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Harvard is on track to add three tenured professors to its ranks in Jewish Studies to address a series of retirements and faculty vacancies that threatened the program’s future.
Of the University’s 10 endowed professorships in Jewish Studies, three remain vacant and two are being filled by assistant professors. The rest will likely become vacant over the next decade, according to Derek Penslar, director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.
“The consequences are potentially quite grim,” Penslar said. “I’d say five years from now, it could be that if we don’t hire and replace faculty who are retiring, have retired, or who have left for other reasons, that really we would have lost all of our central faculty in Jewish studies.”
According to Penslar, the University has extended an offer for the Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization position to a current visiting professor. Searches for two other endowed professorships are ongoing.
The professorship searches began after a Harvard task force on antisemitism recommended that the University fill vacancies in tenured faculty positions affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. The open tenured positions are funded through endowed chairs, which allows the University to fill them even with an active hiring freeze.
The task force, co-chaired by Penslar, also recommended that the University expand its academic offerings in the study of Jewish civilization and antisemitism. In an update released earlier this month, Harvard officials offered several steps they had taken to follow the recommendations, including adding new Harvard Divinity School and Faculty of Arts and Sciences courses on Jewish and Israeli history and antisemitism.
Beyond the tenured ranks for Jewish Studies, Harvard hired Ido Ben Harush, a new college fellow in Modern Jewish Thought, and Shaul Magid, a professor of Modern Jewish Studies in residence. The decision to hire Magid immediately came under fire in June due to his public stance as a “counter-Zionist.”
Magid said in an interview that he was not hired for his political beliefs.
“My politics were never mentioned,” he said.
In response to the blowback over the summer, more than 20 Israeli scholars in Jewish Studies signed a letter in support of Magid.
“While some of us may not share Professor Magid’s political vision, we firmly reject the notion that his views disqualify him from a university position,” they wrote. “In fact, many of his critiques are not dissimilar from positions expressed within Israeli academia itself.”
A University spokesperson declined to comment beyond directing a reporter for The Crimson to the professors’ letter and to an official announcement of Magid’s appointment posted to the HDS website in June.
The University also remains under heightened scrutiny from the Trump administration, which regularly cites antisemitism as a justification for a series of federal investigations into Harvard under Title VI.
There is no official Jewish Studies department at the University. Instead, the Center for Jewish Studies coordinates Harvard’s many academic offerings in Jewish Studies, including sponsoring visiting professors and offering fellowships and scholarships for students. The Center for Jewish Studies does not sponsor full professorships — all positions in the field are held within specific departments, primarily in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department.
As Harvard rebuilds the Jewish Studies field, Penslar said the broader field of study has shifted from a primary focus on theology to incorporating many different disciplines, including history and the social sciences.
He added that Harvard has historically been “slow to catch up” with the rate of change within the field.
Even after the hiring of Ben Harush and Magid, Penslar said Harvard will need to continue searches to keep core tenured positions filled, as several tenured professors in the field near retirement within the decade.
“Nothing can really substitute for a tenured appointment,” Penslar said. “Someone who will be at Harvard for a very long time, someone hopes, and who can contribute to the University substantively and systematically over a long period of time.”
—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at sebastian.connolly@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.
—Staff writer Julia A. Karabolli can be reached at julia.karabolli@thecrimson.com.
