It is with a heavy heart that I come to you asking you to care about something happening at Harvard.

I, too, have mocked the sheer quantity of reporting and writing and takes about what happens at a certain university outside of Boston. But this week’s Cambridge-based brouhaha neatly sums up the politicization of the conversation around antisemitism and the struggle against it.

Harvard recently announced two task forces: one on combating antisemitism and one on combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. The university announced Derek Penslar, a faculty professor of Jewish history who directs the undergraduate program in that field, as co-chair of the task force on antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, some commentators denounced him for having signed an open letter that referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime” and for phrases from a book of his that was published this year. Billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted that Harvard was on a “path of darkness.” Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard and former U.S. treasury secretary, called on Penslar to resign. Some went so far as to call the professor an antisemite.

I do not know Derek Penslar, and whether or not he spends his time as co-chair of a task force on antisemitism at Harvard makes very little difference to me, as does what happens at Harvard generally. However, this particular sequence of events has implications beyond Harvard. The row matters not just for Jewish studies scholars, or those of us who write often about Jewish politics, but for anyone who seeks to understand antisemitism historically and in our present moment, so that they might combat it—which is to say, anyone who takes the reality of antisemitism seriously.

There have been a few lines of attack on Penslar, and there are thus a few issues at hand. First, there is the notion that he called Israel a “regime of apartheid.” In fact, Penslar, in the summer of last year, signed on to a letter by “academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad” who sought to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” That sentence included the line “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described........

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