The Pulitzer Prize Board is facing scrutiny following the election of Vijay Iyer, a composer, pianist and professor at Harvard University with a documented history of anti-Israel bias and activism.
A Jan. 25 announcement from the Pulitzer Prize Administrator’s Office, which also included the election of Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor of the Associated Press, stated that Iyer, a tenured professor of the arts at the Ivy League school with joint appointments in music and African and African American studies, and his work “reflects the enduring commitment of the Pulitzer Prizes to excellence, independence and innovation in journalism, arts and letters.”
The 20-member board administers the Pulitzer Prizes, honoring American journalism, literature and music, and is composed of “leading journalists, news executives from media outlets across the U.S. and the president of Columbia University, as well as five academics or persons in the arts.”
“The naming of Harvard professor Vijay Iyer to the Pulitzer Board only adds insult to injury in the already biased environment to which Israel is being treated in the media,” Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS.
“Rather than seeking to bring objectivity to the Pulitzer Board’s deliberations, this appointment suggests that those who write fairly about Israel will be marginalized,” he said. (JNS sought comment from the Pulitzer Prize Administrator’s Office.)
In November 2023, Iyer signed a faculty statement addressed to then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, criticizing her Nov. 9 message on combating antisemitism.
“It cannot be ruled as ipso facto antisemitic to question the actions of this particular ethno-nationalist government any more than it would be ipso facto racist to question the actions of Robert Mugabe’s ethno-nationalist government in Zimbabwe,” the letter stated.
Iyer also signed a May 2021 letter from Harvard faculty demanding the university divest from Israel, as well as another letter the same month accusing the Museum of Modern Art of serving as an “ideological battlefield through which those who fund apartheid and profit from war polish their reputations and normalize their violence.”
During the 2024 anti-Israel encampment protests on Harvard’s campus, Iyer told GBH News that the “youth-led movement is speaking to one of the most burning issues facing the world today, which is how do we respond to plausible genocide.”
