Harvard Insider Explains Who Is Really Funding Elite Colleges & Why the Spread of Antisemitism on College Campuses Should Concern Us All

When one of America’s most respected rabbis—Rabbi David Wolpe—resigns from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory committee in protest, it sparks national outrage. In this explosive exposé, Rabbi Wolpe (Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi of Sinai Temple in LA, Scholar in Residence for the Maimonides Fund, and Rabbinic Fellow of the ADL) shares the inside story behind the Harvard antisemitism protests, exposing what’s really happening on elite college campuses. From his firsthand experience on Harvard's antisemitism task force, Wolpe reveals shocking accounts of Jewish students being harassed, the disturbing impact of foreign funding promoting anti-Western ideology, and how DEI policies are contributing to a toxic campus culture where antisemitism is normalized. This is not just about Harvard—it's about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses, threats to free speech, and the future of American education. NOTE: This episode was filmed a month ago, prior to the tragic attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday. It is being posted according to our schedule, but our hearts and prayers are with the Jewish community in Boulder. Rabbi David Wolpe's "My Year at Harvard" Jewish Journal article: https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/372630/my-year-at-harvard/ Follow @RabbiWolpe on Facebook and X! Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Harvard has an antisemitism problem, but the problem is bigger than antisemitism. Our country is being influenced by people who are anti-Western. They did an experiment at one of the colleges where they put up a whole bunch of American flags, and guess what? The next day, they were all torn down. The Houthi flag reads, "Death to America, death to Israel, death to Jews." And that is all one sentiment.

• 0:24Mayim Bialik?

  That was celebrated on many of the campuses we're discussing.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  It is a large anti-Western movement, and it has profound implications for America and for Americans, and they can't afford to turn away.

• 0:37Mayim Bialik?

  There is an insidious infiltration of our university system and our education system that literally is using the Jewish cause to insert its ideology, which is explicitly anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-Western. It's devastating to the structure of the academic institution if you believe in it. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our Breakdown. We're going to be talking today about something that we've been hesitant to talk about, but it's important. It's important if you value the ideals of Western society, if free speech is important

• 1:22Mayim Bialik?

  to you, if freedom of religious expression is important to you, if freedom to express your gender or sexual identity is important to you, if the ability to receive an education without threat is important to you. We're going to be talking in particular about Harvard and about the university system in general. What's happening on college campuses for the past few years are a lot of conversations about who can protest where, who feels safe where, and there's a vast majority of Jewish students at Harvard, a report was just released, are experiencing intimidation, vandalism, harassment, really vile behavior that no other minority population would be allowed to endure without national outrage. Our guest today is Rabbi David Wolpe.

• 2:07Mayim Bialik?

  He just wrote a piece recently called Harvard is Spraying Perfume on a sewer. And Rabbi Wolpe, in addition to being the Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple here in Los Angeles, was a faculty member in the Harvard Divinity School. He started one month before October 7th. He was subsequently asked to join the Anti-Semitism Committee by then-President Claudine Gay. He was interested in trying to facilitate conversation and support the students who were experiencing harassment and intimidation. And what he ended up discovering in his time on the Anti-Semitism Committee is that the attack on Jewish students was the canary in the coalmine of an attack on Western values, Western ideals.

• 2:49Mayim Bialik?

  Foreign money is flowing into our top institutions by the tens of millions, and it is shaping them. It is shaping faculty that is hired. It's shaping how students are being recruited for social causes. It's shaping the way we perceive the Western values that so many of us hold to be a critical component of the American experience. Rabbi Wolpe is going to talk about why he stepped down. His resignation went viral, and he's going to talk about what he could not achieve at Harvard, what Harvard and other institutions like it still need to do to make all students feel safe, and why it's not just about the Jewish conversation, but about a conversation about what we all value in terms of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of

• 3:32Mayim Bialik?

  sexual and gender orientation expression. Also, we're going to talk about DEI. If you're concerned about foreign influence shaping our society, understanding the policies of the DEI and how it relates to these protests is kind of mind-blowing for us, and we can't wait to share it with you. So let's welcome to the Breakdown Rabbi David Wolpe. Break it down. Rabbi David Wolpe, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Thank you. Happy to be here.

• 3:58Mayim Bialik?

  We're very eager to hear all of the various angles of what you've kind of been thrust into the middle of. Your career as a rabbi leaves you, in many cases, connected to much controversy, but you've been thrust into sort of a public role in terms of your faculty position and your position on the Anti-Semitism Committee at Harvard. How long had you been there when October 7th happened?

• 4:29Speaker 00

  I had been there a little less than a month. And so I really was just starting to get my orientation in the school and in the larger school because the divinity school is at one end of the campus. Interestingly enough, by the way, on the exact opposite end from the business school, which may say something. But I had been there for about a month and I was just starting to feel like I'm getting, beginning to get my arms around this campus. When, and I had been to one ceremony that was a little bit off putting to me, which

• 5:09Speaker 00

  was the opening ceremony for Sukkot, where the person who was leading it started off by saying, this is a welcoming space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, and those struggling with their Zionism. And I remember sitting there and thinking, also that the ceremony had no Hebrew in it. It wasn't really traditional. And I remember sitting there and thinking to myself, don't judge too quickly. Don't be that person who comes into a new place and says, you're doing everything wrong and you shouldn't be doing this. So I really just bit my lip and I didn't say a word. And I assumed that that would be the entirety of that, you know, that that episode would

• 5:53Speaker 00

  end there, but it had hardly begun.

• 5:55Mayim Bialik?

  So you had been at Harvard about a month before October 7th. And the day after October 7th, 33 campus organizations issued a statement at Harvard blaming Israel for what happened on October 7th, either directly or indirectly. And the following day, you received a call from then Harvard president Claudine Gay. Some of you may know her from various government hearings. And what did you offer the then Harvard president?

• 6:25Speaker 00

  The first thing to know about that call is that she was really shaken up. I mean, imagine it in your mind and double it. In fairness to her, this was not at all what she expected or prepared for or anything. And she, and she said to me, look, I'm a reader. Tell me what I should read because I don't know about this. So I made, I made a suggestion of a couple of books and we talked for a little while. And I think she was already planning to have a committee. But I said to her, like, you should gather a bunch of people who can advise you. And she said, I'm going to do that. And she put together this antisemitism advisory committee, which was composed of very serious people.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Martha Minow, the former dean of the law school, Darah Horn, the noted author and novelist and nonfiction writer, Eric Nelson, who's a professor in government, who were all, and several others, who were all very serious about what had gone on on campus. And, and it was chaired by what the man who is now the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber. He was at the time the provost, but he became the chairman of the antisemitism committee. And I just want to add one other thing, which is the night of October 8th, I went to the Hill Hill to just sort of give some encouragement to the students. And the gathering there was, it was like a shiva house. I mean, people were already getting messages on their Slack channels.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  They already, there were some Israelis there who didn't know what happened to their families. The atmosphere of crisis was almost immediate.

• 8:03Mayim Bialik?

  The task of the committee, as you stated, was to encourage Harvard to enforce university policies already in place, to institute transparent punishments for those who broke the rules, and to set up a decent and responsive reporting system for infractions, and to take antisemitic speech as seriously as racist or homophobic speech. Can you talk a little bit about the framework that for, considering Jews are 2% of the United States population, what was required in order for you on this committee to provide a framework for what is acceptable in how we speak about what was happening to the Jewish community?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  We first of all, did a mini listening tour. We solicited from students what their experience was and what was happening to them. And we got Slack channel messages, some of which were eventually made public, some of which weren't because these were still, they were from undergraduate students and they had privacy concerns. And when we did, we realized that we had to make some immediate recommendations, that longer term recommendations could wait, but there had to be several things done right away. And the first and most obvious one that you mentioned was how about enforcing the rules that are already on the book before we even start writing new ones? Because you're not allowed to break into classrooms with protests, which was happening every day.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  And you're not actually supposed to walk into the library and put stickers and slogans around there and roll out banners on the floor. And you're not supposed to harass other students or prevent their going to class and on and on and on. The trope that you and I and everybody in this world has repeated endlessly is, if this were another group, and we just kept saying like, if this were an LGBTQ group, if this were an African American group, if this was any group other than the Jews, what would the university be doing? And that's what we want you to do.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  But there was and still remains this very weird acceptance and rejection of the Jews as a minority group, which seemed at every point sado voce, not explicitly, but very quietly to stymie all our efforts.

• 10:26Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:55Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:57Speaker 02

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• 12:31Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of people, when kind of told about the things that are happening on university campuses, want to say it's not really a big problem. It's only happening with a small number of, you know, those active, super left students. Most of the kids just want to go to school. They don't want to be involved in this. What can you tell us about the particular experiences that Jewish students are having and what it means on a larger scale for what the university allows?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Well, I think there is some truth to the fact that a lot of people were not involved in the protest and did not care about the protest. And really, all they wanted was to go to school. And I remember sitting next to a woman who was a Chinese poet at this arts and literature society, the Signet Society. And I asked her, like, are you involved in this at all? And she said, no. And I said, what do you do? She goes, I'm a poet. I said, that's beautiful. And what are you going to do when you leave here? She said, going to Goldman Sachs. So I think that was basically the feeling of a lot of people. But what is

• 13:36Speaker 00

  underappreciated is how much the accepted opinion on campus became Zionists are bad. Derivatively, there is something suspicious about the way the Jews conduct themselves and think of themselves. And that was extremely widespread. So even though the activists were few in number, the climate of opinion was and remains on a lot of campuses not so small.

• 14:09Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit, some people may not know, you know, for those of us who've been following this news since October 7, and for those of us who went to college in the 90s and experienced it firsthand, can you talk about some of the things that students experienced? Yeah, can you be more specific for people who maybe have not wanted to think about what it actually looks like?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, which I totally understand. But there were things ranging from negative comments in person, like baby killer, which a lot of people were called genocide lover, supporter of genocide, racist, meant against Arabs. And by the way, this was said to people who were just like I would walk around campus with a kippah. Nobody said anything explicitly to me, probably because I looked like a faculty member, and that was a little risky. But the few students who did got these comments without anyone knowing what they felt particularly

• 15:12Speaker 00

  about Israel or Zionism or Gaza. And then there were some students who were pushed. There were students who lost even second order friends, by which I mean, some people said, my friend will no longer speak to me because I'm friendly with a Zionist, even though I'm not Jewish. And so there was a lot of social pressure. And then there were really venomous and and noxious messages at Harvard among students that were just rife with antisemitic images, including swastikas and accusations that the Jewish community stands up for genocide, except for the few who were at the protest.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  And it's worth remembering, I don't want to freak, I don't want to suggest, you know, there was not, people didn't come after Jews with pitchforks on campus. But remember what it's like to be 18, 19, 20 years old in a social circle and and to go away from home and to know that people on campus will look at you as though you're a terrible person if you wear a Jewish star or you wear a kippah. So one person had said to me, they were in a class on on public health, the School of Public Health was one of the most egregious offenders, where the entire class was about what Israel had done to the Palestinians. And she came up to the professor afterwards and said, you know, you didn't say anything

• 16:38Speaker 00

  about any Israelis who have ever been victims of any kind of terror or even what happened on October 7th. And the professor said, yes, you're right, you're right, I should have mentioned that. And I said to her, why didn't you say anything during class? And she said, well, I didn't want to put a target on my back.

• 16:55Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I, I, yeah, I mean, I, I think many of us can relate and those of us in the public eye, you know, weigh it even in in heavier terms. I think some of the most disturbing things that many of us were seeing were these kind of Zionist free spaces, Zionists not welcome here, students being restricted from going to class, certain buildings, including buildings of egalitarian Jewish gathering, which for many of us are only home away from home for worship, for socialization, those buildings being attacked, you know, the upside down red triangle has been seen as this is a target center.

• 17:36Mayim Bialik?

  You know, besides the social pressure, which I think is very significant, and I even feel it as an adult, this notion that there is a restriction of your movement, a restriction of which classes you can take, what is that like for Jewish students and what did you see?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  It was as simple as there were places you couldn't walk through Harvard Yard because of the encampments. They roped them off and Zionists were unwelcome, which is the central public space of Harvard. And yes, there were parties that had Zionist-free spaces and there were posters that went up on buildings, which they had no right to do. And you didn't have to observe them, but it was scary. And so, most people did, and they didn't want to go into a place where they weren't wanted. And you would also, I had the experience of being at one of the diners at Harvard at, I think it was at lunchtime, and thirty people came in, surrounded all the diners,

• 18:36Speaker 00

  and started chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," except they chanted it in Arabic, and in Arabic, it means, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab," which is an explicitly eliminationist slogan. And everybody sitting there eating, many of whom were Jewish, had to sit there and either listen to that or leave the restaurant. So, it was, in terms of the harassment and expulsion of students, it was entirely a one-way affair. I have to say, one dean said to me, he said, "Please don't repeat this and don't give my name." I am now repeating it, but not giving his name. He said, "But we're not worried about any of the Jewish students, because they don't break the laws."

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And I thought, "Listen to what you're saying, though. Like, do something about those who do."

• 19:28Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to just clarify the experience of someone sitting in that cafeteria, because what you're saying, if it was any other population set, any other race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, you're hearing chants that you should be killed.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:46Jonathan Cohen?

  That's what's happening. They're not just sitting there hearing some foreign chant. They're hearing a foreign chant that says, "You should die, you should be killed, everyone should be exterminated." And if it was any other population, race, ethnicity, orientation, that would absolutely not be tolerated, whether they break the law or not. There would be a national uproar. There would be a national uproar.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  If you said, in this, let's take the exact same phrasing. If you said, "From the river to the sea, there should be no gays." People would go nuts. But I'm trying to use the exact language they used because it means exactly what you're saying. We all know that and they know that too, and everybody admits it. But, but they didn't say we should kill and exterminate. They just said it should be free of all these kinds of people. And no one, nowhere else, no other place in the world, no other group would on a college campus, would that be permitted? We know this.

• 20:46Mayim Bialik?

  Can you speak a little bit? And I know this isn't necessarily your specialty, but everything kind of falls under your specialty. I think once you've, you know, kind of held this position. Where does free speech come into this conversation? What's the difference between free speech and hate speech? I mean, for me personally, and I have been threatened, shouted down, intimidated physically and verbally, both as just a regular Jew and as a public Jew. It's terrifying. I mean, it's absolutely terrifying, especially if people are yelling things at you about you that are not true, like you're a genocidal baby killer. It's one of the things that, you know, I've had shouted at me. What can you sort of tell us about what this does when, when we are then faced with, gosh,

• 21:31Mayim Bialik?

  well, people can say whatever they want. People don't have to like Jews. What's the difference?

• 21:36Speaker 00

  First of all, every college has what are called time, place and manner restrictions. Time, place and manner restrictions means you can protest in a certain, certain times, not always, like not in the middle of finals, in a certain manner and at a certain place. Harvard Yard is now rebutting for protests from now on. I hope that will continue. Also, manner protests, protests that are hostile towards other students have never been permitted on campus before. And one of the things that made this protest different was other protests like Occupy Wall Street protests or Vietnam War protests were not protests against other students. This was.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  So it's not actually a function of free political speech. It's a function of specific attacking speech against other students.

• 22:27Mayim Bialik?

  Also, as a proxy for being disgruntled, upset, or even outraged at the policies of the Israeli government, which is not necessarily affiliated with any students simply because they're Jewish.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Well, that is also true. The fact that there were, the fact that there have been. I say this all the time to non-Jewish friends. I ask them, does your church have security? Does your mosque have security? And almost none of them do. Every synagogue either has security or wishes they could afford security. Because the attack on Jews as a religion is not distinguished by these, the kinds of people who are protesting at Harvard, from attacks on the policies of the Israeli government. So what I would say is, yes, you can express whatever you want. There are issues about what professors do in classrooms, because ideological indoctrination and education are different things.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  And also there are manner restrictions, because if you're part of a community, and a university is a community, then you're allowed to put restrictions on the way that you can behave in that community. If you, you know, if you get out of your car and scream and threaten someone because you don't like the way they drive, then that is actually a violation, especially if it's threatening behavior. So you can do the same thing on a, in a, in a college campus. You have to give as wide a latitude as you can. But you can't say anything to anyone at any time. That's harassment. Yes, it's harassment.

• 24:06Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I talked about with Rabbi Chaim Seidlerfeller, my rav from UCLA, I wrote a piece about the attacks on Hillel's. There was a, you know, a very, very disturbing and increasing attack on any Jewish college institution, including ones that were an umbrella for secular students, for peace-loving students, for all kinds of students. It's the place where we hang out. It's the place where we eat. In many cases, there's a kosher and halal meal plan that you can get at Hillel's. And when I was talking with Rabbi Chaim about the attack on Hillel's, one of the things that he reminded me of in this piece that I wrote...

• 24:46Mayim Bialik?

  Was that the foundation of the university environment is supposed to be an openness and an ability to have dialogue even about things that we find impossible to agree on, that the foundation of an academic institution and the reason that institutions like this exist is to facilitate conversation even in difficult times, especially in difficult times. And the new trend of shouting down, which in many cases is being supported by faculty and professors, is first of all astounding. And second of all, it's devastating to the

• 25:27Mayim Bialik?

  structure of the academic institution if you believe in it. Can you talk a bit about what is going on that faculty is in many cases supporting violent protest, hateful speech, calls for annihilation? Can you talk a little bit about what the hell is going on with the administration and the faculty of these organizations?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  So I want to say two, there are two pieces to this. And the second piece is really important. The first piece is, it isn't just, it's, in some ways, it's worse than that. It isn't just that students and sometimes faculty will literally shout people down, exactly as you said, again, and again, and again. But that when you approach them, they will not speak to you. I went to the protesters. I thought, I'm an adult, I'm a rabbi, I can talk to them. If they're upset at me, that's okay, I can take it. They, they said, I'm sorry, we're not allowed to speak to you. We're not allowed. So there also was an organizing principle here that, I mean, it's the same reason why when you, the tents that appeared

• 26:37Speaker 00

  all over the country were the same brand of expensive tents everywhere, all over the country. They were not ramshackle, which let's just go out to RIA and get a tent. There were, there were handbooks that they found afterwards. This was all organized. And I made more than one attempt, not only with protesters, but with some students from Pakistan who were part of the divinity school. And, and I, I gave them all my number. And I said, please, let's like have the opportunity to talk. Never heard from them. And part of this is there is an enormous amount of foreign money that is supporting this, promoting this, creating this. I talked about the fact that when I said to Claudine

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Gay, who was the president, "What about the money you take from Qatar?" She said, "We only take money from families." And I said to her, "The family that rules Qatar is a family like a mafioso family. It's not a family like your family or my family." But I've just learned recently, in fact, that not only does Qatar do this with colleges, they are now having conferences where they bring teachers in K through 12 to Qatar. Full business class, fully paid, four seminars there, and then they give them teaching modules

• 27:56Speaker 00

  when they go home. So our country is being influenced by people who not only dislike Jews, but derivatively, or maybe even more than that, are anti-Western in their orientation. Because they did an experiment at one of the colleges where they put up, I don't remember if it was Columbia or it was Penn, they put up a whole bunch of American flags, and guess what? The next day, they were all torn down. This is bigger in some ways than antisemitism. It is a large anti-Western movement, and it has profound implications for America and for Americans, and they can't afford to turn away.

• 28:38Mayim Bialik?

  I don't think this conversation is good for my health. Because like, no, but it's like, it's not that I don't know it, but hearing you talk about it in this way, the first thing I think of is I'm being paranoid, right? And that's what I was told my whole life. And that's what I told my grandparents my whole life, who fled the pogroms and the Holocaust of Eastern Europe. I said, "You're being paranoid. Everything's fine. This is the melting pot. We have made it. The streets are paved with gold," right? And my whole life, my fear was that I would be accused of being paranoid like that generation, and that's the generation that we need to Just have all those ideas die out. We're okay. We blend it in. Look at us.

• 29:21Mayim Bialik?

  And what you're saying is that there is an insidious infiltration of our university system and our education system in general that literally is using the Jewish cause to insert its ideology, which is explicitly anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-Western. This should upset people.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  It should upset people. It upsets some people. And by the way, I went through the exact same transitions. My father was a rabbi, and I remember when I started off in the rabbinate, I thought, okay, antisemitism was part of his rabbinate, but it's not going to be part of mine. You know, my father was one of those people who, like, you could be watching TV and a football player would make a good reception, would say, wow, that's a great reception. My father would go, ah, he's an antisemite. He had a comprehensive knowledge of everybody's opinions about the Jews everywhere in the world. But I will say this to make people feel a little bit better. The reason that America is different and has always been different is not because we have a constitution, or not because Americans

• 30:24Speaker 00

  are nicer, or any of those things. It's that for most of Jewish history, Jews were the identified other. There were Russians and Jews. There were Frenchmen and Jews. There were Germans and Jews. There aren't Americans and Jews. There are so many different groups that in fact, what the Jewish people needs to learn to do is to actually create allies. We're much better at identifying enemies than we are at embracing friends. And the truth is, we have a lot of friends.

• 30:54Mayim Bialik?

  Do we?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  And so, we need to make common cause. We really do. We have a lot of friends. And the reason that it's important to say that also is because the people who are our friends feel resentful if we don't acknowledge their goodwill. So I think we need to also look at that side of the ledger and see who will partner with us to make this better because we have to make the case to them that this is bad for America. It's not just bad for the Jews.

• 31:30Jonathan Cohen?

  In some ways, this isn't about us at all. We are the face in a foil for a much larger campaign. And if people are listening or thinking about this issue and saying, whatever, who really cares about the Jewish people? You know, it's a small group and I just don't want to care about this. The reality is, is that we are the front of a much larger attempt to undercut Western values, ideology, and really attack American core values.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Look, I will, as evidence for exactly what you say, I will just direct people, which I almost never do, to the Houthi flag, which reads, "Death to America, death to Israel, death to Jews." Allah is great. That's the flag. And that is all one sentiment.

• 32:18Mayim Bialik?

  That was celebrated on many of the campuses we're discussing. The Houthi flag was flown. They said, "Make us proud, turn another ship around." I mean, it's like a very, we're in the upside down. I want you to talk a little bit more about this anti-Western component. You know, many, many in the Jewish community would, would kind of be astounded when we would see signs like "Queers for Palestine." You know, we would see various groups for whom the values of Western culture are extremely important. The right to be who you are, the right to practice whatever religion you want to, the right to practice no religion, the right to be any gender or sexual identity that you

• 33:01Mayim Bialik?

  would like, all of the things. What are people not understanding about what this anti-Western, and in many cases, you know, Qatar-funded, you know, kind of institutionalization? What are they not understanding about how bad that is for those of us who value equal rights, women's rights, rights for gays, rights for trans people? What are people not understand? Where is the disconnect?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  I'll give you one diagnosis that is not Wilfs, which I think has a lot of traction. She says like underneath it is a utopianism. If we could just, I mean, this is what the Nazis thought. If we just get rid of the Jews, everything will be perfect. And there is a sense in which if we just get rid of the Zionist colonialists, the world will be great. There is no vision for what Palestine would actually be. I never heard that in any of the protests. I never heard someone say, so we can establish a Palestine that will have this kind of government and this kind, just this sense of, it's almost like an impurity that exists in the world. If we could just get rid of that, everything will be fine.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  And that's why it overrides people's values because it's utopianism. You know, it's like when Lenin said to make an omelet, you got to break some eggs. And, and the same idea here, it's like, okay, bad things will happen along the way, but eventually everything will be great. And that's one piece of it that I think is, that by the way, especially appeals to young people. And maybe some of them will grow out of it. That is part of my hope. But then the second part of this is that the, the sense of solidarity and joy that people get by protesting together and, and raising the hackles of those around them should not be underestimated.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I walk by that encampment every day. They were having the time of their lives. And everything they screamed that made people angrier, made their lives better. And there is an element to which this is a big middle finger in the face of everything that these kids, despite the fact that they are the 99.9% most privileged people in the world, think agrees to them. So there's some of that too. There's some of just the obnoxious adolescent absurdities. The problem for me is much more with the faculty. Like, they were the ones that I found inexcusable.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Like, a 20-year-old who says something stupid, maybe they'll grow out of it. But a professor at Harvard who abets that is evil. I don't know another word for it, it's just evil.

• 35:45Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about what you saw and what was reported about faculty involvement? And how far back do we trace where these faculty are getting their information and their support?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Harvard Divinity School had a division called the Religion and Public Life that was a relentlessly, and this was all driven by faculty, a relentlessly anti-Israel program. And the ideology, I mean, there are various ways to trace it. You can trace it, I would say the two major sources are, first of all, French deconstructionism, which is very popular on campus still. It's the only place that still exists. People say the only place you can find a communist is on the college campus. But the other is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did an enormous amount of work in seeding antisemitism and anti-Westernism and chaos through the world,

• 36:42Speaker 00

  and still does with Russian bots on social media. Undermining the West, and the Jews are a very effective lever for undermining the West, has been a Soviet goal for as long as there's been a Soviet Union. And so, let me just say, what that means is we have three separate enemies, and people should be aware of this. There is jihadism, there's radical Islam, there's hard-left antisemitism, and then there's far-right antisemitism. And weirdly, the three, or maybe not so weirdly, the three converge in a lot of their tropes, in a lot of the way that they speak about Jews and even about the West.

• 37:27Mayim Bialik?

  So this, this report that Harvard finally released after almost two months, it took them two months to gather what I think many of us could have gathered in, in just about the first week after October 7th. They released a report with some not surprising statistics. You know, over 50%, nearly 60% of Jewish students had experienced discrimination, stereotyping, negative bias. Around 75% expressed discomfort, expressing political opinions and believed there was an academic or professional penalty for expressing such views at Harvard. What's interesting is nowhere, you know, in the report was, was it mentioned about

• 38:08Mayim Bialik?

  the tens of millions of dollars that, that is coming in from, from Qatar, from, from a country that seems to have a very, very strong incentive to infiltrating campuses. Can you talk a little bit about what else we can understand about the role of foreign governments in fomenting this kind of hatred, intimidation and illegal activity on campuses?

• 38:37Speaker 00

  The role of governments is twofold. First of all, it reduces the diversity of voices in campus because now college campuses don't have to care about the $10,000 donor. They don't have to care about the person who gives 15,000 or 5,000 or 20,000. And they used to have to care about those people who had obviously a diversity of views. Now they can make that up easily, more than make that up by grants from foreign governments, which swamp the voice of the small donor. So first, it eliminates some of the diversity of audience that you have to appeal to.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  And everyone knows that it keeps you on your toes and makes you better when you know that your audience is not just one. It's that it's a diversity of people. It makes you rethink the way you present your message. The second thing I want to point out is the Islamophobia report was issued at the same time, and the Islamophobia report talked about the influence of donors over Harvard, by which it meant Jewish donors, because those were the only ones that withdrew their donations during the year. But the antisemitism report didn't talk about the much greater potential donors and actual donors in Middle Eastern countries. But these countries have, I mean, imagine if you have an ideology, and Qatar does,

• 40:05Speaker 00

  and Oman does, and Yemen does, and they're very similar. Imagine if you have an ideology and you are able to advance that ideology at Harvard, and Oxford, and Stanford, and Berkeley, and Yale, and Columbia. It's like capturing the golden fleece. It's the perfect way to show the world that not only is this ideology respectable, but it is going to become the ideology of the elite class of the West. I mean, one of the things that I approve of that the administration has done in their interventions in colleges, some things I don't like at all, some things I think are really great, one of them is that they insist on transparency in foreign donations, which

• 40:50Speaker 00

  I can't swear to this, but I understand from people in the field, was actually already a requirement, it just was never observed.

• 40:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk a little bit about how this foreign money then trickles down into shaping belief and organization? Because some would say, okay, great, you get this foreign money, you get to do whatever you want. How is it being funneled, both in terms of shaping ideology, which speaks to the perspective of faculty, and then let's talk about shaping actual practice, as you mentioned, handbooks and tents?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  So it does two things. First, it hires faculty. It gives grants for chairs and for visiting faculty and so on. And and one or two influential faculty members can change the feel on a campus. I mean, Edward Said at Columbia changed the nature of Columbia. You know that.

• 41:44Mayim Bialik?

  No, he changed the nature of many aspects of the entire country. Yes.

• 41:48Jonathan Cohen?

  And if someone doesn't know, let's give a snapshot about who Edward Said is.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Edward Said was a Palestinian, although he didn't live most of his life in Palestine, who was an intellectual who wrote a book called Orientalism that argued that the the the West was prejudiced against the Arab world and had and as a result, looked down on them. And in fact, for him, Israel was a primary example of that. It was an example of the West inserting itself into the Arab world illegitimately. That's a that's a quick, but he was a very influential theorist, and Orientalism is still taught all the time in college campuses. But I even think about the textbooks, the programs, the extracurricular programs,

• 42:36Speaker 00

  the movies that are shown at student gatherings, the the trips that are taken.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  All of that is a is part of a constant attempt. This is special pleading, I grant you, but my presence on campus was really important for the Jewish community, and that's just one year, one rabbi in one program.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  But I was in HDS all year long. There was a constant anti-Zionist. I was on campus every single day. I was never asked by anyone at HDS to speak about Israel or Zionism or Gaza or anything ever. Now, why was that? I don't think that was because they thought, and Wolpe has nothing to say. I think it was because. Nobody in that campus was disposed to want to present because they knew the backlash they would get, any other view except the view that was prevailing and subsidized.

• 43:40Mayim Bialik?

  Let's talk about what that quote "other view" is. You are someone that I uphold as a liberal, progressive, peace-loving, deeply-thinking, deeply-feeling rabbi and leader in this country, recognized as a person with high intellectual and compassionate esteem. You are not a person who has presented yourself as someone who does not believe in the rights of Palestinians, does not believe in statehood for the Palestinian people, does not believe in civil rights for the Arab world. Also, the notion that being a Jewish person who believes in the existence of a Jewish state, independent of political conversation, the

• 44:24Mayim Bialik?

  notion that that is an alternative or fringe, like, view is absolutely, it's upside down. It's the emperor wears no clothes.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Well, I will tell you, I mean, first of all, thank you for those kind words. I mean, I was part of the Muslim Jewish Council, I still am officially of the AJC, and we had wonderful dialogues with Muslim co-religionists. It broke down after October 7th. But the voice that they did feature on Israel in the divinity school was a very fine scholar and a very lovely man, but an extreme leftist who wrote a book called Diasporism, arguing about Judaism's validity for being in the diaspora and not in Israel, named Shao Magid. I don't have a problem with Shao Magid saying something at Harvard, but that he was the

• 45:18Speaker 00

  voice of the divinity school tells you that, in fact... 90% of American Jews, what we can call sort of the standard view of most American Jews, found no purchase in the divinity school at Harvard. And that's just insane.

• 45:36Mayim Bialik?

  I think there's also still so much misperception about the word Zionism and this sort of definition. The fact that, you know, when you see a sign, when my kid goes to college, when there's a sign that says Zionists not welcome here, the vast majority of Jews in the United States identify with the term Zionism as simply the belief that Israel has a right to exist. There is no other country in the world that when anyone disagrees with their policies, their government, or even wartime behavior, that we call for the annihilation of an entire country. It doesn't happen. It couldn't happen. The world would not let it happen.

• 46:17Mayim Bialik?

  And yet here we are in this sort of like bizarre alternate reality where denigrating and delegitimizing the Jewish state is really the veil behind which we see that Western ideology is not a pre-- they're coming for the Christians next, I promise.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Well, I, that is, I think that's true. And I will start by, with your first point, which is, I visited Rwanda, where one half of the population virtually slaughtered the other half of the population. Nobody after that said, okay, that's it, we're done, no more Rwanda. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone to do that. Nobody says, look what China did to Tibet, no more China. Or look what Russia did to Ukraine, no more Russia. No, Israel is the only country. And not, and this, and the subsidiary point to this is if somebody said, I, I hate France, and I think France shouldn't exist, but I have no hostility towards Frenchmen, you would say, that's ridiculous.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  So when you say, I hate Israel and Israel shouldn't exist, but I have no hostility towards Jews. When Israel is the only country in the world where Jews actually have sovereignty, it just doesn't track. If you say, look, I'm fine with the other 40 Muslim countries that exist in the world, but the one Jewish country is actually the source of all anguish and pain and evil. I mean, how can people not see, especially after thousands of years of discrimination? This is not a new one. After losing a third of our people less than, what, a generation or about a generation ago,

• 47:54Speaker 00

  it's not possible to say, I think Israel shouldn't exist and think that antisemitism has no part in that view. It's just not possible.

• 48:02Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to turn back to Harvard for a second. And the role of money and influence. We talked about faculty, we talked about programs. Student centers are being funded by this same money. And through those student centers, is that how organizations are supporting handbooks, tents? Talk a little bit more about those organizations and how those are fueling some of these protests and the ideology.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  So Students for Justice in Palestine, which is one of the most prominent of them and has been banned on some campuses, gets an enormous amount of foreign money and uses it liberally. And they, it not only provides information and provide programming, but also works for recruitment. Because remember that people on campus are like also seekers and they're looking for community. And, and they're looking for, you know, places to go to eat and places to go to be and all of those sorts of things. So if you have enough money to spread around the college campus, you have a very, very good chance of building up a cohort of students who will...

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Be drawn to whatever ideology their community is a part of because most people believe what people around them believe. That's the, that is the secret of how you create everything from political parties to cults. Which is, you know, you can predict how people will vote by the neighborhood they live in more accurately than you can predict how they'll vote by what they say. Because we tend to, we're herd animals, we tend to act especially when we're young. Especially when we're first away from home. And your, you know, adolescence is a, is a sort of tortured time. And you want to be accepted. And to be socially accepted and embraced is the best feeling in the world. And if all that takes is to hate Israel,

• 49:58Speaker 00

  that's a small price to pay.

• 49:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Two follow-up questions. The first is likely oversimplified, but I think it's important to state. Does Harvard have an antisemitism problem?

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Do they acknowledge that problem?

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Some of them actually say, I mean, Alan Garber, the president, said that Harvard has an antisemitism problem. Um, so I'm on good, I'm on good authority to, uh, to say it. It has an antisemitism problem, but the problem is bigger than antisemitism. It has an antisemitism problem that ripples out beyond antisemitism. Because the problem is not that Harvard has a lot of people that hate Jews.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  The problem is that Harvard has a deep, too deep, interconnected ideologies. Let me start with DEI. DEI, which is diversity, equity, inclusion.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Basically, the idea is if a group is underrepresented, it is because of discrimination. And the reverse of that is if a group is overrepresented, it's because they've gotten unfair advantage.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  So the way that I expressed this once, uh, online is you can't get, uh, an even lawn with fertilizer, you can only get it with a lawnmower. And the same thing here, if you want to get a representative. Sample in a college, you can't do it by incentivizing people of different minority groups. You have to do it by eliminating the minority groups that are overrepresented. So the first thing that happens is that the Jews have to go. And the same thing is happening to Asians, right? There are too many Asians in college campus because they're just doing too well. And obviously that's not fair, so we have to get rid of them. So DEI by its very nature encourages discrimination against Jews.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Intersectionality suggests that if one group is impacted, then they have solidarity with every other group that is impacted, which is one of the reasons why you see alliances across different ethnic groups for Palestine. And the third piece of this is anti-colonialism as if Israel was this colonial power, which is not true for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that colonial powers are people who come from one place and have a place to go back to, like the French were a colonial power, but they go back to France. The British were a colonial power, but they had Britain. They were not refugees who were going back to an ancient ancestral home. That's not a colonial power.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  So there is a, almost a conjuries of ideology, a sort of combination of many different ideologies at work that is bigger than just Jews are bad. You know, I just, I just did the March of the Living, where you go and I visited several concentration camps and so on. And all I could hear was the echoes in my mind. I mean, I could hear other terrible things too, but I could hear echoes in my mind of people at Harvard who would say things like, go back to Poland, as though that was actually the home of the Jews, right? Poland, which is a graveyard of Jews. And you recognize that the Jewish historical experience

• 53:20Speaker 00

  is irrelevant to people who, who are sort of newly born in this anti-colonial, anti-Semitic ideology. And, and I'll say one other thing, which is that antisemitism, and I know we're not going to do a whole thing about antisemitism, but one piece of it that is extremely important that, to, to recognize is not only that antisemitism is almost always a conspiracy theory. But also, the Jews are the only people who are simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. The Nazis thought of them as vermin who control the world.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  And some of that same "you're less than us, but we're also scared of you" persisted in the antisemitism that we saw on college campuses. "We hate the Jews, they're terrible, they're awful, they're subhuman, look what they would do to other human beings, but also look at all the control they have, look at how they run the banks and the movie industry and the ZAG, Zionist occupied government, which is what they call the American government on the right." So, it's a deep psychological distortion that is very hard to stamp out.

• 54:35Jonathan Cohen?

  If we acknowledge that Harvard is aware that they have this problem, what is the solution? Is it simply cutting off funding? Is it moderating who the professors are? Because then you're trying to, you know, have the same problem of controlling ideology to push it in the opposite direction.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  The antisemitism report makes many sensible suggestions about, you know, first of all, enforcing the rules, and I agree that being transparent about the money is really important. I think hiring people who represent a certain ideological diversity would be a really good thing. You know that if someone like, someone of our ideological stripe came in and interviewed for a job in the English department, there is not a snowball's chance that we would succeed. Because the people who are judging it, as soon as they hear that we have, you know, that we're, in one way or another, get the hint that we're Zionists, they're not going to hire us.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  And so, part of this is changing hiring practices.

• 55:44Mayim Bialik?

  But that's just a euphemism, for they don't want to hire a Jew unless the Jew denounces the right of Israel to exist. Like, that's such a weird euphemism, like, and I see this as I walk around the streets, you know, of the world that I live in. I get it. My existence as a Jewish person who does not call for the destruction of the state of Israel is seen as some sort of threat to Western society.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  When in fact, it is actually the root of Western society. And Western society grew out of exactly that, which is the Hebrew Bible, which I'll just remind your listeners is all about the Israelites getting to the land of Israel. That is what the Bible, that is the theme of the Bible is let's take this people and put them in this land.

• 56:30Mayim Bialik?

  And they weren't in Eastern Europe. Sorry, just to clarify for people who don't know their Bible history. We were a bunch of wandering tribes. There were many wandering tribes.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  I always say, I mean, each year I see these, you know, you have no roots in the land of Israel, said by people who then want to go to Bethlehem to celebrate the birth of Jesus, who was Jewish in the land of Israel thousands of years ago.

• 56:58Mayim Bialik?

  And we existed thousands of years before Jesus. I would like to also remind people.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yes, I wrote a book about King David. King David was in, was about, was a good thousand years before Jesus. And King David was the founder of Jerusalem. So it's, I mean, it's absurd and counterproductive to make an argument that is so, it's so painful to hear clear contradictions of fact asserted because of ideology. But I don't know how else to combat it.

• 57:39Mayim Bialik?

  And in the dramatic theatrics that are playing out on university campuses, what we're seeing is a celebration of Hamas, a celebration of Hezbollah, a celebration of the Houthis, whose entire existence and the call to worship, the call to be a member of these organizations is a celebration of the death of Western culture. Meaning when you are waving that flag, that is why people find that intimidating. Because you're waving the flag of an institution that does not support the right of you to be gay,

• 58:18Mayim Bialik?

  of you to celebrate and to express yourself as any individual Western person. So that is intimidating to many people who identify as Jews.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  No question. And as an addendum to Jonathan's question, think about what happens to right wing speakers when they come to these campuses. They in fact don't want to hear them and don't think they have a right to express their opinion. And, and so they get shouted down and many of them don't have the chance to speak. And so, yeah, there is, there is a censoriousness in the, in the hard left that matches some of the censoriousness in the hard right.

• 59:02Mayim Bialik?

  It's also grouping, it's grouping moderates with far right because the, and I understand if people want to protest people from the IDF, like there is a time and a place and a manner in which you are allowed to protest certain government officials that you don't agree with, but to group moderates in that shouting down category is an assault on Western democracy and the foundation of the academic institution.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  You have to believe certain things or you're not, you're not a good person.

• 59:33Mayim Bialik?

  I want to talk about your resignation because we've kind of couched all of this. And, you know, I don't mean to kind of bury the lead here, but you resigned from your position in December and your resignation statement was really brilliant. And what it said is that the system at Harvard, along with the 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 as intrinsically evil is itself evil. Parts of the university epitomized an ideology that I believe is injurious to higher education

• 1:00:18Mayim Bialik?

  and devastating for Jews. Why did you resign from your position on this committee?

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  So this is what happened.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  I, I was on the committee and I was the only person on the committee who really, whose primary loyalty wasn't really to Harvard. They were all either faculty of Harvard or on the board of Harvard or, and I was, I kind of dropped in. And, and it was clear, we kept making suggestions, some of the suggestions that you mentioned. Please like have a hotline where students can call just a hotline so that everybody knows what's going. Nothing got acted on again and again and again. We were told and and I can now say this because it's become public. The advisory committee was all supposed to be private. Several of us wrote a letter threatening to resign and

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  and it was the only time that the chairman of the board Penny Pritzker came to one of our meetings and she said, please don't resign because they knew it would look terrible for Harvard in the midst of this crisis if the the antisemitism committee resigned said, please don't resign. President Gay made a presentation. Things are going to get better. And so we said, okay, we'll give you like, we'll give you a chance. We don't want to make Harvard look. We want it to get better. Fine. Then came the hearings. So I was in New York at the Maimonides Fund for the hearings. And in the first five minutes, I turned to the person I was watching it with and said, this is a disaster. And if I watched all five hours. And there were so many chances, so many chances to

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  redeem that hearing to bang the table and say, this is not what our university stands for in

• 1:01:56Mayim Bialik?

  So why didn't they? What were they so afraid of?

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  I have two theories about why, but let me just get to the postscript and then I'll tell you what I think. So the day after the hearing, I I knew that I had to resign because this was unless everything changed immediately. But I had to wait till I get back got back to Boston because I needed to tell the other members of the committee, I would not I would not sandbag them. So

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  I got back to Boston and I got a call from Claudine Gay. And I said to her, Look, I I'm I'm in an impossible position. I said, and I know that you are too. And I'm sorry that my getting out of my impossible position is going to make yours worse. That's not what I want. But I don't have a choice. And she said to me in that conversation, what could I do?

• 1:02:47Mayim Bialik?

  Let me count the ways.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  So I gave her like four or five things, but it was clear by the end of the conversation that none of them were going to happen.

• 1:02:54Mayim Bialik?

  What were the things? Like, what? I'm serious. Like, what could we have done?

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  I said, immediately set up a hotline, immediately sanction the students who who have violated the law, make the discipline transparent, because even the people they said they were disciplining, they wouldn't say what they were doing. And in fact, in the end, almost nothing happened. I said, and set up a committee of people outside of the DEI structure to examine the DEI structure, my friends on the committee. And I said, look, I got to resign. Martha Minow, God bless her, the former dean of the law school, whose father was the founder of PBS Newton Minow. She said, my father always used to say to me, David, don't take a job that has accountability, but no authority. And I thought, wow, that's exactly what I did. And she said, so it makes sense. And

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  they were all very supportive. And I wrote the resignation thing. And honestly, I did not think that it was going to go viral. I thought that it would be like my community would like it, and I would be done. And then other people would take the responsibility. But I think people were so fed up and so angry. And like, somebody basically saying what they felt about Harvard was cathartic. And so that's why I resigned. The reason I think, by the way, that they were not more forthcoming, all three of them. It's not only that they were all advised by the same law firm, which could be shut down tomorrow.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  But also, they were all, they were all facing lawsuits. And I think the lawyer said to them, you may not say anything that will give fodder to the people who and and also, and I have one other diagnosis. Okay, so this comes from being a synagogue rabbi. Here's the thing about being a synagogue rabbi that a lot of people don't appreciate. Why should they? They're not synagogue rabbis. You hire a synagogue rabbi for like, for you know how there are like five basic personality traits? One of them is agreeability. Synagogue rabbis have to be agreeable. You have to like your synagogue rabbi with rare exceptions, or they won't survive. And then you ask them to take stands that are disagreeable.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  And most rabbis find it really hard to do. Some can do it, but it's very hard to do. Well, college presidents are the same. You become a college president, when people say, why did Claudine Gay become college president? It's not because she was a black woman. There are a lot of black women. It's because the faculty liked her. She was popular with them. And she was not prepared to say something, I think, that would make all of them dislike her. Leadership is supposed to combine agreeability and also courage. And that is really hard to find, but that's what this moment needed. And unfortunately, there were, there were college presidents who had it. I will single out my friend Daniel Deere Meyer at Vanderbilt.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  He had it as soon as students protested. He brought in the police and he said, keep this up, you're gone.

• 1:05:57Mayim Bialik?

  Not because protests should not be allowed, but because the level of protest that is violating the rights of students on campus cannot be tolerated in academic atmosphere.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  He allowed other protests, but, but that's very, it's rare to be able to have both of those qualities. And I don't think that the people in question have it.

• 1:06:17Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things you said was that more times than I can count, I went to administrators and insisted that what they were treating as a slow burn was in fact a five alarm fire. When did you go to the administration and what were you met with?

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  So I, I knew from my synagogue that when something started to go wrong, ignoring it, never, it just never worked. It always would get worse if it had any legs at all. I mean, if it was just silly, I didn't get my parking space, it would go away.

• 1:06:50Mayim Bialik?

  It's a very serious matter at holy days time.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  And so, and I saw, because I wasn't from Harvard, I didn't have the mentality that a lot of people at Harvard had, which was, we'll be fine, we're Harvard. And in case you didn't understand what I meant, what I mean is, we're Harvard. And they really felt that way. And I kept saying, it doesn't matter that you're Harvard. I'm telling you, I hear from the Jewish community outside of Harvard, who were, after all, my main contacts in the world. And I see by the increasing protests on Harvard, because they were getting bigger, this is not going away, it's going to get worse. And every time I said that, they would say, we've had protests at Harvard before, we know how to handle this. And I felt like I was screaming into the wind.

• 1:07:37Jonathan Cohen?

  What do you think about the Trump administration taking aim and pressing this issue? Now, I want to separate that from the risk to scientific research, which I think is very dangerous, and the risk to advancing our status in leading scientific research around the world. But what do you think specifically on this issue of the Trump administration taking action?

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  First of all, I agree. They use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. And a scalpel would be a much better tool. And I do think that tremendous threat that the universities feel did move them in a way that almost nothing else could. The fact that what they're focusing on, the antisemitism that they're focusing on, as powerfully as they are, I agree, has tremendous backlash potential. So what I would say is, I think there are different ways to do it that might not lead to the same bad consequences as we have seen. There have been some serious good ones as well. So I have mixed feelings about it.

• 1:08:44Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that is scary to me about your resignation is that while I understand why you had to resign, it also makes me feel like... Who's going to defend us? And I know that being, you know, a rabbi for almost 30 years of your life at one of the largest and most respected institutions here in Los Angeles was already, you know, a mighty torch that you that you had to bear for us. You know, your position at Harvard was for many of us, a real opportunity to have the voice of of moderate and peace-loving Zionists have our place.

• 1:09:24Mayim Bialik?

  And I don't mean to to put this burden on you, but if you don't defend us and if reasonable, intellectually sound people entering the university system to try and help are not accepted, what is the solution? Is there not a place for us there?

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, had I thought that I could make a difference inside, I would have. I think that actually my voice got louder by being outside. But but I don't know. I mean, I hope there is a place. I think Alan Garber wants to make such a place. I really believe that. But time will tell because it's not only going to be Harvard. We have the same question about Penn, about Stanford, about Berkeley, about Columbia, about a lot of these institutions. And we'll have to wait and see whether, in fact, there is such a place.

• 1:10:12Mayim Bialik?

  Many people that I know, you know, even again, people who call themselves liberals of all varieties are feeling like the elite institutions, the institutions of the Western part of the United States are simply cesspools for hatred, for divisiveness, and for a lack of academic integrity, even in terms of conversations. It, in some cases, worries me that many people are saying, I'm going to go to a conservative part of the country. I'm going to go to the South. I want to avoid all of this liberal nonsense. I want to get away from it. Is that sort of what you see as as a dividing line now for a lot of students, even people who are not Jewish?

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  I tell people that like there are there are good reasons. If you have a good reason to go to Harvard, if there's a particular professor you want to study with, if there's a particular field you're interested in, there are still many wonderful people there and tremendous resources there, and you shouldn't write it off. I don't want to lose the IVs, and I don't want to lose the IVs to Jews if it's possible still to rescue them. But you have to be willing to be in an atmosphere that is not entirely. Agreeable and you have to be willing to maybe have some backbone and to stand up. And so there are a lot of other wonderful institutions, both institutions that are established and new ones that are being created.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  If you want to send your kid to a place like Vanderbilt or UATX or a place that's trying to create something and there are many, many others. I don't by any means, that's, that's hardly an exhaustive list. There are many institutions where Jews can flourish.

• 1:11:56Mayim Bialik?

  You, you talk about false moral equivalency. One of the things that came out with the Harvard antisemitism report was this concurrent report on Islamophobia that I guess the university just, they could not contain themselves and just release a report on antisemitism. They also had to point out about Islamophobia, which the statistic you give, 68% of religion-based hate crimes are committed against Jews, close to 9% are committed against Muslims, which does not mean that it is not a real problem. It does not mean that we shouldn't take it seriously, that any denigration of Muslim people, of Arabs is completely unacceptable. And for me, as a liberal person, something we absolutely need to address. But this notion of false moral equivalency is something that Sam Harris also talks about.

• 1:12:42Mayim Bialik?

  This compulsive, compulsive, you know, clinical need to make everything the same, to mention the Holocaust in the same sentence as the establishment of the state of Israel as an affront to all of the Arab and, you know, Muslim world. What is it about this moral equivalency that has kind of taken over in many cases, the academic world in particular?

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  I think that, I think that the way you get status is by being a victim. And so if somebody calls some, someone else a victim and not you, you feel like you've been denigrated. And so you have to say, well, you're, you're also a victim, just like they're a victim. But of course, once you do that, what you do actually is eliminate. The real issue on either side. Because antisemitism is a different problem. Society has to take antisemitism on its own. Because we've also seen again and again and again, the tremendous historical damage that antisemitism does to societies. From Spain in the 15th century to Germany in the 20th century, antisemitism is a horrible

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  cancer that eats away at the soul of a society. And it isn't only on Jews, in fact, it's not primarily on Jews. To worry about this and to try to make it better.

• 1:14:01Mayim Bialik?

  First, they came for the communists, and I did not speak up.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly so.

• 1:14:04Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Exactly so, and we are right now in the time of the omair. And the omair is the time in between the leaving of Egypt and the coming to Sinai. And that means that people are in the wilderness and they haven't gotten the message yet, but we will soon.

• 1:14:18Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I mean. Rabbi Wolpe, where can people find out more about you?

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Just Google me, I'm on X, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook, and I'm on email.

• 1:14:33Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you for the, thank you for the beautiful work you do, we appreciate it.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Great pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:14:41Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan, I want to ask you a funny question.

• 1:14:44Mayim Bialik?

  If you had been brought in to serve on this committee, and you saw a complete lack of accountability and an inability of the university to enforce the already established rules about how other students should be treated, what the time and manner is for protest, what would you do? It's interesting, he said that his voice means more because he left.

• 1:15:08Jonathan Cohen?

  It's striking to me that you need a committee to enforce already existing rules. Like, the rules are there, either enforce them or don't, but like, what is the committee supposed to do?

• 1:15:21Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, it's, it brings out the most paranoid thinking that I have. Like, why is this so hard? I don't know why it's so hard, and you know, the, the easy answer is that like, the Jewish cause and the hatred of Jews, which is, you know, the oldest hatred in the world, it's kind of like when people looked at what happened on October 7th and they were like, I don't think those women were raped. It's like, there's only several things that... That it means when we see women who have just been raped and all of a sudden, Me Too did not apply to that community. It's kind of what feels like is happening here. Like, these rules apply, except when you actually have to apply them to a a community that a lot of people don't want to support.

• 1:16:02Jonathan Cohen?

  All these rules apply, except when there's such an overwhelming number of people breaking the rules that to discipline them would be to remove such a significant portion of the student body and potentially upset a significant portion of the faculty as to crumble the structure of the university, which goes to his point that it's putting perfume on a sewer. If the sewer is the thing that is a, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, 35%, 20%, removing that amount of the student body and potentially the faculty, what's left?

• 1:16:41Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think also then it does become an issue of, are people allowed to have other opinions as professors? I think so. Right? And I think that's what's interesting also, when you talk about the funding coming in from Qatar and from these kinds of countries, there's a very singular ideology that they're interested in. When you talk about Jewish donors, there's all kinds of Jewish donors. There's Jewish donors who are on the far left. There's Jewish donors who are on the far right. You can't kind of compare those entities in terms of, you know, donors and who gets a voice, but we do need a diverse representation of opinions. However, if those opinions that, let's say, are on the quote "far left", and they are refusing to engage in conversation with other academics and other professors,

• 1:17:23Mayim Bialik?

  and they're encouraging students to shout down other students, to be violent, and to eliminate the possibility for conversation, to me, that's an indication that you're interested in something other than being a faculty member.

• 1:17:36Jonathan Cohen?

  That's the formation of small militia. Right? Like, we're not engaging in discourse. We're not trying to come to new ideas or overcome our differences. We're promoting extremist behavior on college campuses and to-

• 1:17:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Have extra credit to motivate students to participate in ideological issues is really not part of a curriculum.

• 1:18:01Mayim Bialik?

  When I published my piece in The Atlantic about the attack on Hillel's, this was exactly the point that we talked about. When I was a student at UCLA, I was shocked that the Muslim Student Association, that was the organization at the time, we didn't have SJP yet, the Muslim Student Association would not talk to us. And they would hold up signs and stand there stone-faced. And we would try and engage with them, and they would just stare straight ahead. And it was like, what's happening? Like, we're trying, like, can we talk? Can we bring Palestinian students and Jewish students together? Can we have a forum? It was the policy of shouting people down and shutting people down was already something that was so foreign to me and that clearly has gained so much momentum and is

• 1:18:46Mayim Bialik?

  antithetical to the reason that we're supposed to be in an academic environment. We're supposed to be able to engage with people who don't agree with us so that we can find a way to exist. That's what's going to happen with the Palestinian and Israeli people. Guess what? They're going to live together. They're going to share that land. That's what's going to happen. There's no other solution. There's something conspicuous missing from today's conversation, and I do want to address it. We do not talk about politics in this episode. We do not talk about what led up to October 7th from the perspective of the Muslim world. We do not talk about the policies of the Israeli government. We do not talk about the policies of the IDF. What we talk

• 1:19:29Mayim Bialik?

  about is the things that happened on university campuses following October 7th, specifically beginning with a celebration of the massacre that occurred on those days and the trickle-down effects and what we can understand about what's happening on campuses in terms of how we treat all people and how we value Western ideals. We are not here to discuss The rights of any particular people to any particular portion of land. It's simply not what this conversation's about. Many people don't feel comfortable having any conversation the way we're gonna have a conversation unless we address injustice 1948, 1973, 1967, 1917. That's not what we're here to do today.

• 1:20:11Mayim Bialik?

  We're here to talk about where we can all come together in understanding what's going on at the university system, how it impacts all of us, Jews, non-Jews, people who know about the conflict in the Middle East, people who don't. This is about Western values. I know the comment section of this episode is probably gonna be somewhat mind-blowing. We appreciate positive discourse. We appreciate the celebration that Jonathan and I are here to try and understand how we can cooperate together, how people can coexist. We are lovers of peace, believers in peace, and believers that all of these things can be tackled with the right, the right things in place, the right kind of perspectives in place, that we don't have to agree on everything, but we do need to be able to talk about it.

• 1:20:56Mayim Bialik?

  We appreciate you being here with us and check us out on Substack and from our breakdown to the one we hope we never have. We'll see you next time.