Columbia-Affiliated Seminary Hires Anti-Israel Harvard Academics Who Worked to ‘Dezionize Jewish Consciousness’
Plus, Pete Hegseth is having a good war
A seminary affiliated with Columbia University has hired two left-wing, anti-Israel academics who abruptly resigned from Harvard as the university’s task force on anti-Semitism highlighted their anti-Israel bias and efforts to “dezionize Jewish consciousness,” the Free Beacon’s Jessica Schwalb reports. Union Theological Seminary announced that Diane Moore and Hussein Rashid, who led Harvard’s Religion and Public Life program, will lead a new program by the same name at UTS aimed at teaching students how religion “can be instrumental in just peacemaking.”
Moore left Cambridge in January 2025—a semester before her planned “retirement.” Rashid followed a day later, publicizing a resignation letter that accused the Ivy League school of “anti-Muslim bias” and doing an interview with CNN. Their sudden exits came amid criticism from Harvard’s task force on anti-Semitism, which took issue with an August 2024 paper coauthored by Moore indicating that one goal of the Religion and Public Life program’s annual student trip to Israel and the West Bank was to “dezionize Jewish consciousness.” Four days after Oct. 7, Moore and Rashid coauthored a statement urging students to “challenge single story narratives that justify vengeance and retaliation.”
UTS, which gives students access to Columbia’s campus and facilities like libraries, now says Moore and Rashid are an embodiment of the seminary’s commitment “to interreligious engagement.”
“The pair’s hiring by a Columbia affiliate cements a pattern in which academics ousted by Harvard find refuge in Morningside Heights,” writes Schwalb. “Rosie Bsheer, who was removed from her leadership post at Harvard after bringing a litany of anti-Israel speakers and few, if any, dissenting voices, is a finalist for Columbia’s Edward Said chair in Arab Studies, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.”
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If you had to predict who the Trump administration would want in front of the public messaging the war against Iran, Secretary of War Hegseth “might not have leaped immediately to the top of a conventional wisdom-driven list,” writes the Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll. But if and when the United States and Israel win the war, part of the reason will be the success of Hegseth “in communicating directly to the American people and to the troops.” Stoll writes:
Whether you catch Hegseth on an old-fashioned television or in a livestream pop-out window on the X app on a smartphone, the message is clear and consistent. Rather than get drawn into Vietnam-War style 5 p.m. follies of daily briefings, Hegseth and Caine have come out somewhat sparingly. They’ve been careful about keeping the press questions limited; the point of the briefings isn’t to make journalists famous, it’s to let Hegseth communicate to the country. Choose your preferred modifier—relentless, robotic—Hegseth stays on message, with short sentences, simple language, hammering the ideas home to the audience like another bombing sortie against enemy targets.
One somewhat refreshing thing is that he talks, unburdened by political correctness, about killing the enemy. “Our warriors have fought with lethality,” he said March 13. He is unsparing in describing the targets. “Rats,” he called Iran’s leadership. “Barbaric savages.” “Terrorist cowards.”
He’s been nearly as derisive toward the Pentagon press. “A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing, we know this at this point, to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step. Sadly, TDS is in their DNA. They want President Trump to fail, but you, the American people, know better,” he said March 19. He called a CNN report “fundamentally unserious,” and said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
In the end the outcome of the war will be up to the brave people of Iran, to seize a better future for their country. It will be up to the U.S. and Israeli militaries and intelligence operations people and to the president and prime minister. But if Hegseth can help buy them all more time by projecting confidence and fighting the “quagmire” narrative from the press, it will help maximize the chance of success. The risk for Hegseth is if it doesn’t work out he gets blamed. Trump could cut him loose the way he did with Kristi Noem. But there’s upside, too. Hegseth, 45, was on the couch in the Oval Office this afternoon right alongside Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, who are thought of as presidential material. If this war ends in an American victory it may be the first of more wins ahead for Pete Hegseth.
READ MORE: Pete Hegseth Is Having a Good War
Additional reading:
Former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent said he resigned from the job in protest of the Iran war, which he accused President Donald Trump of waging due to “pressure from Israel.” Before his resignation, it turns out, Kent was facing a “months-long” FBI investigation into allegations that he improperly shared classified information, Semafor reported.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth live on an Army base in Washington, D.C., due to security concerns. Multiple drones have recently been spotted flying over that base, and officials “have not determined where they came from,” according to the Washington Post.
Hegseth led a briefing Thursday on Operation Epic Fury, revealing that the United States has sunk more than 120 Iranian naval vessels, including 11 submarines, which make up more than a third of Tehran’s fleet. “We’ve decided to share the ocean with Iran. We’ve given them the bottom half,” he quipped. “Their surface fleet is no longer a factor. The submarines they once had, 11 are gone.”
California’s Eric Swalwell cofounded a political AI company with his former chief of staff described as “ChatGPT for your own campaign database.” It has taken tens of thousands of dollars from Swalwell’s Democratic allies in Congress, including his self-described “best friend,” Arizona senator Ruben Gallego, NOTUS reported, raising questions as to whether Swalwell is using his official position to drive business, something House ethics rules prohibit.
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