Alan Dershowitz, who taught at Harvard Law School for 50 years, said Tuesday on Newsmax that he hasn’t been invited back to the school in the 11 years since he became an emeritus professor, as “they only want to hear the view of people who support their narrative.”
“I’ve become essentially persona non grata at Harvard,” Dershowitz told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America,” during an interview in which he accused the Ivy League university of tolerating antisemitism. “Harvard does not want to hear my views on Israel or my views defending [President] Donald Trump against improper lawfare.”
That also means he won’t be attending Thursday’s graduation ceremonies, where he said he expects anti-Israel protests to disrupt the proceedings.
“The one time I was invited back, my speech had to be moved off campus for fear of my own safety,” Dershowitz said. “This is a school I taught at for 50 years, taught 10,000 students. I was one of the most popular professors, but once I defended Donald Trump and started to defend Israel vocally, I have been canceled and cut off from Harvard. So no, I will not be at the Harvard graduation.”
Dershowitz’s comments come as the Trump administration continues to ramp up its pressure on Harvard, including its latest move to cancel some $100 million in federal grants to the institution.
On Tuesday, Dershowitz called on Harvard to reach a deal “whereby they admit they’ve done things that are terrible.”
He added that Harvard’s schools for public health and divinity should be put “into a kind of receivership where they are under the control of the central administration so they can’t be using the money the federal government sends to Harvard to preach this horrible hate.”
Harvard, he said, is “teaching, encouraging, and fomenting antisemitism” in several of its schools.
“The Divinity School recently elected as class marshal one of the thugs who attacked a Jewish student and harassed them on campus and was supposed to be disciplined for it,” said Dershowitz. “The Harvard Law School gave a $65,000 scholarship to another one of the students who harassed and tried to assault a Jewish student at Harvard. These schools are teaching things like intersectionality, critical race theory, and DEI, all of which are incubators for antisemitism.”
He also said the teaching and support of antisemitism at Harvard and elsewhere are driving violence, such as the killings last week of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.
“I defended a lot of protesters in the 60s and 70s, and I wrote, I predicted in my book ‘The Preventive State’ that we would see the kind of killings that we saw in the District of Columbia, because I knew from my experience that when you encourage violent protests of the kind we’ve seen on campuses, the line between violent protests and taking a gun and killing somebody is a very, very thin one,” he added.
Dershowitz also said that he has been told to double his personal security, “because any prominent Jew who is a supporter of Israel today, or a prominent Christian who’s a supporter of Israel, has a target on their back.”
Meanwhile, Dershowitz said he does think the administration is “overgeneralizing” in some of the steps it has taken, including stopping all foreign students from coming to Harvard.
“After all, there are some students from Britain, from Israel, from other places that are coming in to study,” said Dershowitz. “They shouldn’t be defunding cancer research and other research. There should be targeted defunding and targeted denial of Visas. That makes a lot of sense.”
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