this past.

SREENIVASAN: Rabbi David Wolpe, thanks so much for joining us.

WOLPE: Thank you.