Jessica Costescu writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a link between the head of Harvard’s history department and a group with troubling beliefs.
The chairman of Harvard University’s history department is a member of a faculty group, Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, that posted an anti-Semitic cartoon over the holiday weekend depicting a hand emblazoned with the Star of David holding a noose around the necks of one black man and one Arab man. In the background, a black arm swings a machete scrawled with the phrase, “liberation movement.”
The image was posted alongside a message from the faculty group arguing that blacks and Palestinians are natural allies: “African people have a profound understanding of apartheid and occupation,” it read.
Several prominent members of the Harvard faculty belong to the group, including History Department chairman Sidney Chalhoub. The Brazilian historian has sparred with Harvard leadership in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel—in November, he signed a letter condemning the school’s “Combating Antisemitism” initiative, which he and other signees called “dangerously one-sided.”
As chair of Harvard’s history department, Chalhoub “play[s] a key role in the life of the department,” according to a 2022 university handbook. He is responsible for developing the department’s “curricular plan”—the history classes Harvard will offer—as well as recruiting and promoting faculty and overseeing “the process for graduate student admissions.” Chalhoub also resolves “departmental disputes,” holds “regular department meetings and social occasions that help to build community,” and monitors “tenure-track faculty,” according to the handbook.
Harvard condemned the image on Monday, calling it “despicable,” and the faculty group said it did not “condone” the images “in any way.” Yet Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine circulated an amended graphic with an image of Stokely Carmichael, a Black Panther Party leader who praised Adolf Hitler in 1970 as the “greatest white man” and later complained, in a 1990 address, that “zionist pigs have been harassing us everywhere.”
