Exclusive: Harvard Alums Turn to Hillsdale to Create ‘Rhoda Kadalie Endowed Journalism Scholarship’

Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak and his wife, economist Julia Pollak, have turned to Hillsdale College to create an endowed scholarship for students in journalism in memory of Julia’s mother, human rights activist Rhoda Kadalie, in the wake of Harvard’s failure to condemn Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.

“We have been interested in Hillsdale for quite some time, and Rhoda took an interest in Hillsdale and in their publication, Imprimis,” Joel Pollak told Breitbart News.

“When Rhoda passed away from lung cancer last year, we started thinking about a way to preserve her legacy and to create this scholarship that would fund journalism students at Hillsdale because, among many other things, Rhoda was also a journalist. She was a writer,” Pollak added.

Pollak also slammed Harvard, his alma mater, for its failure to properly respond to the October 7 attacks in Israel by the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to its pro-terror students on campus:

We felt it was especially important to complete this scholarship right now because Harvard and other elite colleges have struggled to condemn the terrorism committed by Hamas, and students at these colleges have come out in favor of the Hamas terrorists or in favor of the perceived Palestinian side, when Israel is simply trying to defend itself.

“It’s been shocking to see the moral weakness of Harvard and other institutions, and we feel very strongly that people need to look for alternatives,” he said.

Julia told Breitbart News that her mother “was a remarkable human rights activist and anti-apartheid activist who, while a part of that movement, also held it to a much higher standard than perhaps we often hold liberation movements to.”

The ANC [African National Congress], in its fight against apartheid, did pivot to an armed struggle when peaceful tactics failed, but they didn’t target civilians. They didn’t target all whites. Occasionally, of course, radicals went off the rails and killed people who were suspected informants. Even in those cases where there was perhaps some military reason to do so, my mother and her friends condemned those actions and argued that they needed to uphold human rights, and they needed to fight for a democratic South Africa that would uphold minority rights and the rule of law and due process and not operate through kangaroo courts and death squads.

“She distinguished herself on the university campus, fighting against apartheid but also upholding women’s rights and human rights,” Julia said.

Kadalie later “started an organization that identified and awarded examples of best practice in poverty alleviation, in HIV/AIDS work, in nutrition, etc.” she added.

Julia went on to say that “while recognizing public-private partnerships by day and helping the government achieve its poverty alleviation goals, she also was a columnist by night, criticizing that same government where it fell short.”

“So she was a very interesting person who had multiple different sorts of identities and views but held them all together and was always a fierce sort of internal critic while also helping the anti-apartheid movement first and then the South African government next,” she said.

Joel Pollak added that while writing Kadalie’s biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order!, he found that “her Christian faith was very important to those principles that Julia described.”

“Even though she ended up politically on the right, having started on the left, the constant in her life was that solid moral core,” he said, noting that his mother-in-law had gone from “radical black feminist Marxist in the anti-apartheid era to Trump-supporting conservative in today’s time.”

“She still believed in the same fundamental principles. She believed in right and wrong. She believed in accountability. She believed in achievement,” he said. “And all of that came from that solid moral founding that she had.”

Additionally, Joel Pollak recently returned from Israel, where he did some on-the-ground reporting in the wake of the massacre by Hamas.

“I saw some of the worst things that I’ve ever seen in my life, and I don’t think Western civilization has seen an attack on civilians like this, certainly since the Holocaust and certainly in the last several decades. But this was astonishing,” he said.

Joel added that he “saw homes that had been devastated, a kindergarten riddled with bullets, playgrounds destroyed.”

He was also shown raw footage of the attacks at a military base and noted that “some of the journalists were quietly asking for the footage to be stopped in the middle because it was so disturbing and hard to watch.”

“We were also taken to a military base where we saw the bodies inside refrigerated trucks being identified still, several weeks later. They’re having trouble identifying some of the victims because they were so badly burned and mutilated,” he said.

Joel and Julia Pollak issued the following statement about the newly established Rhoda Kadalie Endowed Journalism Scholarship at Hillsdale College:

Each year, the scholarship will help support a student in pursuit of a career in journalism — one of many areas in which Rhoda Kadalie, mother to Julia, made her mark.

Julia and Joel are both Harvard graduates, and Rhoda had a relationship with Harvard. Yet today, when Harvard administrators struggle to condemn terror against Jews; or when students fail to make the moral distinction between the unintended death of civilians in a war of self-defense on the one hand, and the deliberate murder of civilians by terrorists on the other; it is clear Harvard and other elite colleges are failing.

Rhoda, born in 1953, grew up in District Six and Mowbray in Cape Town, South Africa. She became an anti-apartheid activist and feminist, and was later appointed by President Nelson Mandela to the Human Rights Commission. After several years, she resigned in protest at the government’s inaction on human rights. She then founded the Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust to reward the best public-private partnerships in social development in South Africa, while also becoming a prominent opposition voice in the national media.

Rhoda nurtured a deep and humble Christian faith, which was a constant in a life of political change. She was also a staunch supporter of Israel, and an admirer of America. Ever the contrarian, she was a black Marxist radical in her youth and an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump in her retirement. She was due to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen nine days after her untimely passing from cancer in 2022.

Rhoda loved the cut and thrust of political debate. She believed in challenging everything, and yet she had friends with whom she disagreed vehemently about fundamental issues. She rejected the idea that human beings were defined by race and other categories. She celebrated talent, she admired hard work, she insisted on competence, and she had a wicked sense of humor. She was a writer who loved good writing.

Hillsdale is a perfect institution to ensure Rhoda’s legacy. Founded in 1844, it was the first college in the state of Michigan to admit women, and it also admitted black Americans — before the Civil War. It rejected federal government funding rather than submit to the requirement to keep track of students by race. It maintains its Christian roots in ecumenical fashion. It is recognized as the intellectual home of liberty in the United States.

We believe that Jewish donors should contribute to Jewish organizations that are actually caring for the welfare of Jewish students, such as Harvard Chabad (link here). As for investing in universities themselves, it is time for donors to look further afield, to colleges like Hillsdale, which remain true to the principles upon which the freedom and safety of Jews, and all Americans, depends.

It may seem surprising that we feel more secure, as Jews, donating to a Christian institution. Rhoda would have enjoyed the irony.

If you would like to contribute, kindly do so at here, and specify “Rhoda Kadalie Endowed Journalism Scholarship.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.