Pro-Palestinian Group of Harvard Employees Removes Names, Loses a Prominent Professor

The backlash from the posting of a clearly anti-Semitic cartoon by several pro-Palestinian groups at Harvard is still being felt. As I described yesterday, the school immediately denounced the cartoon which showed a hand with a Jewish star and a dollar sign holding a rope around the necks of one black and one Arab man. As of Monday the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the African and African American Resistance Organization and the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine had all pulled the image down and apologized. But it seems to be a case of too little, too late. 

Last night the school’s interim president, who took over after the resignation of Claudine Gay, condemned the image and added that the Harvard corporation also joined him in condemning it.

Interim President Alan M. Garber ’76 fiercely condemned an antisemitic image posted by two pro-Palestine student groups in a Tuesday evening message to Harvard affiliates.

“While the groups associated with the posting or sharing of the cartoon have since sought to distance themselves from it in various ways, the damage remains, and our condemnation stands,” Garber wrote. “The members of the Corporation join me in unequivocally condemning the posting and sharing of the cartoon in question.”

But there are other signs that even the groups themselves are ashamed. The Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is a recently formed group of Harvard employees and their website used to list over 100 faculty and staff by name as signatories. Sometime Monday all of those names disappeared.

As of Monday morning, the faculty group listed more than 100 signatories on its website under a statement describing the group’s goals. They included faculty and staff from Harvard’s law school, medical school, college, and school of public health…

At some time on Sunday or Monday, the faculty group removed the names of all signatories from its website, according to archived versions of the site. A spokesperson for the group did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) also got a vote of no confidence from a Harvard history professor who had served as the group’s faculty advisor. He also pulled out of the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) where he was originally the top signatory.

Walter Johnson, a professor of History and of African and African American Studies, resigned as a faculty adviser to the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine after the groups faced a wave of backlash for sharing a post containing an antisemitic image.

History professor Alison Frank Johnson, Johnson’s wife, confirmed his decision to resign from the two groups when reached by phone Tuesday evening…

Johnson was initially listed as the first signatory in FSJP’s founding statement. The list of FSJP members was removed from the website at some point after controversy erupted over the antisemitic image.

The Boston Globe notes that the cartoon in question was originally published in the 1960s and it was called anti-Semitic even then.

The cartoon appears to have originated from a 1967 newsletter published by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a major player in the 1960s civil rights movement. According to a New York Times article at the time, the two men depicted with ropes around their necks are boxer Muhammad Ali and then-president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser.

According to the Times article, the SNCC newsletter condemned what it described as atrocities committed by Zionists against Arabs. The Times quoted a then-director of the Anti-Defamation League saying the newsletter, which included the cartoon, “smacks very heavily of antisemitism.”

So it’s hard to see how these groups didn’t know what they were dealing with. This image was first called anti-Semitic more than 50 years ago.

Finally, the NY Times published an interesting piece yesterday noting that other college presidents are watching what is happening to Harvard with concern.

When 70 university presidents gathered for a summit at the end of January, the topic on everyone’s mind was the crisis at Harvard.

The hosts of the summit treated the university, battered by accusations of coddling antisemitism, as a business-school case study on leadership in higher education, complete with a slide presentation on its plummeting reputation.

The killer slide: “Boeing & Tesla Have Similar Levels of Negative Buzz as Harvard.”…

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s School of Management, organized the summit. “Despite near 400 years of history, the value of brand equity is nowhere near as permanent as Harvard trustees think it is,” he said in an interview. “There used to be a term in the industry of something being the Cadillac of the industry. Well, Cadillac itself is, you know, sadly not the Cadillac of the industry anymore.”

Harvard is probably still thinking that it can ride this out a bit longer and eventually bounce back as if nothing happened but that probably isn’t the case. The school is doing permanent damage to its reputation with each new outburst of anti-Semitism.