The House Hearing on Antisemitism: A Lesson on Hypocrisy

1/4/24

Given all the attention by the media to the recent resignation and fall from grace of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, I decided to go back and watch the CSPAN video of the meeting of the House Education and Workforce Committee. Gay testified before that committee, along with two other University presidents (Elizabeth McGill of University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT); and that appearance seems to have been the precipitating event leading to Dr. Gay’s demise.

The hearing was purportedly devoted to the topic of antisemitism on college campuses, which was achieving national attention in large part due to a plethora of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the growing sense that university administrators weren’t addressing what many have come to believe was antisemitic hate speech and calls for violence on the part of the demonstrators.

Before reviewing that video, about the only coverage of the event that I had been aware of was the part where Representative Elise Stephanik asked Gay whether calls for the mass murder of African Americans would be protected speech at Harvard. While this question had to be the softest of softballs, Gay evaded before Stephanik moved on.