Harvard Touts ‘Counter-Zionist’ Professor, Palestinian Liberation Erotic Poetry Journal as Evidence of Progress Against Jew-Hate

Adding a course taught by a professor who accuses Israel of genocide. Hiring another professor who describes his own work as "counter-Zionist." Launching a student journal of erotic poetry and "support for Palestinian Liberation." Appointing another scholar to a visiting professorship that already existed and has been refilled annually for nearly a decade. Adding a course on antisemitism taught by a professor who backs a definition of antisemitism embraced by boycott-Israel advocates.

Harvard and ten of the nation’s biggest-name appellate lawyers are brazenly trying to pass all these steps off to federal judges as proof that the university is moving to address what even the university itself concedes in its latest court filing has been "disturbing, offensive, and vile treatment of Jewish students."

Harvard’s legal, political, and public relations strategy in its faceoff with the Trump administration over billions in federal research funding became clearer this week with court filings in a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, President and Fellows of Harvard College v. US Department of Health and Human Services. The federal government also filed a memorandum of law this week in a similar case, United States v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which is before Judge Richard Stearns in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

What Harvard has not done is survey Jewish students or the campus as a whole to see whether what it found in 2024—that Jewish students get an inferior campus experience—has changed. The government’s federal filing notes Harvard’s own past finding that "substantial numbers of Jewish students indicated experiencing discomfort and alienation at Harvard … 26% felt physically unsafe and 44% felt mentally unsafe. Nearly half (49%) felt their well-being was not supported at Harvard … Almost 60% of Jewish students indicated they had experienced some form of discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to their views on current events." Harvard hasn’t collected or disclosed new or updated data on that, either.

Instead, Harvard’s ten outside lawyers, led by former George W. Bush administration solicitor general Paul Clement and including former Scalia clerk Scott Lehotsky, former Trump Organization lawyer and current Fox Corp. director William Burck, and former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Joshua Levy, tell the court in its latest filing that "Harvard implemented many changes aimed at ensuring its campus is safe, fair, and welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students." An 11th outside Harvard lawyer, Scott Keller, recently withdrew from the case to take the job of general counsel of Chevron.

Harvard’s filing says "The University’s deans have implemented changes concerning appointments and curriculum (including bolstered course offerings and faculty focused on Jewish history and antisemitism)."

The court filing footnotes this claim to a Harvard "academic life" web page that really has to be seen to be believed. It’s one thing, in court or in the court of public opinion, to put your best foot forward. It’s another thing to offer an account so selective and full of half-truths and spin that it winds up being misleading, a deception that is the opposite of Veritas. I’m not saying that Harvard hasn’t improved from the nightmare it was, or that it hasn’t put effort and resources into improving. But that Harvard is billing these particular "changes" as leaps of progress against discrimination is laughable.

Among the "changes" touted on the Harvard web page that is footnoted in the court filing, many referencing the Harvard Divinity School:

— "In spring 2026, HDS added a new course on Jewish Ecology." That course was taught by Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg, who accuses Israel of genocide.

— "a new student journal on Jewish liturgy." That’s Ashera, a journal of Palestinian liberation and erotic poetry that was actually "created" not by a student but by a professor, Shaul Magid, who advocates what he describes as "counter-Zionism."

— "In June 2025, HDS hired for the position of the Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence." That was Magid. In his 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile, Magid declared that "Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project," and said that he doesn’t think "that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way." The book, he writes, is "in some sense, anti-Zionist" or "more precisely … counter-Zionist."

— "New faculty at Harvard Law School. In fall 2026, Harvard Law School will welcome a new faculty member as the Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law." This visiting professorship has existed since at least 2017, through the most vile periods of Harvard antisemitism. The person who will hold the position in the fall of 2026, Moshe Halbertal, was also there in 2018-2019. And while Harvard may be bringing in traveling Talmud professors, it is also giving $90,000-a-year fellowships to four anti-Israel activists. Harvard’s English and history departments also paid a $35,000 honorarium and $7,500 in travel expenses "for a 5 star hotel" to have Ta-Nehisi Coates appear on campus on September 24, 2025, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and "read from his chapter on Palestine," according to documents released by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Enumerating the changes with such specificity also risks contradicting Harvard’s other legal arguments. Harvard is claiming a First Amendment right to teach whatever it wants without government interference, and simultaneously telling the court to look favorably at all the new stuff it’s doing and faculty it’s hiring.

In addition to the filings from Harvard and the government, several "friend of the court" briefs were filed in the cases this week by other parties. Hillel International filed a brief siding with Harvard against the Trump administration, signed by a lawyer, David Zimmer, who is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. After a Harvard student who successfully sued, then settled with Harvard, Alexander "Shabbos" Kestenbaum, called Hillel out on the matter, Hillel moved to withdraw its brief, explaining that "authorization to file the brief was provided to counsel without the brief having gone through a required internal review process within Hillel."

Another brief backing Harvard was filed by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and National Council of Jewish Women. Their lawyer is Naomi Shatz. Shatz was also the lawyer for Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a Harvard Divinity student from Ghana, charged with misdemeanor criminal charges of assault and battery and of interfering with the civil rights of a fellow student in what prosecutors said was an attack on Yoav Segev, an Israeli student at Harvard Business School. Shatz’s defense strategy included telling a Boston judge that Segev "had no bruises." The civil rights charge was dismissed and the assault charge was dealt with by pretrial diversion to community service.

Shatz’s brief claims "identifying Jewish People as the Reason for Funding Cuts Will Create Backlash and Scapegoating of Jewish Students and Faculty," which seems like circular logic—don’t crack down on campus antisemitism, because the antisemites might discriminate against the Jews even more fiercely in response to the enforcement.

A brief in the district court case from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Equal Rights Under the Law highlights a subtle legal issue that helps explain why Harvard is so eager to emphasize what it has done. The Brandeis Center argues that the government does not need to prove "deliberate indifference." It says, "intentional discrimination may be proven by a number of different methods; all that is required is proof that persons were treated worse because of their protected category."

As the court cases work their way through the system and Harvard works on its slow academic timeline to hire professors (a search is under way for a tenured full Yiddish professor to begin in July 2027 to replace Ruth Wisse, who retired in 2014), many talented Jewish students who might in past years have chosen Harvard are looking elsewhere. The Hillel college guide lists the top 60 schools by Jewish population percentage. Brown, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Duke, Yale, University of Pennsylvania all make the list. Harvard is absent.

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