Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest odd development at America’s oldest university.
Harvard University—which is being sued by the federal government for antisemitism, has been laying off employees, and is going around telling courts, Congress, and alumni that federal funding cuts are threatening life-saving cancer research—is launching a new publication named after a Canaanite goddess that the Bible bans.
The first issue of Asherah: A Harvard Divinity School Journal touts “Innovations in Jewish Prayer and Ritual.” It is really something to behold, even by the provocative and sophomoric standards of student publications.
While the journal’s website describes it as “a student publication of Harvard divinity school,” it also says it was “Created by Shaul Magid,” who is not a student but rather the Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the executive committee of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. In his 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile, Magid declared that “Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project,” and said that he doesn’t think “that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way.” The book, he writes, is “in some sense, anti-Zionist” or “more precisely … counter-Zionist.” Magid wrote two of the 16 articles in the journal, including a preface that begins, “When we first announced our new Harvard Divinity School Jewish liturgy journal, ASHERAH, we received many responses stretching from congratulations to curiosity to disturbance and even anger.”
Magid writes, more than a little defensively, that the name was chosen “not to subvert the norms that constitute Judaism today as much as to enhance them.” A reasonable response would be, spare us the enhancement. Deuteronomy 16:21 states: “Do not plant an Asherah for yourself [or] any tree near the altar of Adonoy, your God, that you will make for yourself.” Encyclopedia Judaica describes Asherah as “A Canaanite fertility and mother goddess.” The Babylonian Talmud, in Sanhedrin 7b, describes it as a tree used for idolatry.
