After a public firestorm, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government decided to change course and award a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Roth had previously been denied this position for his scathing criticism of the Jewish state.
I wish I could say this is good news for academic freedom. One shouldn’t be barred from the academy for merely professing critical views of a foreign government’s policies. But upon examination of Roth’s record, it becomes clear that he’s more than just one of Israel’s many left-wing detractors.
Under Roth’s leadership, HWR betrayed its founders’ vision. It thoroughly discredited itself by becoming a superfluous anti-Israel activist group. Human Rights Watch has consistently singled out Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, for censure. The organization has continually subjected the country to far more denunciations than any other in the region, an area of the world that’s dominated by autocracies, authoritarian theocracies, and failed states.
Roth also has a long history of making antisemitic remarks. Throughout his career, he has insinuated that Jewish Israelis have a primitive sense of morality, blamed Israel for antisemitism in Germany, equated Israel’s ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip with the Holocaust, and even criticized Jerusalem for sending humanitarian aid to Nepal in the aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake.
At some point, one has to wonder what might be motivating Roth. Perhaps it’s self-loathing? Roth is ethnically Jewish, and his father was a Jewish refugee from Germany, but it sure seems like he’s doing everything he can to distance himself from his upbringing.
Psychoanalytic speculation aside, Roth’s history of grotesque and hateful anti-Jewish remarks disqualifies him from serving on the faculty of a prestigious institution such as the Kennedy School. Harvard should have stood its ground. But no one should be surprised by this reversal. Much like what Israel’s late foreign minister Abba Eban once said of the Palestinians, prestigious universities in recent years have seemingly “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”