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Penny Pritzker is at the center of the antisemitism drama at Harvard, where she serves as the senior fellow of the Corporation which presides over the university's endowment. She essentially purchased the position in 2021 with a $100 million donation to build a new wing of the school's economics department. A year later, she oversaw the appointment of Claudine Gay as Harvard president.
For years, Pritzker has been one of the most identifiable faces of the Democratic Party's elite donor class. Apart from her position at Harvard, she serves as the Biden admin's Special Representative on the Economic Recovery (read: corporate looting) of Ukraine. She is also a dedicated pro-Israel donor whose family built a Hyatt hotel on land seized from Palestinians in East Jerusalem after 1967.
Before Pritzker appointed Gay as president of Harvard, her wealth helped propel Barack Obama from obscurity to the White House in a matter of four years. Both Gay and Obama were elevated to serve as Black managerial faces of the financial elite centered within the Democratic Party, and embodied by Pritzker. Whenever a crisis in Israel-Palestine arose, neither had much space to maneuver because each owed their position to the pro-Israel donor class.
After October 7, when GOP-oriented pro-Israel forces mobilized by Likudnik vulture capitalist Bill Ackman manufactured an antisemitism scare on Harvard's campus, Gay needed to keep Pritzker on her side. So instead of mounting a principled defense of free speech and diversity of thought, she hastily denounced Palestine solidarity slogans and presided over the creation of a politicized "antisemitism task force."
Of course, Gay’s groveling was never going to mollify the Ackman-led mob. As Palestinians know all too well, when you give Zionists an inch, they take a mile. Together with fellow Likudnik Harvard alums like Idan Ofer, an Israeli shipping magnate whose business empire has been disrupted by Yemen’s naval blockade, and Les Wexner, a close associate of the late Harvard donor Jeffrey Epstein, Ackman claims to have bled his alma mater of $1 billion in donations.
Having leveraged their fortunes to destroy Gay, Ackman and his uber-wealthy cohorts are now gunning for Pritzker’s resignation.
Politico has aptly described this saga as "the battle of the billionaires." As such, it offers an unusually revealing glance at the real forces that dictate American politics, and a preview of the presidential election, in which two wings of a wholly corrupted financial elite will battle to select the country's front-facing manager while remaining firmly united in defense of Israel.