Five participants in the TED fellows program, which supports and promotes emerging voices in a variety of fields across the globe, resigned Wednesday after the public-speaking organization invited hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and journalist Bari Weiss to speak at its 2024 flagship conference in Vancouver. The five fellows — self-described inventor Ayah Bdeir, filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, cosmologist Renée Hlozek, artist Sarah Sandman, and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz — sent a letter to TED leader Chris Anderson and fellows program director Lily James Olds. Titled “TED Fellows refuse to be associated with genocide apologists,” the letter accused TED of choosing “not only to align itself with enablers and supporters of genocide, but to amplify their racist propaganda.”
The authors of the letter wrote that Ackman “has defended Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and has cynically weaponised antisemitism in his programme to purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech.”
The five former fellows also named the invitation of Free Press founder and editor Bari Weiss to the conference as a reason that they cut ties with TED. Weiss, they wrote, “has a long, sordid, and well-documented history of anti-Palestinian speech.” And, supposedly like Ackman, she has “weaponised antisemitism to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has a track record of transphobic extremism.”
Ackman — not known, before the Hamas attack on Israel, as a commentator on current events — has become one of the most outspoken critics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education. Since October 7, he has become one of the loudest voices on X discussing the rise in antisemitism in the United States, particularly on college campuses. He was also one of the bigger names calling for Claudine Gay’s removal, first after the former Harvard president’s testimony in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee and then during the plagiarism scandal that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation on January 2.
Weiss, whose outlet has extensively covered the Hamas attack, the ensuing Israeli response, and the conflict’s reverberations in the West, is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, from 2019. She has become known as a defender of the Jewish state.
For TED to rebuild its standing in the eyes of the former fellows after having “crossed a red line,” they wrote, “it should immediately disinvite both Ackman and Weiss from the 2024 conference, and make a genuine effort to respond to the ongoing genocide by inviting Palestinians themselves to speak about their research, scholarship, and experiences that for decades have clearly documented Israel’s apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.”
A paragraph near the bottom of the missive includes criticisms of TED’s “long history of uncritically platforming the US military and arms trade, Israel’s most resolute backers,” and its language describes the War on Terror as “indefensible, disastrous, and unconsciously destructive” and the U.S. as “the world’s most prolific weapons dealer.”
As of press time, 55 individuals associated with TED had attached their names to the bottom of the letter in support of the five fellows who resigned; a note on the document clarifies that signing does not require breaking one’s relationship with the organization.