Steven Pinker. Photo: Steven Pinker / Wikimedia Commons

Steven Pinker

Psychologist

Esteemed Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker again led his influential voice to the opposition of academic boycotts of Israel, as two groups of anthropologists geared up campaigns to defeat the boycott resolution before the American Anthropological Association (AAA), to be voted on beginning April 15, 2016.

Pinker, a best-selling author whose work spans diverse disciplines, spoke out when Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) in 2014 banned the use of Israeli SodaStream water systems, releasing a statement titled “Against Selective Demonization,” asking whether Israel’s policies are “really so atrocious, so beyond the pale of acceptable behavior of nation-states, that they call for a unique symbolic statement that abrogates personal fairness and academic freedom?”