The resignation of a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, Rabbi David Wolpe, from the school’s recently inaugurated antisemitism advisory group is the first sign that the effort to combat antisemitism might be falling apart following the president of the Ivy League university’s disastrous Congressional testimony earlier this week. 

Rabbi Wolpe, who was previously named by Newsweek “The Most Influential Rabbi in America,” tells the Sun that the issue of antisemitism at Harvard is too deeply rooted for him to be able to help fix. On Thursday, in what he called a “Chanukah message,” the rabbi announced his decision to step down from the committee less than two months after it was assembled by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to address the crisis of antisemitism on campus. 

Rabbi Wolpe chose to part ways with the group following the congressional testimonies earlier this week of Ms. Gay and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. The presidents’ testimonies have sparked national outcry for them to resign. 

The path forward, Rabbi Wolpe says, requires an overhaul of the institutional policies and educational curriculum at these elite schools to rectify the ills plaguing their campuses following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel.

“I thought that I could not be helpful given the severity of the problem and the fact that the advisory committee was an advisory committee — it wasn’t as though we could create policy or change policy,” Rabbi Wolpe tells the Sun. “I did not believe that many of the things that we thought were essential were going to happen.”

Ms. Gay established the antisemitism advisory group to “begin the vital work of eradicating antisemitism from our community,” she announced at Harvard’s Jewish center, Harvard Hillel, in late October, weeks after Hamas’s attacks had unleashed a gusher of antisemitic conduct on elite college campuses.

The committee’s eight initial members included influential administrators and faculty from the Harvard College and the professional schools, who would work with Ms. Gay on developing a strategy for combating the pernicious ideology on campus. 

Rabbi Wolpe declined to speak on the details of his confidential discussions with the committee upon informing them of his decision. He says that they are “a very harmonious group of people,” though, and “they certainly were understanding of my reasons and my decision.”

“It’s not that the committee didn’t take action,” says Rabbi Wolpe. “It’s that this is a bigger issue that a committee alone cannot solve.” Calls to remove the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn are also insufficient to mitigate the roots of campus antisemitism, he argues, for “this is a much deeper and more systemic issue than certain individuals.”

Defeating antisemitism at Harvard, Rabbi Wolpe says, requires more transparent disciplinary procedures for students who perpetrate such behavior. Ms. Gay’s testimony on Tuesday disclosed a failure to apply the school’s code of conduct as she dodged repeated questions from Congresswoman Elise Stefanik over whether calls for the genocide of Jews on campus constitute harassment or bullying. 

Harvard, Rabbi Wolpe urges, should expand its education on antisemitism and Judaism, rethink its structures and ideologies of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and hire a more ideologically diverse faculty. Part of the problem, he says, is the analytical framework of “intersectionality” pervading academia, which places an overwhelming emphasis on individuals’ identities alongside the discrimination and privilege they face in society. 

“When you see the world through the solitary lens of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed,’ and Jews who have been so deeply oppressed are seen as oppressors,” Rabbi Wolpe says, “then you have no natural place for them in your scheme, and therefore they become ‘oppressors.’” The suffering of Jewish students on college campuses today, therefore, has been “discounted.”

Elite universities have been widely criticized as hostile environments for Jewish students in recent weeks. Rabbi Wolpe says he knows some undergraduates who have refrained from speaking up in class when their professors condemn the violence at Gaza but say nothing of the inhumanity committed against Israel. One student explained to him, “I didn’t want to put a target on my back.”

“I hope that this is a catalyst for a greater cultural awakening of the deep problems that we have in our culture,” says Rabbi Wolpe. He hopes that college students can receive “a kind of reindoctrination in the values that they so take for granted,” for negligence of one’s blessings, he says, is “what leads people to celebrate totalitarian and terrorist organizations because they cannot actually imagine that they don’t share the values that they grew up with.”

“Remember,” Rabbi Wolpe warns, “this is not a Harvard problem — this is a problem in education, and when there’s a problem in education, it reflects a problem in the society in general.”

Yet the rabbi expresses no intention of leaving Harvard before his year there is over. “Students at elite institutions,” he says, “are going to be leaders in the culture in one way or another. And so what they believe matters.”