Harvard’s official magazine published an early draft of the antisemitic speech delivered Thursday by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa in which a passage defending Jewish students, which she did not read onstage, appeared in the text.
The early version of Ressa’s commencement speech, published in Harvard magazine and preserved at the Internet Archive, included the following passage:
For the protestors: when you hid your face in a keffiyeh, did you place yourself in the shoes of another student wearing a yarmulke just wanting to walk to class? Or the faculty administrator, who’s never faced this before and whose task is to protect every student or donor?
That passage was dropped from the version that Ressa actually delivered, which now appears live at Harvard magazine.
In addition, an antisemitic passage delivered by Ressa, which now appears online at Harvard magazine, was very different in the earlier draft.
Ressa said (as seen in the new, updated version, with the text as delivered from the stage):
Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money, because they want power and money.
The original version was:
According to social media, exploited and used by power and money for power and money, I was:
A criminal.
A communist.
A CIA agent.
Anti semitic
Anti Palestine
A Princeton grad.
I am a Tiger. The rest are lies. And the truth is simple. I’m a journalist.
The difference between the two speech drafts was noted by Rabbi David Wolpe, who resigned earlier this year in protest from Harvard’s antisemitism committee.
2/2- so maybe what the Harvard officials saw was what she wanted them to see? And what they sat through was the vile “money and power” remark.
— David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) May 24, 2024
As Breitbart News reported Thursday, Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy approached Ressa after her speech and asked her to clarify her antisemitic remarks. When she declined, he walked off the stage in protest.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
