Invitations to a fictitious club saying “Jews need not apply” were slipped under the doors of students living in the Harvard University dormitories.

The flyers enclosed in the sealed envelopes discovered early Friday morning invited the students to the inaugural event of a new undergraduate social club, or finals club, called The Pigeon, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported. The flyer also said “Seriously, no f***ing Jews. Colors OK.”

There are eight all-male and five all-female Harvard finals clubs, which are not recognized by the university and which have been accused of promoting “an exclusive and dangerous social environment,” according to the Crimson.

The dean of Harvard College, Evelynn Hammonds, wrote in an email statement on Friday that the flyers were “deeply disturbing” to her and others in the Harvard community. Harvard College is one of two schools within the university granting undergraduate degrees.

“They are not a reflection of the values of our community,” Hammonds wrote. “Even if intended as satirical in nature, they are hurtful and offensive to many students, faculty and staff, and do not demonstrate the level of thoughtfulness and respect we expect at Harvard when engaging difficult issues within our community.”

The Crimson also reported that early Friday morning, two Northeastern University students who vandalized a menorah located on the Boston campus were identified on a surveillance video and will face disciplinary action.

Romney may say the right things, but will he really be able to affect change? And Obama says… and does… the wrong things, and he has no reason to change. Democrats complain that Romney has no sympathy for the unemployment problem.

Of course this is ironic since he has been hunting for a new job for the past year. In the recent debate, he stressed how he would work to improve the economy to help the middle class. He wants to cut out deductions, lower taxes, and simplify the tax code. Great idea, but that’s not how Washington politics work. With so many special interests, will he really be able to make the required changes? It doesn’t look good.

On the other hand, Obama wants to spend his way out of the problem. He gets the money from borrowing the same way overspending American citizens fund their personal largess. Instead of paying back debt that he racked up, Obama pays the minimum monthly balance. It’s like if you pay $50 on your $5,000 credit card debt. Based on the logic of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, the President feels he can double the amount of debt since he’d only have to make $100 monthly payments (or, in the case of the United States debt, make that an increase from $30 billion per month in interest payments to $60 billion!). This system of borrowing money will probably continue to work until at least the  election date, and maybe for a few more years. But at some point, that debt must be paid off.

On this week’s Goldstein on Gelt radio show, I asked former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Harvard professor Ken Rogoff about the American Debt Crisis. He gave a great explanation.

Here’s part one of the show (below). Part two will be posted next week.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

If you have not yet read the blog post we wrote a month ago about Prof. Cyril Karabus ["26-Sep-12: Dubai, Dubai, Dubai"], please consider taking a moment to do that now. Even if you don’t have that moment, below is a summary of some of the issues we raised there, plus some fresh background. It’s followed by some thoughts by us on what the scandalous conduct of the authorities in the United Arab Emirates in this sordid affair might all mean.

The UAE is one of those nation states that was invented in the lifetime of many of us, in 1971. At the time, it had a total population of less than a million people, and control of one-tenth of the world’s oil. Those conditions meant it has been making very serious money ever since, while marching to the beat of its own distinctive drum.

The UAE is made up of several separate emirates. The two largest are Dubai and Abu Dhabi who have not always gotten along so nicely together; their armed forces faced off against each other for a while in the late seventies [source]. They were impoverished fly-specks before gigantic oil and gas reserves were discovered in the sixties. They are no longer poor.

It would be nice to say their phenomenal wealth has been used consistently for good. It would be even nicer if the mythology they like to spin about their leaders were true, but it is not. For instance, the UAE’s first president and acknowledged driving force, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, is described in glowing terms on one of its newspaper’s websites:

His firmly-held belief in Islam… was fundamental to his views and actions… He was a firm believer in the need for dialogue between different faiths and cultures, rejecting the intolerant views of those who would seek to promote divisions… His faith was fundamental to his views and actions [including] the duty entrusted to us by God Almighty, who commands us to treat all living creatures with dignity and respect.

Nice sentiments. Keep those last words in mind as we push ahead.

Zayed’s founding (in 1999) and funding of the notorious Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, a so-called think-tank that is now defunct, demonstrated motivations of a different sort. The Center [says Wikipedia]

became embroiled in controversy when it became known that it also disseminated and provided a platform for anti-American, anti-Semitic, and extreme anti-Israel views.

Its speakers were said [according to Wikipedia] to have described Jews as “enemies of all nations” and “cheaters whose greed knows no bounds.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous anti-Semitic forgery created in the 19th century to vilify Jews, was held up as a factual account of a Jewish plan to “control the world.”

Israel was accused by Zayed Center officials of developing an ethnic bomb that will kill only Arabs, an accusation echoed just last week in a wave of claims to identical effect that were published throughout the Iranian government-controlled media. See our blog post “9-Oct-12: The serious message behind the vile idiocy.”

The Zayed people asserted for good measure that the Mossad was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy and for the Watergate scandal as well. There’s more [here, for instance], but you get the picture.

And (here we get to our point) some Zayed speakers accused Israel of trying to sterilize Palestinian children by lacing the water “used by some Palestinian schools” with chemicals.

Matters came to something of a head in 2004 when Harvard Divinity School decided to return a $2.5 million gift from Sheik Zayed [source] “after 18 months of controversy over the donor’s alleged connection to anti-Semitic and anti-US propaganda… Sheikh Zayed gave the money to Harvard in 2000 to endow a professorship of Islamic studies.” But note that the London School of Economics was not quite so unctuous, and kept and spent a similar cash gift from the same source: we wrote about it in our blog two years ago: see “26-Nov-10: Gifts and good relations.”

Now fast forward to today’s UAE and Dubai, where the statelet’s huge airline, Emirates, has just done a deal with Qantas to essentially take over the Australian airline’s steering wheel. With the Australian government blessing the deal a few days ago [report], it looks like full steam ahead. And according to a UAE business news website story from six days ago headlined “No alternative to Emirates deal: Qantas,” the Flying Kangaroo is already thoroughly and irretrievably locked in.

The recurring uproar over the facts surrounding the life of Jesus now surrounds the discovery of an ancient papyrus bearing the words “Jesus said to them, my wife”.

The discovery of a 4th century Egyptian Coptic papyrus fragment was publicized at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on Tuesday by a professor of the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at the school, released a statement noting that Christian tradition “Has long held that Jesus was not married,” and stated that the new find – being called “The Gospel of Jesus’s wife” – suggests that his being dubbed unmarried was likely due to “vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage.”

An analysis by King of the fragment will be published in the Harvard Theological Review in January 2013.

State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions. She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40 minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.

She said that because I work for Harvard and am identified as a professor she had the right to sue Harvard. When the communications official explained to her that I have a right to express my opinion as “a matter of academic freedom,” and that Harvard has no control over what I say, she did not seem to understand. She persisted in her nonstop whining, claiming that she is prohibited from responding to my attacks by the rules of professional responsibility—without mentioning that she has repeatedly held her own press conferences and made public statements throughout her career.

Her beef was that I criticized her for filing a misleading affidavit that willfully omitted all information about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained during the “struggle” it described. She denied that she had any obligation to include in the affidavit truthful material that was favorable to the defense. She insisted that she is entitled to submit what, in effect, were half truths in an affidavit of probable cause, so long as she subsequently provides the defense with exculpatory evidence. She should go back to law school, where she will learn that it is never appropriate to submit an affidavit that contains a half truth, because a half truth is regarded by the law as a lie, and anyone who submits an affidavit swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Before she submitted the probable cause affidavit, Corey was fully aware that Zimmerman had sustained serious injuries to the front and back of his head. The affidavit said that her investigators “reviewed” reports, statements and “photographs” that purportedly “detail[ed] the following.” It then went on to describe “the struggle,” but it deliberately omitted all references to Zimmerman’s injuries which were clearly visible in the photographs she and her investigators reviewed. That is Hamlet without the Prince! The judge deciding whether there is probable cause to charge the defendant with second degree murder should not have been kept in the dark about physical evidence that is so critical to determining whether a homicide occurred, and if so, a homicide of what degree. By omitting this crucial evidence, Corey deliberately misled the court.

Corey seems to believe that our criminal justice system is like a poker game in which the prosecution is entitled to show its cards only after the judge has decided to charge the defendant with second degree murder. That’s not the way the system is supposed to work and that’s not the way prosecutors are supposed to act. That a prosecutor would hide behind the claim that she did not have an obligation to tell the whole truth until after the judge ruled on probable cause displays a kind of gamesmanship in which prosecutors should not engage.

The prisons, both in Florida and throughout the United States, are filled with felons who submitted sworn statements that contained misleading half truths. Corey herself has probably prosecuted such cases.

Ironically, Corey has now succeeded in putting Zimmerman back in prison for a comparably misleading omission in his testimony. His failure to disclose money received from a PayPal account requesting donations for his legal defense made his testimony misleadingly incomplete. In her motion to revoke his bail, Corey argued that Zimmerman “intentionally deceived the court” by making “false representations.” The same can be said about Prosecutor Corey. She too misled and deceived the court by submitting an affidavit that relied on a review of photographs and other reports that showed injuries to Zimmerman, without disclosing the existence of these highly relevant injuries.

Even if Angela Corey’s actions were debatable, which I believe they were not, I certainly have the right, as a professor who has taught and practiced criminal law nearly 50 years, to express a contrary view. The idea that a prosecutor would threaten to sue someone who disagrees with her for libel and slander, to sue to university for which he works, and to try to get him disbarred, is the epitome of unprofessionalism. Fortunately, truth is a defense to such charges.

A new feature-length documentary starring one of Harvard University’s all-time most popular professors reveals the secret components of Israel’s success as an international leader in innovation and humanitarianism.

Israel Inside: How a Small Nation Makes a Big Difference stars Tal Ben-Shahar, former Harvard University professor of Positive Psychology, who left his post as the lecturer of the formidable institution’s most popular course to return to Israel with his family.  In the film, produced by JerusalemOnlineU.com, Ben-Shahar breaks down and analyzes the five unique characteristics he says have combined to give Israel its unusually high level of national actualization.

Though Israel is populated by just over 7 million people, it is the third highest represented nation on the New York Stock Exchange, and is considered a world leader in science and technology advancement.  Through the course of the film, Ben-Shahar takes the viewer on a journey to discover what unique mix of factors or “actualizers” have contributed to this fact, and to the success of Israel as a nation of innovation.

“None of these actualizers are in and of themselves unique to Israel,” Ben-Shahar says. “But in combination, they are bringing about an almost unparalleled progress and success and contribution to the world.”  The factors explored in the film are family, turning adversity into advantage, “chutzpah”, education, taking action, and the Jewish drive to do “tikkun olam” – repairing the world.

“What we need to communicate about Israel is that it goes far, far beyond ‘the conflict’, Ben-Shahar told Jewish Press’ Yishai Fleisher.  “Yes, we’re in the midst of a conflict, and at the same time we’re also a thriving nation, we’re able to do wonderful, amazing things for ourselves as well as for the world.  Our contribution to other nations, to our global village, is disproportionate to our size, and especially commendable given our geopolitical situation.”

The film features numerous projects related to giving, development, and increasing quality of life for Jews and non-Jews in Israel and around the world in the areas of science, environment, medicine, and technology, and includes interviews with Shai Agassi, Founder and CEO of electric vehicle service provider Better Place, Naty Barak, CEO and Head of Sustainable Development at micro-irrigation solutions company Netafim Industries, Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat, Tamar Jehuda-Cohen, Founder and CTO of Smart Biotech, historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, and others.

JerusalemOnlineU.com is an online portal for Jewish distance learning offering courses in the basics of Judaism, Israeli history, Positive Psychology, Cinema, and Jewish concepts.

Since leaving Harvard, Tal Ben-Shahar teaches at the Inter-Disciplinary Center in Herziliya. He is the author of international best sellers Happier and Being Happy, which have been translated into 25 languauges.

This past weekend Harvard hosted a One-State Solution Conference, designed to promote the dissolution of Israel. It is only the latest example of that university’s longstanding practice of facilitating the spread of anti-Semitism.

The virulently anti-Israel Harvard student organizations that sponsored the event, including the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, and the Arab Caucus, acknowledge in the program that the One-State Solution Conference would not have been possible without the support of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and funding from the Harvard Provost’s Office and the Center for International Affairs.

Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and her administration did not express any concern over the conference’s heavily biased and non-scholarly nature. Not one of the speakers is known to be sympathetic to Israel, and many are prominently involved in the campaign to boycott Israel’s universities and to pressure American schools to divest any holdings in corporations that do business there.

Benny Morris, a leading scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has described keynote speaker Ilan Pappé, a supporter of Israel’s minuscule Communist party, as “at best… one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest.”

Harvard Law School professor Duncan Kennedy, the opening speaker, has denied that Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction, even though the Hamas charter accuses Jews of plotting to take over the world, and claims they caused the two world wars and the French and Bolshevik revolutions.

Unfortunately, there is nothing new about Harvard’s tolerating and even assisting anti-Semitic propagandists. In 2000, Harvard’s Divinity School accepted funds from United Arab Emirates dictator Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to endow a professorship in Islamic Religious Studies named for him. The dictator had already established a Zayed Centre in his own nation that condemned Israel’s existence and promoted Holocaust denial. Harvard planned faculty exchanges with the Zayed Centre.

No Harvard administrator or professor publicly criticized the university’s acceptance of the sheik’s funds. The endowed professorship was withdrawn only because a graduate student, Rachel Fish, mobilized public support against it.

By contrast, the Harvard administration refused to host an academic conference on American responses to the Holocaust that the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies proposed in 2004. Many of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars are affiliated with the Wyman Institute. The institute asked me to present the keynote lecture, on Harvard’s response to Nazism. As a courtesy, I sent then-Harvard president Larry Summers a detailed summary of my lecture. Summers’s office replied several months later that it would not host the conference. It emphasized that no Harvard administrator would attend if it were held elsewhere. Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies was delighted to serve as host.

My lecture focused on how Harvard and other elite universities forged friendly ties with Germany’s Nazified universities, helping the Hitler regime improve its image in the West. Harvard sent a delegate to Heidelberg University’s 550th anniversary celebration in 1936, a Nazi propaganda festival orchestrated by Josef Goebbels. This occurred after Germany’s universities expelled their Jewish faculty members and the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. Heidelberg University promoted Nazi “racial science” and “Aryan Physics.”

Harvard warmly welcomed to its campus Hitler’s foreign press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl, a fanatical anti-Semite. Harvard president James Conant called anti-Nazi protesters who demonstrated against Hanfstaengl’s visit “ridiculous.” Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound accepted an honorary degree from Berlin University, personally presented by Nazi Germany’s ambassador, Hans Luther. Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter unsuccessfully pleaded with Conant not to allow the ceremony to be held on campus.

Sadly, there is consistency in Harvard’s complicity in helping Nazi Germany present itself as civilized during the 1930s; accepting funds from a Holocaust denier, Sheik Zayed; trying to suppress a scholarly conference on the Holocaust; and now serving as a platform to promote the destruction of the Jewish state.

Stephen H. Norwood is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author, most recently, of “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz is best known for his legal prowess, but he is also the author of two dozen nonfiction works and three novels, the latest of which is The Trials of Zion. Set in Israel, the book’s plot tells the story of three lawyers who defend an alleged Arab terrorist while simultaneously trying to discover who set off a bomb that killed the American president and Israeli and Palestinian leaders at a peace-signing ceremony in Jerusalem.

Dershowitz recently spoke to The Jewish Press about his new book, the Sholom Rubashkin trial, and President Obama’s policy toward Israel.

The Jewish Press: Why did you write this book?

Dershowitz: I think that Israel needs to be portrayed in the 21st century in fiction the way it was portrayed years ago by Leon Uris in Exodus. Fiction really matters; people read novels and form opinions based on them. I think Israel’s image in the world has been suffering lately, and I wanted to write a reality-based novel indicating how difficult it is to deal with terrorism and to make peace in the face of terrorism.

But this book is not entirely pro-Israel.

I had to make it nuanced. I didn’t want it to be something that could be dismissed as pro-Israel propaganda. I wanted it to subtly convey the history of Israel, how difficult it’s been to make peace, and the various elements that seem to be opposed to peace. Remember, when Leon Uris was writing, everybody in the world loved Israel. It was very easy to write a completely pro-Israel book. Today that wouldn’t work. It has to be more nuanced.

You’ve supported the creation of a Palestinian state since the 1970s. Yet, in some circles today you’re considered a right-winger because of your outspoken support for Israel.

It’s so interesting that Noam Chomsky is considered centrist and I’m considered a right-winger even though I have been critical of the settlements since 1973, I’ve favored the two-state solution since 1970 – even before Israel did – and I’m very active in the peace process. I haven’t changed. It shows you how the world has changed.

Intermarriage is generally thought of as one of the worst sins a Jew can commit. And yet, in your novel, you portray positively a budding romance between a young Arab man and a young Jewish woman. Why?

I don’t think I portray it in a positive light. I think I portray it realistically. I portray it the way I see it among my students. I’m trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I’m not suggesting it’s a good thing. I don’t support it.

But I see it all around me. The other night I spoke at a Chabad Shabbat dinner at Harvard, and a lot of the students came with non-Jewish girlfriends and spouses. Many of them will eventually convert to Judaism but we’re going through a very challenging period now with intermarriage. I can’t ignore that in my writing.

In the book, you seem to imply that followers of religious leaders such as the Lubavitcher Rebbe are somehow irrational or not using their critical faculties. Is that what you believe?

No, I certainly don’t believe that. I’m the faculty adviser at Chabad at Harvard and I’m a tremendous admirer of Chabad. They do phenomenal work. I don’t believe that at all. You can’t put in my mouth everything that every character spouts.

The point I made about Lubavitch is that a lot of these actors in Hollywood immediately jump on the Lubavitch bandwagon without understanding a thing about Judaism or Lubavitch. I was thinking of a particular person I know in Hollywood, a fairly well known actor, who has just given up his critical faculties…. Tomorrow he’ll be abandoning that and going to some ashram in India. It’s not real for some people. That’s my point.

You have been critical of the 27-year sentence Sholom Rubashkin recently received. Do you see him as a victim of anti-Semitism or as someone who simply was unlucky to have a stern judge presiding over his trial?

I don’t know enough about the case to know whether he’s completely innocent, but I can tell you this: The sentence was utterly disproportionate. You cannot explain that sentence based on the facts of the case. I don’t care how harsh a judge she is. She’s never sentenced anybody like this for a comparable crime.

So I don’t know whether it was anti-Semitism or anti-Easternism or anti-New Yorkism or anti-outsiderism, but it was anti-something. And it can’t be explained on principles of justice. The sentence was way, way out of proportion to anything that was proved in the case.

You have publicly stated that the Jewish community’s hostility toward President Obama is undeserved and unwise.

I do think that. Look, I’m critical of a lot of the policies of the Obama administration, particularly as it relates to foreign policy and most particularly as it relates to Iran. But I think it’s a terrible mistake to regard him as an unredeemable enemy. People point to those who were close to him like the Reverend Wright. People forget that one of the persons who’s closest to him in the world is my dear friend Charles Ogletree, who is an African-American professor at the law school and a fervent Zionist who goes to Israel as often as he can, who has taught in Israel, loves Israel, and is a deep supporter of Israel.

Many of my other African-American friends who are very close to Obama are also very strong supporters of Israel – Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for example. So it’s not a one-sided picture; it’s much more complex. And the most important point is he’s the president of the United States. He’s going to be the president for two more years and maybe six more years, and it would be a terrible mistake to turn him into an enemy. We have to try our best to make him a friend.

Many Jews who become successful try to downplay or hide their Jewishness. You don’t. The fact that you named one of your books Chutzpah amply demonstrates this point. What makes you different?

I’m very proud to be a Jew. I want everybody to know I’m Jewish, and I want to be assertively Jewish. When I came to Harvard, people told me I was too Jewish for Harvard and that I’d never get tenure. I said, “That’s fine. If they don’t want to give a Jewish Jew tenure, that wouldn’t be a good place for me to be.”

I’m not going to hide my Jewishness in any way, and am always contemptuous of people who change their names and change their noses. I don’t think that’s happening as much today, but it certainly happened in my day.

I’m proudly and assertively Jewish and I’ll always be that way. For me it’s very important. I tell Jewish jokes in my classes, I quote Rambam as often as I quote Blackstone, I wrote a book about the book of Bereishit. I’m very proud of my Jewish heritage, education and knowledge. I never hide it at all.

That’s what happens when you grow up in Boro Park. We lived on 48th Street between 15th and 16th Avenues, and I grew up with the Klass family [founders of The Jewish Press]. Mrs. [Irene] Klass was a friend of my mother’s.