1
Picture a college professor.
Surprise, it’s a woman. It’s like that old riddle about the surgeon and the boy in the car accident (dad dies in the accident, son arrives at the hospital needing an operation, surgeon says: “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son”—you, the listener, are confused). The point of the riddle is that misogyny shapes our imaginations. Kids telling riddles on the school bus wouldn’t put it that way, but they get it.
In the world of the riddle, we’re not worried about the fictional kid—someone else will perform his surgery, that’s not the point. The kid is going to make it.
In the world of the real professor, real kids seem less safe. This professor is tenured at one of the best universities in the world. Let’s call it: Harvard University. Women are underrepresented on its faculty, so good for her. She works every day with young adults, 18 to 22 or so. She’s a mom, if you were wondering. One day (when exactly?) she finds out that someone in her social circle—a friend of her husband’s, a good enough friend that she and her husband spent their honeymoon on one of this friend’s luxury properties—has been accused of sexual misconduct. After a complex combination of state and federal investigations, this friend pleads guilty to two crimes in the state of Florida: soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of eighteen. So—someone who knew him might think—some kind of sexual misconduct involving a minor? Involving a child?
But perhaps our professor missed this information, didn’t hear about this friend’s problems, though the investigation and plea deal took years. And international media did cover the case. And one of her university’s most famous law professors, a colleague, was a member of his defense team. And eventually this friend served time in jail (kind of). But perhaps she didn’t exactly totally know about it? Her workplace definitely knew. Before his conviction, Harvard University—did I mention her husband was its president?—accepted more than $9 million in donations from this friend. After his conviction for crimes including a crime against a minor, the university banned further donations. So this $9 million was received between 1998 and 2008; her husband was president from 2001 to 2006, and his relationship with this generous donor dates back at least to 1998, when he first traveled on this friendly donor’s private plane.
It’s well known but worth repeating: this friend (since deceased) has been plausibly accused of exploiting, trafficking, and assaulting hundreds of girls over the course of too many years. In the 2006–2008 case, the federal plea agreement specified 34 victims, as reporter Julie K. Brown emphasizes, meaning that his abuse of them had been confirmed by that investigation, though he was just asked to plea on the two counts. He’s one of the most prolific child sex offenders known to history. His victims tell of a voracious appetite for abusing young teenage girls, with his demands for multiple “massages” a day, his construction of a coercive pyramid scheme through which he intimidated his victims into recruiting more victims—younger victims, because of course his victims were always aging out of his interest. His properties in Florida, Manhattan, and the US Virgin Islands (professorial honeymoon spot) are all believed to be sites of abuse.
While I am, like many of you, just a casual reader of the Epstein files, no expert in his daily life, we can say that it has never seemed that Jeffrey Epstein was subtle. Even those associated with him who deny they ever knew anything about his crimes might mention that, yes, he did travel with young women, yes, there were often young women around (about whom they seem to have been quite incurious, though always sure, when asked, that every single one of them was over eighteen).
So what did this accomplished tenured professor at Harvard, teacher of young women, mother of daughters, what did she do when she learned that her husband’s friend had been convicted of some crime to do with a much younger woman, a teenager, something to do with trying to have sex with a teenage girl? The charge uses the term prostitution, which helpfully blames the victims, but all the same, this woman is a professional reader, who must know that phrases like solicitation of prostitution from someone under the age of eighteen, or child prostitute, all these phrases, well, they are a bit problematic. A bit complicated. Only under certain circumstances—in certain states at certain ages, and/or according to certain set intervals of ages between the people involved—can minors, who are children, be said to consent to sex. Usually when an adult has sex with a child, that is understood to be nonconsensual, understood to be rape, even if the minor might at some point say they consented. So if children can’t consent to sex, they can’t be prostitutes. Trafficked or enslaved are better words, and are the words that the good reporters use. But maybe this literature professor had never thought about the nuances of this language. Maybe her imagination was peopled with contented, empowered child prostitutes, and she pictured this encounter in those terms. In any case, her middle-aged, extremely wealthy, powerful friend had pled guilty to this kind of activity and there was more than one accusation. So what does she do, in all the years between his conviction in 2008 and his death in 2019?
She stays friendly with him, she flatters him, she asks his advice, she solicits and gets money from him and his friends for her poetry projects, she asks favors from him, she calls him “so kind,” she thanks him for his help, she thanks him for his corrections of her, how he instructs her, she uses him to connect with celebrities like Woody Allen (whom she also flatters), she praises what an interesting conversation he had with her on his private plane, she hides his identity from her staff, she recommends books he might like, she knows he likes Lolita, so she recommends to him another book (Cather’s My Antonia) about “a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” [1]
And with his money, his friends’ money, his help, his advice, she produces a national PBS show about poetry that runs for seven years.
What sort of poetry did Jeffrey Epstein support?
2
Elisa New joined the faculty of Harvard in 1999, in her forties. She married Lawrence (Larry) Summers in 2005, second marriage for both. Summers joined Harvard initially as an economics professor and later served, as noted, as Harvard’s president, and as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, Obama’s director of the White House National Economic Council, chief economist at the World Bank, etc. On their honeymoon, New and Summers departed Massachusetts on Epstein’s private plane—Ghislaine Maxwell flew with them—and made their way to St. Thomas then to Epstein’s Little St. James. [2]
New and Summers remain married as of the time of writing. Emails released in the Epstein tranche show Summers seeking advice from Epstein on an affair he’s hoping to have. He tells Epstein he’s an “economics mentor” (whatever that means) to the object of his desire. The Guardian notes that Epstein gives “[Summers] advice in a 2019 exchange about his romantic gestures being rebuffed.” [3] To outside readers, Summers’ narration via email of this failed affair creates the impression he’s stalking this woman at some conference. While it’s fun that a man gets “rebuffed” after he assumes that being someone’s “economics mentor” should result in an intimate relationship, the fact that someone with enormous decades-long power over women’s professional and economic lives (and a teacher) turns to a notorious sex offender for advice when women decline his advances—this is, imo, not that funny.
Timeline-wise, if you’re wondering what it was like to email with Jeffrey Epstein in 2019: Julie K. Brown’s three-part series on the miscarriage of justice in Epstein’s grotesquely lenient 2008 plea deal—reporting that reignited national interest in Epstein’s crimes and led to Alexander Acosta’s resignation from Trump’s cabinet—appeared in the Miami Herald in November 2018. Indeed, Summers wrote Epstein in late November 2018 to say “U have returned to the press,” so he was familiar. Epstein replied: “short lived , no worry.” Epstein was wrong about the publicity, but right about himself, since he’d be dead in less than a year.
Elisa New studies American poetry, especially the poetry of Puritan and Protestant New England, about which we’ll say more. Her published work includes The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which Modern Philology says “makes the strongest case for the Puritan view since Pearce”; The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Harvard University Press, 1999), which challenges claims that “American vision [is] inherently possessive” and asserts that “American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow” (according to jacket copy). The poet and scholar Susan Howe hailed this volume’s “clear and deep sympathy with the lyric gifts Protestant ethics can bestow and have already bestowed on our culture.” Then New published a chronicle of her family’s history, Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore (Basic Books, 2009). And most recently, New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). By “first literature,” to be clear, New means the literature of America’s first European settlers, not its indigenous people.
New is best known for the project “Poetry in America,” comprising a PBS TV and online series (2018–2025) and a suite of related educational programs. She’s president of Verse Video Education, a nonprofit that supports these endeavors and which received $110,000 directly from Jeffrey Epstein in 2016. Since Epstein’s money went to New’s nonprofit, it skirted Harvard’s ban on his donations, but the Harvard Crimson highlights how these sources of support weren’t so distinct: “Harvard donated office space and partially subsidized employee salaries for the nonprofit housing the show [Poetry in America].” New’s work had previously received a substantial gift “from Leon D. Black, an executive at private equity behemoth Apollo, brokered by Epstein,” as also reported in the Crimson and elsewhere. [4] “Jeffrey, you have been such a wonderful supporter of my Poetry in America project. The Leon Black gift changed everything for me last year,” New wrote to Epstein in 2015, “… first and foremost, it gave me leverage, enabling me to set down a solid Harvard base for my activities… The money did it: as soon as they heard about the gift, they took my project more seriously.” [5]
PBS dropped the show Poetry in America in December 2025, just before its fifth season was set to air, after New’s Epstein connections had been made public in the latest file release. By then, New had moved herself and her Poetry in America work from Harvard to Arizona State University (in 2021), and her show from the Boston-based PBS member station GBH to Arizona PBS. [6]
Right after PBS dropped the program, Arizona State also “part[ed] ways” with New. ASU closed the “Education Media Innovation Studio” she’d directed, and Poetry in America staff there lost their jobs. [7] (For clarity: there’s no evidence that New’s staff knew about her connections to Epstein, which she seems to have known she should hide.) There’s some dispute about whether New’s connections to Epstein necessitated her move to Arizona in the first place. In 2025, GBH reported on its own past affiliation with New’s program: “A GBH spokesperson said the station cut its ties with New and the series about three years ago [2022] after learning about her connection to Epstein.” Through a spokesperson, New disputed this and claimed the move was her idea. [8]
New had big ambitions for her project from the start. Or big needs, which in her context might be the same thing. In 2014, Epstein wrote to his friend and ex-girlfriend Eva Andersson-Dubin, wife of hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, to say “larry summers wife is tryint to raise 3million to do poetry classes on line, Ask Glenn, but I think 100 - 200 k a good idea from you guys.” To which Eva Dubin replied, “That is a lot of poetry!!!” [9]
In 2015 New sent Epstein a personalized form letter thanking donors to her projects. In it she highlights the scope of her planned endeavors: the TV series; an upcoming Harvard Graduate School of Education course for middle and high school teachers called “Poetry of the City,” with “companion materials” on PBSLearningMedia [10] (elsewhere she notes that “Leon Black is paying for all of this” [11]); another planned program for teachers called “Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky,” with a science focus; “a recent partnership with Greenwich Country Day School and the Success Academy Network of charter schools.” She’s interested in developing programs on poetry and character development; she lists partners including “The Nantucket Project, Nautilus Magazine, The Aspen Ideas Festival, and The Big Think, and, of course, HarvardX, Harvard’s provider of free open online courses.” [12] In another email to Epstein she brainstorms about a program on “Poetry for CEOs and management teams” and one on Jewish diaspora literature. [13]
She thanks Epstein for his help in “defining [her] project” for a grant application, and then thanks him a little more personally, comparing him to her husband: “It really means a lot to me, all financial help aside, Jeffrey, that you are rooting for me and thinking about me. You push back a lot (as Larry does), and it’s always annoying but I always learn.” [14]
What should we make of this sniveling? She’s a Harvard professor, he’s a college dropout fired from the one teaching job he ever had, also a convicted sex offender.
On the one hand, this is #girlboss behavior, I guess. He has the money she wants and she’s getting that money. She’ll act how she needs to act. On the other hand, her behavior is consistent with academia’s aesthetics of incompetence, its self-serving claims to “imposter syndrome”—in which people from comfortable backgrounds who have comfortably ascended the ranks of an exclusionary hierarchy, rewarded with well-resourced jobs at elite institutions, try to redirect your attention to their emotional needs. Like a lot of academics, New seems OK to come across as inept about the things of this world, asking Epstein for help with budgets, [15] and seeming unembarrassed about the extent of help she’s requesting, which must be how it works for rich people. In an exchange from late November 2018 (!) he seems to correct her writing—evidently she said something about “using” Serena Williams in relation to the program, and he points to that verb (“thank you very very much for editing me,” she says)—and she replies: “I am so used to being unpaid for this work I didn't realize my language suggested actual profit. Dumb.” [16]
Unpaid? When she’s writing this, she holds a named professorship at Harvard. Her Poetry in America work is supported there. They literally help pay for it. And she’s talking to someone who has provided her with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But acting like a martyr at your own job, out-of-place and put-upon—an intellectual ingenue emerging blinkingly from the library into the world’s harsh, profit-driven light—that’s the academic style. Classically, the more money you make, the shabbier and more helpless you should appear. In clips of New’s early Poetry in America lectures available on YouTube, she’s visibly sweating through her stylishly belted sweater, professor-style (I sympathize; most of us wear loose blazers for this reason). On the TV show, her hair is often not quite in order, her mic clipped on poorly, wrinkling things up. Academic aesthetic.
So far Epstein’s involvement in American poetry parallels his involvement across arenas of politics and society, the common thread to which was often support for the state of Israel. [17] Among powerful people he’s a fixer, backchanneling, brokering. He connects power to power, money to money. He chitchats, he’s in touch with everyone, he can get you in touch. [18] Throughout his interactions with New they both know the deal: she’s “larry summers wife.” She’s here as a wife and she acts like it, down to the phrasing of her thanks. Poetry and its labor are overtly feminized in these interactions (so often the case), and New goes along with that too, pretending she’s an unpaid volunteer while having one of the best poetry jobs there is.
So, we might conclude, Epstein’s poetry dealings are like his other dealings: they mainly serve his relationship with Summers, powerful man in his sphere, and serve his and Summers’ shared worldview and policy interests. But what else does he get out of all this chitchat, advice-giving, money-moving?
Epstein was from a working-class background and lacked elite credentials. The Ivy League crowd he cultivated—Summers, New, others we’ve read about—incorporated him into their world, wildly improving his status, his ideas and opinions and company now sought out by certified geniuses. Under Summers, as the Guardian reports, Epstein was “appointed a visiting fellow to conduct research in [Harvard’s] department of psychology,” this despite the fact that “the university later concluded Epstein ‘lacked the academic qualifications visiting fellows typically possess and his application proposed a course of study Epstein was unqualified to pursue.’” [19] Most of New’s emails with Epstein are about the business of her project, but sometimes she talks a little poetry too—sending him an Emily Dickinson poem with some commentary, for example (and noting that she “always prefer[s] face to face if you have time”). [20]
Others included and elevated Epstein similarly, and similarly used literature as a tool. After a dinner with Epstein that also included Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, Noam Chomsky’s wife Valeria persistently tried to get Epstein to read a Clarice Lispector novel. Epstein deflects at first, then tells her he’s started the book, then pivots back to Noam and tells a story about students being impressed with his own (Epstein’s) ideas about language systems. [21]
Leon Botstein, until recently president of Bard College, sent Epstein bon mots like a little quotation by Andrei Biely, whom he describes as a “favorite of Nabokov’s.” [22] Some time later his assistant sent over an article Botstein had written on Nabokov and poetry. [23]
In these exchanges, literature is a luxury currency, at best. Epstein’s credentialed friends offer him this currency, signaling that they consider him a fellow sophisticate. Perhaps this is because they sincerely value his insights and enjoy his conversation. Perhaps they are smart enough to recognize a quid pro quo: Epstein is wealthy and accessible, a node in a network that benefits them, and they know he craves this kind of highbrow inclusion.
At worst, these members of the intellectual elite are using literature to launder Epstein’s misogyny and the sexist cruelty they seem to suspect. You’ll note how both Botstein and New dignify Epstein’s interest in Nabokov. Epstein’s enthusiasm for the novel Lolita seems to have been widely known (also of course the source of media’s nickname for his private plane, the Lolita Express). In 2015 a reporter tried to fact-check whether this was really the “only book on [his] bedside table.” [24] A first edition was found in his New York City home. Photos from the Epstein tranche show lines from Lolita written in marker across the body of a young woman, or women. Girl, or girls. [25]
And here are two prominent intellectuals doing Epstein the favor of pretending he’s a fan of Nabokov the writer, not of the book’s subject: a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. As if he would like to read Andrei Biely more than he would like to sexually abuse a child.
By the way, during this same time period, Epstein reached out to other academics who declined to meet or work with him because, they explain when interviewed, they Googled him and learned about his criminal convictions. So that series of actions was perfectly possible. [26]
I can’t say what any of these individuals—New, Botstein, all the others—did or didn’t know about Epstein’s crimes, the vicious exploitation of children that shaped his life and caused his victims such terrible suffering. But if they didn’t suspect anything, why provide him with this perfect alibi? We know you love Nabokov, wink…
3
At first the PBS show Poetry in America wouldn’t seem to belong to Epstein’s world, with its cadres of powerful men talking business, geopolitics, and Israel, its background or is it foreground of misogyny and child sexual abuse. But watch a few episodes and commonalities emerge.
Each episode runs just under a half-hour and centers on a poem or pair of poems. There’s the canonical: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; an Emily Dickinson poem; William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”; Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”; W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”; Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Sometimes it’s more contemporary: a Mark Doty poem on barber shops; an episode on an Evie Shockley poem in conversation with Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit”; an episode on Stephen Sondheim. And so on. [27]
This show aims to fortify an American canon. It’s a canon-making activity. For a public media educational show, it’s surprisingly not that educational. Its main feature is sentimental close reading as performed by celebrities. This is a show about how the elite appreciate poetry and you get to watch.
You could imagine a PBS show that treats canonical poems as lenses through which to understand important moments in American history or culture. This isn’t that show. Some episodes are more substantive, but historical context is often treated pretty lightly. There’s commentary on poetic form, but that’s not a consistent priority either. You wouldn’t learn that much about the history of American poetics by watching this. Discussions of form veer towards the tautological in a way undergraduate instructors will recognize: someone notes that a choice of wording or punctuation in this poem seems significant or interesting; in response someone notes that the poet chose to make that choice. They wrote this on purpose, you see. That might be as far as it gets.
The show relies heavily on its format, which comprises continual, even frenetic cuts between commentators whom New is interviewing. Strangely, you often barely get to experience the central poem itself. It’s broken into couplets or stanzas that float across the screen and/or are read aloud (often badly) by different people, discontinuously, interspersed with brief voiceover lecture or interview chitchat. This show does not trust you, the viewer, with a poem. Art needs to be mediated, explained by the elite, before it reaches you.
For each episode, New curates her selection of “interpreters,” as she calls them. These tend to include one or two well-known poets/writers; a professor or two, almost always from Harvard; one or two prominent folks from business, media, the arts (Sheryl Sandberg, Tony Kushner, DJ Spooky); maybe a politician or Supreme Court justice; maybe a New York Times or New Yorker writer; maybe a celebrity, usually someone Boomer-friendly (Bono, John Lithgow, John Turturro, Shaquille O’Neal, Mary Chapin Carpenter…). Sometimes ordinary people are represented: a few couples selected to talk about a love poem; “four exonerated prisoners” in one episode. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John McCain, all make appearances.
Woody Allen was meant to talk about Williams’s “This Is Just to Say,” the poem about those plums, but his clip was taped and never aired—New’s staff seemingly blocked it during the #MeToo years. [28] Which is too bad because New was excited to hear Woody discuss this poem’s “seductiveness,” she told Epstein. [29]
The show is heavily produced; its style of cuts makes for a rapid yet lulling collage. We see a flash of, say, Sheryl Sandberg emotively sharing an anecdote about her husband’s death, Samantha Powers reading a couplet, New posing a broad question, Jane Hirshfield sharing an interesting thought that gets cut off, some animated archival or stock imagery, all these graphic elements flowing and morphing. This show was mostly made before GenAI, but it feels so much like GenAI—like a lot of corporate and higher-ed culture, in retrospect it’s a bland, eerie foreshadowing of that aesthetic. Interpreters don’t get to develop their thoughts at length. Their level of interest in this activity, and level of preparation for it, varies: some are engaging and insightful; others are casual, as if they’d slipped this appearance into their schedule as a favor, which they did.
There’s little suggestion that the Americans watching this show might write poems, or that this show would help them do so, or that it would be that worthwhile if they did. No: poets are exceptional, different from ordinary people, and that’s what you’re here to witness. (For the sake of sanity I did not watch the entire show, I should add, but I experienced a wide selection of episodes and clips.) The show’s investment in elitism and canonicity becomes more disturbing in certain moments, for certain writers and writing. This show loves words like “genius” and “prodigy.” And both are used, for example, to describe enslaved Revolutionary War–era poet Phillis Wheatley and contemporary hip-hop artist Nas. Fair enough. But those words started to turn against their subjects, I felt, as we watched.
In the Wheatley episode, her exceptionalism is emphasized so much that a regressive interpretation shadows the discussion: as if Wheatley truly was so different from other enslaved people that one needn’t consider their experiences in the same terms; as if she was superior to “them” to the point that she’s not their representative, but can be claimed by the oppressors’ culture instead. This dynamic is not the fault of individual commentators, but of how the show is made.
The Wheatley episode focuses on two poems, which are about Harvard University and George Washington, respectively; important poems have important subjects. Nas is featured due to another Harvard connection: a hip-hop archive at the university that had recently honored his album Illmatic. Harvard is front and center in this project, despite its seemingly populist mission. In his interview, Nas carefully presents his work as originating from a specific, shared culture, calling himself a “disciple of the streets”: “the streets is my world, I’m of it and I love it.” New redirects toward his own genius, focusing on the moment when that collectivity was replaced by “your own words.” He suggests that each neighborhood and subculture in a city offers its own linguistic energies, its own rich potential for poetry. She does not seem interested. This isn’t a show about art that comes from everyday people or belongs to them. It’s trying to prove the opposite thesis.
The episode that I think most about is the one on Auden’s 1939 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” There are just three guests—Harvard professor Peter Sacks, New York Times columnist David Brooks, former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers—so the pace is statelier. You may know this poem about suffering and how it is and isn’t witnessed, through the poet’s viewing of Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: the mythical flying boy falls to his death discreetly in the sea, ignored by the everyday scene continuing around him.
If you didn’t already know the poem, I’m not sure what you could make of this product about it. The whole poem isn’t shared upfront. You’d have to wait to find out what these people are talking about as they go. Any reader might find this irritating—a poem chopped up into lines and phrases that are fussed over and repeated, the wholeness of the work withheld. It’s as if someone was showing you a painting by only letting you see separate little parts of it, while they pedantically explain each one, and annoyingly they keep emphasizing how good the whole thing is. The people onscreen are smiling at each other, but the viewer can’t share in that feeling. Mainly because the imagery that keeps appearing onscreen in this episode, interspersed with these interview clips, is so disturbing. Over and over—collaged rapidly, with no context, just a flotsam of numbing spectacle—are images of human beings in scenes of war, in states of horror. Recent refugees crossing the Mediterranean on overcrowded boats, hellish scenes from World War II, key images from Tiananmen Square. At one point we transition from a crowd heiling Hitler right into a discussion of this poem’s internal rhyme scheme. Another time Samantha Powers is emphasizing recent suffering in Aleppo, Syria, as a scene of “the inferno itself”—and then we cut to cheerful music while the poem’s unusual adverb choices are highlighted. It feels really bad.
Most people in these images of suffering are not white people. We seem to be in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, it’s hard to know from brief images flashing by, and it’s all presented as equivalent and sad: something that makes you, the innocent bystander, feel sad. All the commentators are seemingly white. There’s no discussion of who caused what suffering. Suffering is just endemic to these people and places, apparently. The commentary assumes that the poem is for people like “us,” people safe within the empire, people who too often turn away from distant suffering, but sometimes you can’t or shouldn’t (as the chitchat emphasizes), so what should we do. That people from Aleppo might write a poem or be interested to read this one is not an option that exists in the Poetry in America universe. They’re over there. Poems are from here.
The episode explains that this poem has a moral vision. If you’re wondering how to do the right thing in the face of all this distant suffering, how to be a good person, Poetry in America has an answer: you would be Samantha Powers at the UN or David Brooks writing his columns. Brooks and Powers are presented, through cuts and framing, as the good witnesses. They are the truest readers of the poem; they are testament to the poem’s meaning and worth, and the poem attests to their worth in turn. If Auden were alive today, the show seems to suggest, he would be a fan of David Brooks’s takes in the NYT. You should all be the David Brookses you want to see in the world.
It doesn’t feel coincidental that Brooks and Powers, canonized here, both failed to oppose the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza. Powers is the author of an award-winning book about genocide, A Problem from Hell, and a proponent of humanitarian intervention against genocide, except in the case of Palestine, during which she was USAID chief and stood with Biden as he helped starve and burn Gaza, to the point that her own staff publicly critiqued her. [30] Brooks is a longtime supporter of Israel, who also supported the US war on Iraq, which could potentially be hard to reconcile with the devastated images from what’s seemingly Iraq that we’re seeing onscreen, except we’re not asked to reconcile anything. People of the empire, white people, liberals—nice work reading this poem and noticing that it’s a critique of other people, and maybe sometimes of you, a tension you’ve now immediately resolved. Once again literature is mere alibi.
4
By her own account Elisa New was transformed when she moved with Larry Summers into the presidential mansion at Harvard, aka Elmwood. Elmwood was James Russell Lowell’s house, of the longtime Boston and Harvard-affiliated family, poet Robert Lowell’s ancestor (New insists on calling such families “Brahmin,” meaning “Boston Brahmin,” a phrase I didn’t know people still used). That New gets to live in this quintessentially New England place—that she is someone with the right to live there—is very important to her and, she argues, to literary work itself: “[L]iving at Elmwood and with Larry changed my whole literary disposition; changed the way I see the meaning of what we do as teacher and scholar.” [31] This is from her most recent book, New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature. She writes that “my institutional adventures with Larry were emancipating… inspiring me to step beyond certain disciplinary norms, beyond the mores of the day.” [32] This quotation gets uncomfortable in the context of Epstein, his support for her work alongside his own definition of stepping “beyond the mores of the day.” She credits Elmwood with making her “a Yankee, a Brahmin, and a Cambridgian,” a “Harvardian.” [33] Identities born of possession: claiming place as a status, status as the right to a place.
This 2014 book frames itself as a manifesto, more personal and passionate than a traditional monograph, exceeding the limits of literary criticism as a discipline. It’s “an attempt to express, and to foster, a passion for the literature of New England not fully authorized by the protocols of literary criticism.” [34] The final chapter is an “autobiographical epilogue” that expounds on what it meant for the author to be the queen of Harvard and live in its castle (my wording). Living in this historic building at Harvard is not a widely accessible pedagogy, of course. But, charitably, perhaps this writer considers this book an attempt to share its benefits.
By “America’s first literature,” New means Puritan and Protestant. Native people, indigenous New Englanders, are barely present in her study and lack even an index entry; they are truly not on her mind. She frames Pilgrims as immigrants and compares them to the Jewish immigrants to New York City in the nineteenth century witnessed by Emma Lazarus in her famous poem. [35] I don’t remember those particular working-class Jewish immigrants undertaking decades of systematic brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide in lower Manhattan, which is what the Puritans did and is their most significant legacy. But New sees in history what she wants to see. I guess all these people did come on boats? With a telling generosity New offers the Puritans endless alibis, casually comparing their historic annihilatory project of settler colonialism to her own move to New England for a job.
(For context, I grew up in New England and am descended from “Pilgrims” who perpetrated genocide as soon as they arrived in the 1630s.)
How freeing it feels to live in the big house—to claim something valued and rare and canonical and know it as yours, and know that it is known as yours. New seeks to reclaim New England’s literature and its Puritan origins from decades of professional detractors, countering its critique in the academy, which from the 1970s on has undertaken the “unseating of Protestant New England as the capital of American literary culture,” by her account. [36] New England literature, she argues, has a lasting power that criticism can’t reach; people feel this power when they read it. Her emphasis on feeling interestingly echoes the Puritans’ own emphasis on conversion and justification: the feeling of the direct experience of God’s grace, as proof of one’s elect status. [37] You could say that this book is about making New England great again. And great is a way that you should get to feel, if you’re part of New England.
These days, the Puritans are often remembered not for their particular conception of God’s grace, but for their strict social control, their stern “godly” culture. Other than through a shared commitment to misogyny (remember all those witch trials), they wouldn’t seem to belong in the decadent, hypercapitalist world of the Epstein files. But the Puritan ideology of the elect—an angry God’s chosen saved few, among a vast sea of sinners, who will indeed be punished—illuminates the connection: these are the few residents of the Kingdom of Heaven, passengers on that private plane. Theirs was definitively not a populist or inclusive belief system. Elitism is its meaning. In early acts of total war and genocide in the Native Northeast, Puritans initiated the settler colonialism that became the making of America: a model lent to and adapted by the state of Israel hundreds of years later, in the ongoing Zionist project of claiming, settling, and occupying Palestine. [38]
When scholars defend the culture of the Puritans, they minimize discussion of their colonizing activities and suppress the presence and fate of Natives in early American history, separating the political from the cultural, as if this wasn’t all happening together. They carefully zoom in so that we’re only looking right here, at the city on the hill—not how it was built, what’s around it, who was also within and about it, at whose expense all this was made. The “defense” of Puritan culture fits in well amid powerful men committed to America’s neocolonial occupations, invasions, and resource extraction, to Israel’s settler colonial project and its American funding and weapons. While these scholars don’t speak in terms of God’s grace, there’s no doubt these folks view themselves as an elect. Thinkers like New easily end up as avatars of a settler colonialism they won’t name. To tell the story of the culture and the colonizing together—to tell the story of the culture as colonizing—would risk exposing the thinker’s own desire for power and possession, the consequences of their own politics (implicit or explicit), their own defense of supremacist state and institutional practices today.
New insists on a purity, a grace, to her connection with New England literature, transcending the worldly stuff of discipline: “when I asked myself the question of why I worked on this tradition, my reasons were more along the lines Emily Dickinson had given Thomas Wentworth Higginson for how she recognized a poem: this stuff simply took the top of my head off.” This purity of experience isn’t just powerful, it’s true: feeling is a path to truth and a mark of authority. [39]
This is why we have to suffer through watching all these celebrities banally feel their way through a poem. If you can feel it purely, it’s yours. And that’s meaningful because what’s yours doesn’t belong to everyone.
Who gets permission to possess something, what else does that permission allow? New frames a central question of her book’s New England-reclamation project: “Why would anyone have ever wanted to be a Puritan?” At a material level the answer is crude but clear: the Puritans survived and those around them—whom they targeted for dispossession, enslavement, and death—did not. The project here is to make space for the feelings of the colonizers, the “beauty” and the “pleasures of terror” and “the thrill of it” (as she puts it) that New wants to center. [40] Who would have wanted to be in the Epstein files? So many people.
Reading the Epstein files is a long dark encounter with these acts of willful epistemic greed and segregation: spheres of thinking and feeling violently separated from one another, so as never to include the wrong person or object, never draw the morally troubling conclusion, never critique the hand that might fund you. If you see a surprisingly young woman with this billionaire, there must be a good-enough reason, or even better, you’re beyond worldly reasons now, beyond disciplinary norms, the mores of the day, the streets that others walk, a transcendence of which you’ve always suspected you were worthy. What’s good for you must be right for others if you want it to be. All the reading in the world has become just a way not to see this abused girl, this child falling out of the sky that private planes traverse, while you “[turn] away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” [41]
[1] Some relevant emails, courtesy of Jmail.world: On Lolita and “so kind”: Nov. 25, 2018, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029566?view=inbox; on the private plane ride and Woody Allen: June 11, 2013, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA01970216?view=inbox; thanks: Dec. 19, 2016, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019203?view=inbox; “thanks so much for a really fun day”: Feb. 19, 2013, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA01906172?view=inbox; advice and money: Feb. 16, 2016, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02474085?view=inbox; money: Oct. 3, 2015, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta00630696-pdf?view=inbox; how she learns from his advice: Dec. 2, 2015, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028943?view=inbox
[2] Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava, “Summers Visited Epstein’s Island During 2005 Honeymoon,” Harvard Crimson, Nov. 20, 2025, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/21/summers-honeymoon-epstein-island/
[3] Sara Braun, “Larry Summers to Resign from Harvard After Epstein Files Revelations,” The Guardian, Feb. 25, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/larry-summers-resign-harvard
[4] Abigail S. Gerstein and Amann S. Mahajan, “PBS Cut Ties with Former Harvard Professor Elisa New Following Epstein Email Release,” Harvard Crimson, Dec. 11, 2025, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/12/poetry-show-pulled/
[5] Dec. 2, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028943?view=inbox
[6] Jenifer B. McKim, “PBS Cuts Ties with TV Program amid Probe of Harvard Host and Jeffrey Epstein,” GBH News, Dec. 10, 2025, https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-12-10/pbs-cuts-ties-with-tv-program-amid-probe-of-harvard-host-and-jeffrey-epstein. According to PBS and NPR affiliate WVIA’s listing for the show, the first two seasons were “distributed nationally by American Public Television”; the third and fourth were “distributed nationwide by PBS Plus.”
[7] Tricia L. Nadolny and Deirdre Fernandes, “After Epstein Revelations, Arizona State University Parts Ways with Elisa New, Harvard Professor and Larry Summers’ Wife,” Boston Globe, Dec. 18, 2025, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/18/metro/epstein-summers-harvard-asu-poetry/. Poetry in America staff also posted on social media about losing their jobs, though some posts have seemingly been deleted.
[8] McKim, “PBS Cuts Ties with TV Program amid Probe.”
[9] Oct. 18, 2014 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta00676210-pdf?view=inbox. For further context on Dubin and on Epstein’s network, see Julie K. Brown’s exceptional book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story (Dey Street Books, 2021), follow-up to her 2018 Miami Herald reporting.
[10] Dec. 2, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028943?view=inbox
[11] Oct. 3, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta00630696-pdf?view=inbox
[12] Dec. 2, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028943?view=inbox
[13] Oct. 3, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta00630696-pdf?view=inbox
[14] Dec. 2, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028943?view=inbox
[15] Feb. 23, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta01193213-pdf?view=inbox; Feb. 21, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta00693513-pdf?view=inbox
[16] Nov. 27, 2018 email, https://jmail.world/thread/vol00009-efta01015377-pdf?view=inbox
[17] See Drop Site News’s extensive reporting here: https://www.dropsitenews.com/s/epstein-and-israel
[18] With thanks to Ryan Grim and Noah Kulwin, in an interview on the Jewish Currents’ podcast “On the Nose” (Nov. 28, 2025), for their insightful descriptions of Epstein’s relational role, https://jewishcurrents.org/on-jeffrey-epstein
[19] Braun, “Larry Summers to Resign from Harvard.”
[20] Dec. 2, 2014 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025514?view=inbox
[21] May 22, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02350192?view=inbox
[22] Feb. 14, 2013 email, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA01902994?view=inbox
[23] Apr. 27, 2013 email, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02674989?view=inbox
[24] Mar. 31, 2015 email, https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025875?view=inbox
[25] Graham Kates, Scott MacFarlane, and Melissa Quinn, “House Democrats Release 68 New Photos from Epstein Estate,” CBS News, Dec. 18, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/epstein-files-photos-house-democrats-estate/
[26] Susan D’Agostino, “Leon Botstein’s Amoral Accounting,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2026, https://www.chronicle.com/article/leon-botsteins-amoral-accounting
[27] I watched the show online here, https://www.poetryinamerica.org/tv-series/
[28] Gerstein and Mahajan, “PBS Cut Ties with Former Harvard Professor.”
[29] June 11, 2013 email, https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA01970216?view=inbox
[30] Alex Woodward, “Samantha Power, Who Wrote a Book on Genocide, Confronted by Own USAID Staff for Failing to Speak Out on Gaza,” Independent, Feb. 1 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/samantha-power-israel-genocide-gaza-b2489147.html
[31] Elisa New, New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), ix.
[32] Ibid., 12.
[33] Ibid., 290, 285.
[34] Ibid., 12.
[35] Ibid., 279–281.
[36] Ibid., 1–2.
[37] See Frances Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), for example 42–43.
[38] My discussion here and throughout is indebted to Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Harvard University Press, 2018).
[39] New, New England Beyond Criticism, 9–10.
[40] Ibid., 13.
[41] W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 1938, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd
∩
Hilary Plum is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Cleveland. Her books include the novel State Champ (Bloomsbury, 2025) and the long poem Important Groups (Community Mausoleum, 2025). With Zach Peckham she co-hosts the podcast Index for Continuance, whose discussion in episode 27 (“The Epstein Episode”) helped shape this essay.