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Derek J. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. He is also the co-chair of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combatting Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and teaches the history class “One Land, Two Peoples: The Modern History of Israel/Palestine.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: What is your favorite joke?
DJP: So there’s a Jewish grandmother who lives in Florida, and she loves it when her grandson, little Davey, comes to visit.
But Davey’s mother is worried that Bubbe — that’s Yiddish for grandma — is getting older and a little distracted, and she’s worried that if she leaves Davey with Bubbe, that maybe she won’t look after him appropriately.
But Bubbe says, “No, of course, I’ll look after little Davey. I'll watch him like a hawk. Don’t worry.”
So Davey is left with his Bubbe, and Bubbe takes him to the beach.
Bubbe sees a bunch of other Bubbes on the beach, and she starts talking to them and gossiping. And she totally forgets about Davey, and she turns around a few minutes later, and he’s gone.
She’s panicked. “Where’s Davey, where could my grandson be?” She raises her head to heaven and says, “Oh, God, please bring back my little grandson. I’ll do anything. I’ll go to synagogue every day. I’ll give money to charity. Bring back my little grandson.”
Suddenly, the waters recede. A huge wave forms, moves towards the shore. It has Davey on top of the wave, and the water deposits. The wave deposits Davey right at his Bubbe’s feet, not a hair harmed on his head.
And she looks up at the heavens and she says, “He had a hat.”
FM: Love that. You study Judaism, have you become more religious over the course of your life and your study?
DJP: I don’t know which came first. That is, I was raised in a non-religious home; I became interested in religion already a little bit in high school, certainly in university. So I began to go to synagogue. I began to learn more about Judaism, but I think that I reached a certain level of religious observance already in my 20s that hasn’t really changed in the last 40 plus years.
My studying has gone on and on and on. Although Jewish life means a great deal to me, and the Jewish religion is part of that life, I don’t think it is inextricably linked with my scholarship. I think my scholarship and teaching are actually different.
FM: Now, you taught a course this semester called “One Land, Two peoples: The Modern History of Israel/Palestine.” How did the course unfold?
DJP: Well, it went very well. Most importantly, because I had fantastic students.
They brought into the course an open mind, a willingness to do the work and a willingness to engage with each other. So all of that was the most important precondition.
We also had a course assistant, Shira Z. Hoffer ’25, who, at the very beginning of the course, led a session on constructive dialogue, respectful disagreement. And I don’t know if students in that first session really heard things they had never heard before, but it was symbolically very important then for them to see that Professor Penslar really cares about them, how they communicate with each other. I want them to learn from each other.
As the course went on — to get back to what I said a moment ago — I can’t escape my own subjecthood, my own strengths and limitations as a scholar and as a human being, and I was very honest about that. I’ve never taught a course before where so often I would say to the students, “Here’s what I don’t know.”
I think that the students appreciated that honesty. Simply put, I believe that within a few weeks of the start of term, we had developed trust in each other. And when the professors and the students trust each other, then you can really have a terrific and valuable learning experience.
FM: This isn’t the first year that a course like this has been offered. Is there anything different about this year’s iteration, especially given everything is going on?
DJP: It’s different in a couple of ways. One is just the political atmosphere, which has made this subject more fraught, but also of greater interest to people.
But the second is that although I’ve been teaching about Israel for decades — and Palestine and the Palestinians have always been part of that course — I have never tried as hard as I did this term to make the course truly about Israel-Palestine as a unit, and not something primarily about Israel with Palestine and the Palestinians on the side.
I really wanted to acknowledge the students concerns, and all of our concerns that if there’s going to be a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, that has to be done on the basis of true equality. So I brought that perspective into the class. The readings were 50-50. We read works by Palestinian authors, by Israeli/Jewish authors, other authors. The readings reflected a very broad range of viewpoints. They were carefully curated.
FM: You’re a busy man, you have a lot of appointments across the world. You teach a lot of seminars, lectures. You’re part of the Task Force, and you also advise theses. How do you do it all?
DJP: I love my work, and the most important thing is I really love my work.
I’m at an age now where a lot of people have retired or think about retirement, and I’ve begun to think about that issue myself. But if you spent your life as a lawyer or in finance or business, working huge, long hours and maybe not doing the kind of work you love, and then you get to be 60 or something, then you might want to retire and then do something totally different.
The issue for me is I love what I do. And if I didn’t do this, I’d want to teach.
That, and I have a very, very understanding spouse.
FM: Tell me about how you met your wife.
DJP: We met in October of 1981 at a Yom Kippur break fast. It was the night after the end of the Day of Atonement — the most sacred or holy day of the Jewish year — and it’s a day of fasting. And a friend of mine who was at the law school at Berkeley — I was a grad student at the time, getting a Ph.D. — he invited me to a break the fast at the home of the woman who ran the Jewish Law Students Association of Berkeley.
I walked in the door, and it was this very nice home, and there was nice food, and there was this cute, very small, curly-haired young woman with a nice, warm smile. And I talked with her, and I thought, “Hmm, this could work.”
And then I gathered up my courage. A few days later, I remember standing by the telephone in my house where I was living. I was standing by the phone on the piano, trembling as I called her up and asked her to have lunch.
And there you go. That’s 44 years ago.
FM: Transitioning to more serious topics.
DJP: Oh, there’s nothing more serious than your marriage.
FM: Now that the Antisemitism Task Force has been released, how do you feel about how it turned out?
DJP: I stand by the report, and I’m very glad that we did it. It wasn’t an easy experience. I am now hopeful that we will move on with dedication and focus to implementation, to making Harvard a better place for everyone — a better community, a more engaged community, and certainly a more respectful community.
FM: You faced backlash over your past writings and petitions critical of the Israeli government actions, including some that refer to Israel as an apartheid state. In hindsight, do you regret signing these petitions?
DJP: I do regret signing that one petition for the simple reason that the net value of signing a petition is pretty small and the net risk is high.
That petition and of itself — which was signed by 3,000 academics, including almost all of my colleagues in my field in North America — simply said that we cannot talk about democracy in Israel and the independence of the court system and other things that the current government is trying to undermine. We cannot talk about these things in Israel without reminding people that the West Bank is under occupation under military law, under a different legal system than that of the State of Israel and its civilian population.
So in our minds, when you talk about two different legal systems for people living in the same territory, there was a word to describe it. But at the time, I was a little uncomfortable with the statement. And yes, looking back on it, I should not have signed it, simply because of the ease with which it can be manipulated.
First of all, people who very few people have actually read that statement. It does not say Israel is an apartheid state. It’s not what it says. It talks about what’s happening in the West Bank. But even then, I’m sorry for anything that I may have done that would weaken the credibility or threaten the work of the Task Force. I offered to resign from the Task Force to the President. I said, “Look, maybe you want someone else.”
But to my great fortune, I did not have the opportunity to leave, and here I am.
FM: Do you feel that the controversy surrounding your appointment affected your ability to connect with your students through the listening sessions and lead the investigation effectively?
DJP: It was a problem for some in that there were some students who took these accusations against me seriously and who viewed me with distrust. In most cases, once they actually met me, then they found out that their fears were misplaced, but not always.
And I feel bad about that. I feel bad if people are being judged — not by who they are, not by what they teach, not by what they write — but by what other people say about them.
I remember at listening sessions, both at Chabad and at Hillel, I remember facing but overcoming a good deal of that suspicion.
FM: If you could go back and redo any part of the process, would you have approached things differently?
DJP: I might have said no.
FM: You considered stepping down at one point. What motivated you to stay on?
DJP: It was hard. I was being attacked so much, and I don’t mind when people disagree with me for things I actually write or say, but people were just piling on me for things I had not really said. They were attacking an avatar of me, as opposed to me, and I found it very dispiriting. But I realized that if I were to give in, then I’m essentially sending a message to any political bully out there.
You bully Claudine Gay, you can get her to step down. And you bully a much more middle-level faculty member like Derek Penslar, you get him to step down. You can just do anything to anyone. So I was determined to stay on.
I just don’t want to give in to a bully. I don’t think any of us ever should.
FM: What was the lowest point for you during this entire process?
DJP: It was back in January of 2024 when I was being so relentlessly attacked. That was very low, I’ll admit. There was a night where I really fell apart. And again, my understanding spouse was there for me, and my friends were there for me. And I should mention, the students here were amazing.
But the most heartwarming thing, I won’t say who it was, but a certain student came in my office and I said, “How are you doing? Do you want to talk about your essay?”
And this student just said to me, “No, I’m here because my friends and I are concerned about you. What can we do to help?”
And that’s when I realized that it’s not such a bad thing to be a Harvard professor.
FM: You said that one way you coped with the criticism was that you worked out. What’s your favorite workout? What’s your go-to work out?
DJP: I used to do a lot of running and go to the gym and work out on the machines with weights. But I wound up herniating a disc in my lower spine a couple of years ago, and I have to do pretty punishing exercises several times a week.
So I probably have the best abs of any male professor over the age of 65 in the Department of History.
FM: Do you feel responsible for some of the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard?
DJP: No, no. What is it they say? “If there were no devil, one would have to invent him” or “if there were no God, one would have to invent him?”
The Trump administration has reasons of his own to attack Harvard, and our report is an internal document. It’s created to be implemented by and for Harvard. It is a painful work of self critique.
But if the report were ignored or denied by the administration, I’d be worried, but it’s been accepted fully. And again, the administration is already taking all kinds of steps to improve things. So no, I don’t feel personally responsible for it. I didn’t vote for the guy either.
FM: The report contains deeply personal student testimonies. But as a Jewish professor at Harvard during this time, what has it been like for you? Have you experienced antisemitism yourself?
DJP: I have not. But there’s a big asterisk next to that, which is: I am a tenured full professor.
I teach students who are overwhelmingly engaged, nice, interesting and interested people. I go to meetings where we talk about whatever one does in meetings, administrative things or whatever. What are the circumstances under which I would encounter antisemitism? I simply don’t live a life where that would happen
I might encounter remarks that make me uncomfortable. Somebody might say things about Israel that I find disconcerting in one way or another. But I’m not in a situation where I’m going to encounter at Harvard itself, an overtly antisemitic statement.
What I do encounter is hate email.
So I have a little email folder called “unpleasantness.”
But that’s why, when a faculty member at Harvard says, “I am Jewish and I have not encountered antisemitism,” that might very well be true. But the experience of an individual Harvard faculty member doesn’t really add up to much. We have 22,000 students, and ultimately, it’s those students experiences that matter.
—Associate Magazine Editor Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X@sunshine_cxn.
