Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest example of journalistic malpractice from a leading legacy media figure.
A columnist for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, who is married to the vice chair of Harvard Board of Overseers, Sheryl WuDunn, publicly humiliated himself Friday afternoon on a Harvard Kennedy School stage for what was billed as the Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy. It turned out to be not a lecture but a pathetic, apparently unprepared question-and-answer style performance by Kristof, who doubled down on his unverified fantasy that Israel is using a trained dog to rape Palestinian prisoners. Kristof said this had happened to “numerous” prisoners, though he also said he couldn’t say how many. He claimed he knew this based on reports from human rights groups that he said didn’t talk to each other but that he then conceded under questioning did talk to each other.
Kristof’s honorarium for the appearance was undisclosed. A Harvard Kennedy School spokesman didn’t respond to my query about it. But Harvard’s English and history departments paid a previous anti-Israel guest lecturer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a $35,000 honorarium and $7,500 in travel expenses “for a 5 star hotel” to appear on campus on September 24, 2025, the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Kristof’s non-lecture “lecture” was Friday afternoon on the weekend of Yom Kippur.
I can’t quite do justice in text to the performance, characterized as it was by Kristof’s self-contradictions, mispronunciations, nervous laughter, and likening of Israel to the Nazis, an instance of Holocaust inversion that violates the definition of antisemitism that Harvard adopted as part of its settlement with Jewish students that a federal court said Harvard had failed. … They are entertaining, though not so entertaining as to justify an honorarium anywhere on the Coates level, and less entertaining if you consider the effect they have in stoking Jew-hate.
