Member of new Harvard antisemitism task force signed letter saying Israel imposes ‘apartheid’

Harvard professor Derek Penslar, who was tapped as a co-chair of the new antisemitism task force announced by the university, signed a letter in August that denounced Israel as an “apartheid regime.”

The open letter, which is titled “The Elephant in the Room” and has nearly 2,900 signatories, denounced the controversial judicial overhaul advanced by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and asserted it had a “direct link” to Israel’s “illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians.”

“American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid,” states the letter, which was flagged by the conservative news site the Washington Free Beacon.

The letter also states that “as Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it. Meanwhile, American Jewish billionaire funders help support the Israeli far right.”