Our Letter to Harvard on the Wiener Lecture
Sent August 30, 2026 to Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein, Harvard Kennedy School, and copied to President Alan Garber.
Re: The Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture, September 17
Dear Dean Weinstein,
On September 17, the Kennedy School will confer the Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture on Nicholas Kristof. We write on behalf of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance to ask that the School withdraw the honor.
You receive letters objecting to speakers every week. This is not one of them. We have no quarrel with Mr. Kristof’s right to speak and no interest in rehashing his column here. Our subject is not what he said. It is what Harvard is about to say.
An honor is not neutral ground on which a speaker stands. It is a sentence Harvard writes about him. Of Gordon Brown, Muhammad Yunus, and Gita Gopinath, the Wiener Lecture has said: this is what we hold up. On September 17 it will say the same of a columnist whose most recent notable work advanced an ancient libel against Jews, built on sourcing that his own paper’s Executive Editor would not fully stand behind. That sentence is Harvard’s, not his. And Harvard will write it months after assuring this community that it had learned to consider what its choices say to us.
We have tried to anticipate the School’s answer, and we can find only four. Silence: we will have heard indifference. Inertia: the invitation predates the column, and withdrawing it risks an uproar, so the honor proceeds on momentum rather than judgment. Thoughtlessness: no one considered what this would say to the Jewish community, which is precisely why we are writing this letter. Or deliberate indifference: the School understood, and proceeded because it did not much care. The only answer we could not write for you is the one in which Harvard reconsiders.
We ask three things: that the School withdraw the honor; that it explain how Wiener honorees are selected, since no criteria are published; and that your office meet with us before September 17. A reply by September 4 would leave time for all three.
Sincerely,
Adrian Ashkenazy
Co-founder and President
On behalf of the Board of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance
Board of Directors
Adrian Ashkenazy · Steve Bloch · Eric Fleiss · Allison Gordon · Judy Greenstein · Dvora Inwood · Jason E. Klein · Mark Rosen · Dan Weiner