More Pro-Israel Muscle
A truck with a billboard displayed their names and photos, and critics put out do-not-hire lists. The students say it’s a campaign to shut them up.
… But within days, students affiliated with those groups were being doxxed, their personal information posted online. Siblings back home were threatened. Wall Street executives demanded a list of student names to ban their hiring. And a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” …
Complicating it all: outside groups, influential alumni and big-money donors, who are putting maximum pressure on students and administrators.At the University of Pennsylvania, donors are pushing for the resignation of the president and the board chairman, after a Palestinian writers’ conference on campus invited speakers accused of antisemitism.
At Harvard, a billionaire couple quit an executive board. Another donor pulled money for fellowships. And Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and Treasury secretary, criticized the leadership for a “delayed” response to the Hamas attack and the student letter. …
NYC law firm rescinds job offers to Columbia, Harvard students over Israel letters
A prestigious Big Apple law firm has revoked job offers to three students at Harvard and Columbia universities after the Ivy League students signed controversial letters supporting Palestine in the wake of Hamas’ deadly slaughter in Israel.
Davis Polk & Wardwell alerted staffers on Tuesday that it had rescinded the offers because the prospective employees held leadership positions within the student organizations that issued last week’s statements blaming Israel for the attacks.
“These statements are simply contrary to our firm’s values and we thus concluded that rescinding these offers was appropriate in upholding our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment for all Davis Polk employees,” Davis Polk managing partner Neil Barr said in the email. …
Davis Polk’s decision comes a week after another law firm, Winston & Strawn, said it had revoked a job offer to former New York University Student Bar Association president Ryna Workman following a controversial pro-Hamas column cheering the Hamas attack.
A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World
Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.
In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”





