The Real Danger Of That Atheist Harvard Chaplain

The power of the “rabbi” title is that it confers Jewish legitimacy and respectability on whatever the rabbi, even a  self-proclaimed one, says. Jewish students at Harvard who don’t know better will hear that “the rabbi” said something, and assume that what he said represents Judaism, not just a tiny fringe element on the Jewish spectrum.

Whether Greg Epstein will influence Jewish students’ religious beliefs remains to be seen. It could be argued that these students are more likely to be influenced by their professors, whom they often perceive as experts and authority figures. But where Epstein’s influence may well be felt even more strongly, I fear, is on Jewish students’ perceptions of Israel, the Holocaust, and antisemitism.

Because he is Jewish, and because of the power of his new position, Epstein will have significant new platforms from which to share his views on Jewish issues—at campus events, in the news media, and well beyond. And Epstein’s views on Jewish issues are disturbingly extreme.

A Tweet from Epstein on April 28, 2021 employed the ugly term “Jewish supremacists” to demean Jewish nationalists who were marching in Jerusalem. That slur was coined by neo-Nazis and then more recently adopted by the radical left.

One indication of Epstein’s shallow understanding of the Holocaust was his 2019 tweet calling American detention facilities for illegal migrants “concentration camps.”

If you think I am exaggerating, and that Epstein could not possibly have meant literally that those facilities are similar to concentration camps, note that he wrote they “can LITERALLY [his caps], in a historically accurate way, be called concentration camps.”

No, they can’t be, which is why the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and other scholarly Holocaust institutions strongly denounced those comparisons.