On June 30, a task force set up by the U.S. federal government, aimed at combatting antisemitism, published an open letter to Harvard University. “Harvard University is in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin,” the letter alleges. “The enclosed Notice of Violation details the findings of fact supporting a conclusion that Harvard has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff.”
The letter continues to outline the task force’s findings, including that a majority of Jewish students feel unsafe; Jewish and Israeli students have been physically assaulted; and antisemitic imagery and slogans have been prominent on campus. The letter concludes by stating that failure to adequately change Harvard’s culture “will result in the loss of all federal financial resources”. The university, meanwhile, has told reporters that it “is far from indifferent on this issue and strongly disagrees with the government’s findings.”
So how much of this has to do with Jews, really? And how much is President Donald Trump’s administration simply taking aim at left-leaning, Democratic-aligned instutitions?
David Weinfeld—a Harvard alumnus, former columnist with The CJN and current associate professor of world religions at Rowan University—joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on The Jewish Angle to analyze the issue, and how the university’s symbolic status makes it an ideal focal point for a larger assault on America’s higher education system.
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, I’m Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and you’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. My guest today is David Weinfeld. David is an assistant professor of world religions at Rowan University in New Jersey. His first book, published by Cornell University Press, is An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism. He was also a doctoral student at New York University in history when I was doing my own doctorate there in French and French studies. But he is here today more directly related to two earlier parts of his biography: coming from Canada, Montreal, to be specific, and having gone to college somewhere near Boston, is that correct?
David Weinfeld: Yes, just outside of Boston, but on the T.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, welcome to The Jewish Angle.
David Weinfeld: Thank you.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, when were you at Harvard? Which is the only important thing about you for today’s discussion?
David Weinfeld: That’s true.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And what was Jewish life like there or life generally like there?
David Weinfeld: Thank you, first of all, for having me on the show. Very excited. I was at Harvard from 2001 to 2005, and my first day of classes was September 12, 2001. So it was an interesting time, certainly, to be in college. I think, you know, the world kind of turned upside down. But it was exciting, certainly, to be at a place like Harvard at that time, where people felt, I guess, like they were in a prime position to try to understand what was going on and feeling like they could make a difference. Whether that’s accurate or not is a different question. But certainly, people felt that way. I think, and Jewishly, I think it was a wonderful time to be at Harvard. I mean, I went to Harvard Hillel almost every Friday night. I really enjoyed that experience. I had other interesting experiences as well. This was during the Second Intifada, of course, and I was involved in an Arab-Jewish dialogue group there, which I’m sure we can talk about. So, yeah, it sounds like things have changed since I was there. I can’t comment on that more precisely because I haven’t been there in a long time, though I’m going to my 20th reunion this weekend.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Okay. So we’re recording on June 4th, in case you may have already been to this reunion by then.
David Weinfeld: Oh, yes, it’s not live.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: We’re not live.
David Weinfeld: No, you’re right. Yes, of course.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: It’s okay. Yeah. So those are actually the same years that I went to college, but I went to the University of Chicago, so I don’t have to be euphemistic; it’s somewhere in Chicago. But I definitely had a different experience, Jewishness-wise, in those exact years. I was supposed to be literally traveling, and then it was 9/11, and I was in Manhattan because that’s where I’m from. I was not at the Towers, but, you know, not the best of days. What I was going to say about the college experience was I had grown up around a lot of Jews in New York and then was suddenly at school with a lot of people who hadn’t met Jews before. I experienced both kind of like proto versions of the, like you’re part of the problem with the Iraq War because you’re Jewish. You know, the neocons, the Straussians, all of that. That stuff I remember. But also just this basic fact of people who just had not met many Jews before and had a lot of notions of what Jews would be like. Like I had a roommate who assumed that Jews were just all extremely studious and could not figure out why I was like chatting with my friends on Instant Messenger and not always with a book. Anyway, it was a different time. I read this Steven Pinker long read about Harvard in the New York Times, and the word Harvard appears in it. How many times would you guess? It’s a long article. 35, 59.
David Weinfeld: Oh, wow, okay.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I made sure to not include it in the headline and stuff. I did a count, and a part of me saw this and was like, oh my goodness, people are too excited about Harvard affiliations. However, there’s something actually to this now, which is this Trump stuff with Harvard. The Trump administration in the U.S. is focusing its crackdown on Harvard. And my question for you is why? Why do you think that is? So what specifically is he doing? He’s trying to block international students from going to Harvard. He’s trying to block federal funding from going to Harvard, among other things. Why do you think he’s focusing the crackdown on Harvard as opposed to, and I should try to get in at least 59 times the word Harvard, but rather than Columbia? Right, because Columbia is also an Ivy League school and the one more famously involved in the encampments and so forth.
David Weinfeld: That’s a good question. And I don’t know exactly why, but, you know, he did obviously target Columbia to an extent, and University of Pennsylvania and other places to an extent. I think that Harvard does have a kind of symbolic resonance that these places don’t have. You know, one can discuss ad nauseam which school is actually better in which way. There are magazines that rank them, and they have a lot of fun with that. Certainly, the students, when they’re there, have fun with that, too. But I don’t think that’s necessarily relevant to the point that Harvard is the oldest university. It’s the wealthiest university. It’s the university that most people outside of the United States have heard of. So if Trump can bend Harvard to his will, I think that carries a lot of weight. I think they probably correctly note that there are a lot of Harvard students and alumni who find themselves in opposition to Trump’s policies. While that’s not different from these other places, it’s probably that if they’re the big kahuna and they could take down Harvard, then the other ones will fold as well. That might be part of the strategy.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Let’s say you’re a Canadian Jew without any Harvard affiliation at all, and I speak as one. I have nothing to do with Harvard. I’ve never even applied to it. So why does it matter? What are the stakes here? To paraphrase from one of my grad school professors who, whenever you tried to hand in a term paper, he would say, “What are the stakes?” And I’d be like, “I don’t know. Paper’s due.” But why does it matter if Trump dismantles Harvard?
David Weinfeld: I don’t think that it matters with any sort of specificity to Harvard. I think it matters that he is trying to dismantle the university system, the higher ed system as we know it, and Harvard is a symbol of that. So, you know, if he were doing something similar to Yale or Princeton or Columbia, it would be just as bad, but it just might not resonate as much. So I don’t think it’s a Harvard-specific thing at all. I think Harvard is a symbol for what he’s trying to do to higher education. This is not new. J.D. Vance has said that professors are the enemy, the university is the enemy.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: A Yale Law School grad, right? J.D. Vance?
David Weinfeld: Correct. Yeah, a Yale Law School graduate has said that. So, you know, we can discuss. There’s a long tradition of some sense of anti-intellectualism in the United States that many people have written about, and some have debated how powerful it is. Is it not that powerful? People often actually compare it to France, which supposedly venerates intellectuals. Something you might…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. And it does. It does. I mean, yeah. What I’ve wondered with the conservative thing, though, is I used to kind of follow this a lot, the conservative critiques of higher ed. Like, that would be in National Review Online, like in the early 2000s and things like that. But then it always seemed to be that they wanted ideological diversity, right? My impression was that they wanted either great books or more conservatives on campus, or they had these different agendas. But it never seemed to—the goal never seemed to be what it seems to be now. So, I’ve been asking every guest who comes on, on these topics versions of this question, but like, basically, what is Trump actually trying to do here? Because it doesn’t—it seems like there’s a lot of consensus that he’s not actually trying to fight anti-Semitism, that that’s just this kind of pretext he’s giving. And I will talk about, though, the existence of actual anti-Semitism too, but I guess—so first, I want to know what you think, and then I’m going to give my latest theory. Each episode, I probably have a different one.
David Weinfeld: Okay.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Okay. Yeah.
David Weinfeld: I mean, I don’t know exactly what he’s trying to do, but I would say that, again, I think the broader target is the university system and the sort of notion of a, quote-unquote, liberal elite and a, you know, what people call the professional managerial class, right? That does dominate the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has been very successful in demonizing the Democrats with this label that is associated with higher ed and specifically with elite institutions in higher ed. So, I think that’s the goal, right? The goal is to make higher ed less powerful and less important to America. There still is the sense—and I mean, when I speak to other faculty or other alumni of elite institutions in the United States and, you know, this—well, that going to college, even though not everyone does it, is still the sort of cultural rite of passage in the United States. People often said in, you know, in Israel, it’s serving in the military; in the United States, it’s going to call going away to college, having the college campus experience. Even though, as we both know, and I’ve come to learn, especially teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University and now at Rowan University, that it is, of course, not the majority of Americans, even, that are college bound, that have that kind of experience. But in the cultural mind and among the leadership class in the United States, it is much more common. And I think part of the effort is to just undo that, to weaken that and to try to offer dignity. I think that would be the positive spin to people who don’t take that route and to show that they’re not even just as good, but in fact, better than people who do take that route. Those are the stakes, as I see them, right, that it’s this dismantling of higher ed, which is a cultural touchstone in the United States and is also—and this is true even to this day—is the envy of the world, right? People send. Foreign students are desperate to go.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You were there. You were the foreign students there.
David Weinfeld: I was. You know, I don’t know how desperate I should have been, but there are many. Fine. Canadian.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I was gonna say, like, the tragedy that is McGill.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, no, that’s—I can talk about this at great length—but the truth is there are international students coming from all over the place and they.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, it’s true, it’s true. My husband was one of them. Right.
David Weinfeld: Like, yeah, in STEM, but also not in STEM. And, you know, the fact that he’s targeting international students also is really fascinating because, at the very least, like, it’s about control. I think higher ed is going to be what this Trump regime wants it to be. It wants it to be weaker, less important for US citizens and probably steering people in certain directions ideologically and professionally. I think those are the stakes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think you’re right. And I think all I have to offer is a yes. And basically, because I think all of that makes sense. And I do just keep returning to this idea that I used to think that conservatives just wanted a more conservative higher ed. And I think this is different, sort of like categorically different what’s happening now. And I think it really is about encouraging bridging brain drain that’s like sort of feature, not bug. And getting this kind of revenge, like you say, on the people who like, sort of the people who think they’re so smart. And you see this as like a pattern, right? So there’s Elon Musk getting rid of the blue checks on Twitter so that it’s not elite journalists, but it’s instead people who are paying for an Elon Musk branded product. You know, whatever. I’m not going to go into the whole Twitter thing. And Jeff Bezos is taking over the, you know, the. Making the Washington Post opinion. This is news as of June 4. Making the Washington Post opinion pages sort of a bit of a watered-down situation. Like first taking over the ideology of it, but then saying like, no, no, it’s going to be like we’re going to use. Let ordinary people using AI submit op-eds and this. As an opinion editor, I have a lot of thoughts that I could digress on and won’t, but I think there is like, you start to see a pattern that it’s like you think you’re so smart, well, we’ll get you. But then I think that if you combine this, though, these zoom out even more and you combine it with the tariffs, you’re looking at like, this is about turning America into a manufacturing economy rather than a knowledge one. And also, then there’s the whole gender aspect of it. And like, I think there’s this real, like, I don’t think you can ignore that college has become at least understood to be. I think the reality’s a little more complicated. Like this female-dominated thing. It’s an arena where women are doing really well. And how do you, you know, like, he’s gonna offer women, you know, no trans girls on the volleyball team in exchange for shutting down college. As if women had asked for this thing about the volleyball team to begin with. But the point is that’s kind of what I see is going on. That I think it is really like—it’s not just screw over the university to screw over the university—but that it is like remake America in this kind of profound way where there’s like a woman at home rather than with one of those email jobs. Because that’s become this whole thing, right, the email jobs. Anyway.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree with that. And we, you know, again, I think the only place where I might disagree is that I don’t know if it’s a sea change. I think—I don’t think this is entirely new. I do think this is part of a longer process that has been going on. When you were talking about gender, I mean, this is something that’s well known, right, that when a profession becomes feminized, it becomes devalued. Right? That was true with teaching, that’s true with nursing, that’s true with therapy and psychology as a discipline. And I think you’re right that the goal is to make that happen to higher ed as well.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I think the goal is to make it happen more than it’s happened. Just sort of free market style. Right. You know, like it’s, it’s to make it. It’s sort of treating the fact that anytime people who are not, I guess, white men or whatever, are doing well as if that’s something that the government artificially put into place. If you take out whatever government, whatever they’re calling DEI, kind of everything could be DEI, you know. If you take that away, then it’s going to be this meritocracy. I’m not so persuaded that that’s actually what’s happening, but yeah. I wanted to ask, though, also, since you are a professor in the States, how much, if at all, has all of this stuff that one reads about Trump’s intervening in higher ed affected your own work or your own university?
David Weinfeld: Great series of questions. I mean, it certainly affects the faculty a lot because the faculty are thinking and talking about this a lot. It’s hard to gauge with the students. A lot of students seem, at least where I go to school, disengaged. They’re disengaged from their schoolwork, and they’re disengaged from the political scene. I had a number of students tell me they didn’t vote in November. And I don’t see Rowan in particular. Where I teach is a more STEM-oriented institution, and it’s also a more commuter institution, so it’s not the kind of place that necessarily has a lot of student activism. I would say, in fact, the opposite. It does not have a lot of student activism, and so that kind of lends itself already to this just disengagement and then not sort of recognizing the stakes that you and I have been talking about. And I don’t want to overgeneralize. There are definitely students that do and are very troubled by this. But I think that a lot of students are like, I need to learn what I need to learn from college in many ways. I need to just get my piece of paper, my degree. And because I know that that’s going to get me a better job, or at least that’s supposed. That’s the transactional agreement, right? That you’re supposedly putting in, whether there is a job at the end of the tunnel or not. Unclear, but. So I definitely think, and I think all those things are really connected, right. When you devalue humanities and social sciences especially, and you try to control the curriculum and limit what people are allowed to teach and say, you know, in the classroom and out of the classroom, the students kind of can understand what really matters to university administrators when that happens. And you know, it’s clear at a place like Rowan and other places that the kinds of things that I do, you know, history and religion and the kind of things that you have done are not valued.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: There has been a kind of line that I mostly have agreed with about how the truly dangerous antisemitism in the United States comes from the right. Not that there isn’t any on the left, but the really dangerous stuff is from the right, like from, you know, the alt-right once called alt-right. I don’t know if it still is trolling. That’s now MAGA politics. From Elon Musk lifting his arm in the manner he did and from incidents of far-right antisemitic violence sprinkled throughout American history, including recently. But now with attacks in Boulder and D.C., we’re seeing anti-Jewish violence in the United States in a manner that had existed for decades really in Europe, where Jews are a stand-in for Israel, right. So I’m thinking about it a lot obviously, and it leads to an atmosphere not just of Jews, many Jews obviously not all, being afraid. But also what I find is that there’s the sense that whenever Jews are attacked, this is widely viewed on the left as if not outright justified because Jews mostly have some kind of affinity for Israel. But more so, but also just that there’s like sort of as long as whatever violence is happening falls short of what Israel is inflicting on Palestinians, in a sense, like what are you complaining about? And I’m thinking specifically of a Blue Sky mutual of mine, not somebody I know personally, just, you know, social media, a journalist who’s on the left and I don’t believe is Jewish, who posted something about how terrible the attack in Boulder was and followed it up with another post that was kind of like, but also let’s not forget Gaza. And I sat with this for a while because I thought it is horrible what’s happening in Gaza. Why are we, why does it have to be affixed to this? You know, like there was something about the but also let’s not. Like it just seemed like you couldn’t just say one thing was bad and that another thing was bad, but yet you had to somehow connect them. And this just has been bugging me, and I’ve been thinking about it, and I guess I’m just wondering, like how should Jews, American Jews, Canadian Jews, Jews anywhere, how should Jews approach. Well, let’s let Israeli Jews be for the time being. North American Jews. How should North American Jews approach this moment?
David Weinfeld: I think it’s important to separate a few things. One is that there’s a difference between condemnation and explanation, right. I think everyone, I think many of us would and should agree that all violence is bad, particularly violence against civilians in any context, right. And that’s worth condemning. And then there’s the explanation part. And you know, as an academic and a historian in particular, I really do try to see a context for everything. I think what’s become clear is that in a certain sense the Intifada has been globalized. That what happens in Israel and Palestine and Gaza and the West Bank is connected to what happens to world Jewry now, right. Whether it’s right to associate Jews, any Jews with the state of Israel, whether that’s fair or not, we’re seeing it happen, right. I mean, that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I think we already were seeing it happen, but it’s newly in the United States that, that’s because, I mean, because of having studied France like, and having been in France, like sitting on the commuter train under the anti-Jewish graffiti, like. Yeah, I mean that’s, Yeah, I think it’s new in the States.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, yeah, I think, okay, I think that’s right. And certainly the ferocity of it and now the tendency towards violence does feel new. I mean, the fact that we had, you know, two of these incidents so close together just recently, you know, that kind of urges us to say, okay, what’s going on here, right. But I think it’s also important to try to again, put into context, try to explain as much as possible. Well, I think it’s, you know, we have to condemn this violence that’s happening to, to Jews or Jewish-adjacent people.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes. That, that is another.
David Weinfeld: In the United States and, and it may very well happen in, in, in Canada too.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, there has been.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, there’s been, yeah. And, and you know, you know, the United States, as you know, as you and I agree on this, has a gun problem, which Canada does not have the same problem. But as we know, you can find ways to be violent without guns. And so this is a huge, huge problem, right. It’s just an enormous problem because, and again, I’ll put on the academic hat. I don’t know what’s in anyone else’s heart. And so I don’t know exactly what motivates people when they do these sorts of things. And everyone will have their personal motivations and also their political motivations to do these sorts of things. But I think that even if, you know, there’s debates like, is this antisemitism, is it anti-Zionism? And I don’t know that the intentions and motivations of the people committing this violence matter as much as we’re in an interconnected system where things that happen in the Middle East are going to lead to people behaving not just in Europe anymore but also in North America violently.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. I mean, what I keep returning to on this, just to pick up on what you were saying about whether it’s fair or not that it gets blamed on Jews, I mean, and, you know, Jews specifically outside of Israel. And I’m just thinking about, again, like, there are a lot of themes that keep kind of coming up on this podcast. But that most American Jews are Democrats, most American Jews did not and do not support what Trump is doing generally or on behalf of Jews supposedly. And yet, who gets attacked? Who. You know what I mean? It’s not the people who are—it’s not the entities saying, “Let’s deport students for supporting Palestine.” It’s Jews who are not. You know, so that to me is where antisemitism enters into it. When you can just see so clearly that there are people who would be the ones you’d be angry at if this were about Palestine solely. Whereas if it’s… So. And especially when you think, I mean, especially this thing with the Boulder attack, particularly because of it being about the hostages and not, you know, rah rah Israel, but.
David Weinfeld: And not official representative and not official.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Exactly. Exactly. Not that I think that’s okay either, obviously. But I’m saying that that just struck me as like, okay, this is pretty clear cut.
David Weinfeld: I agree with that. But I guess the point I was trying to make before is that I want to separate that from knowing what the motives of the…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, sure, sure. I agree. I don’t think anybody can know what’s in another person’s head. Yeah.
David Weinfeld: And so, but I’m saying, like, you know, we were both at NYU together some time ago, and I don’t know if you ever had the chance to take a class with David Engel who teaches…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes, yes, I did. We had like some kind of research or some sort of class, one-on-one class. Yes, yes.
David Weinfeld: So anyway, David Engel, a recently retired historian of European Jewry at NYU, really brilliant guy. Brilliant guy. Especially Eastern European Jewry and he knows a million languages. And he, one of the things he famously wrote an article about and does in his teaching, he does not use the word antisemitism. And he has a chair or had the chair in Holocaust studies. And for him, he would say that the word for scholars is often a crutch and it doesn’t explain much, right? It doesn’t. Why did this happen? Because of antisemitism? No. Well, that’s, you know, we have to put it into a larger context. It doesn’t really help us to think, just like to say anti-Semitic intent is the reason that X happened. I mean, there’s a whole, you know, and I’m sure the whole structuralist or functionalist versus intentionalist debate about the Holocaust is part of this conversation. And I think it’s very helpful to use that idea, that framework that David Engel uses.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, sorry. Go on. Sorry.
David Weinfeld: Oh, just to take a step back and say that regardless of what the intentions in the person’s head, whether it was. And I, you know, I use the word antisemitism in my own work, but I do try to, like, I was saying that you have now a situation where Jews will be associated with the state of Israel whether they want to or not, and that is going to lead some people to commit violence against them. Right?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. I mean, it’s just so frustrating. I feel like Jews are also associated—I mean, forget like even anything so far afield—Jews are associated with the actions of the Trump administration, despite not having voted for Trump by and large. So that, that just seems—if that’s intractable, it’s just…
David Weinfeld: Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I mean, but, but we’re also seeing, you know, the evangelical Christian wing of Zionism has for a long time taken a front seat ahead of, ahead of, of, of American Jewry. And these are often the most sort of right-wing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But that’s not who gets attacked.
David Weinfeld: But that’s not who gets attacked. Right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: David Weinfeld, thank you so much for coming on The Jewish Angle.
David Weinfeld: Thank you, Phoebe. It was a pleasure.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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