One of the top law firms in the country just fought back against anti-semitism by rescinding job offers from Ivy League students who signed onto anti-Israel statements following the deadly, vicious Hamas attack on the embattled Meditteranean state.
That top firm is Davis Polk, an international, “white shoe” law firm headquartered in New York City. It apparently fired off an internal email saying that the sentiments expressed in the statements signed onto by the students do not represent its values.
According to a report from NBC News, Neil Barr, a Managing Partner at Davis Polk, is the one whose name was on the email. In it, he said, “These statements are simply contrary to our firm’s values and we thus concluded that rescinding these offers was appropriate in upholding our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment for all Davis Polk employees.”
Continuing, he added that the decision wasn’t necessarily permanent, yet, saying, “At this time, we remain in dialogue with two of these students to ensure that any further color being offered to us by these students is considered.”
A representative for Davis Polk said, “The views expressed in certain of the statements signed by law school student organizations in recent days are in direct contravention of our firm’s value system. For this reason and to ensure we continue to maintain a supportive and inclusive work environment, the student leaders responsible for signing on to these statements are no longer welcome in our firm; and their offers of employment have thus been rescinded.”
Though the Davis Polk email did not specify which statements the students signed onto, one of the most notorious came from Harvard. There, students signed onto a letter reading, “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum.” the statement reads.
Continuing, the statement went on to say. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.”
It went on to attack Israel as an “apartheid” state and lay the blame on the victims for the massacres, saying, “In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
The letter disillusioned many on the left who used to support woke academia, such as former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who said, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.”
Summers continued, “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.”
Summers then went on to add, “I very much hope appropriate statements from the University and College condemning those who launched terrorist attacks and standing in solidarity with its victims will soon be forthcoming.”
Featured image credit: By Daderot – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1987180
"*" indicates required fields