Yom Kippur 5776: Reflections about Israel on Campus

(Note:  This is an excerpt of remarks I shared at this year's Yom Kippur services at Northwestern University)

In my remarks last week at Rosh Hashanah services, I mentioned that in 2015 Northwestern joined the growing list of campuses that have faced divestment campaigns aimed at delegitimizing Israel.  I noted that, in response, our Hillel has added a full-time Israel Fellow, Simcha Masala, who will help us to increase opportunities for students to engage with Israel through study, travel, cultural programming, and advocacy. 

In preparing for Yom Kippur the past few days, I realized that this is actually my first opportunity since the divestment vote to discuss Israel with so many students, including new students.  So I want to say a bit more about Israel on campus.

A bit of background:  As many of you know, in January Northwestern’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and allied campus groups launched a campaign called NU Divest.  NU Divest’s stated goal was to have the ASG Senate pass a resolution calling on the University to divest from six companies allegedly involved in human rights abuses in the West Bank and other areas of what they called “Occupied Palestine”.   Its unstated goal was to delegitimize Israel.  A month-long campaign culminated in a contentious and at times raucous six-hour debate that ended with a secret ballot in which the resolution passed with 24 for, 22 against, and 3 abstentions.  In effect, it passed by one vote.

A week after the vote here on campus, I attended the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC (and three weeks later, I attended the J Street National Conference, also in DC).  Given what had just occurred on campus, I felt like a celebrity – OK, a very, very minor celebrity.  Still, with my purple NU Hillel kippa – (hold it up) this one – I had a target on my head for Northwestern alumni and anyone else upset about the divestment debate and vote that had just roiled our campus. 

One such person expressed his “condolences” on the divestment vote and said to me, in a tone that I heard as pity: “This isn’t really what you signed up for, is it?” 

Between 2001-2003, at the height of the 2^nd Intifada, I lived in Jerusalem. During my first year there, I fell in love with Israel, and I fell in love with a wonderful young American woman who was also living there.  On the last day of July 2002, that woman – Marla Bennett – was one of five Americans and nine people overall murdered by a Hamas terrorist bomb in the Hebrew University cafeteria attack.  That searing experience helped to give me a keen appreciation both for the need to defend Israel’s security and the need to quest constantly for a peaceful resolution to Israel’s conflict with her many foes.

With this appreciation in mind, twelve years ago I returned to the States and began work as a Hillel professional (It’s my Bar Mitzvah year!).  Five years ago, I became the Executive Director of Northwestern Hillel.  I – and our student leaders and staff at Hillel – believe that having a relationship with Israel should be a key component of what it means to make a meaningful and enduring commitment to Jewish life for any Jew – indeed, for every Jew – living in North America in the 21^st century. 

So – did I sign on to this job to campaign against BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement?  No.  But I did sign up to ensure that engagement with Israel is part of a robust Jewish life on our campus.  And when Israel is attacked, demonized, and delegitimized, I have a responsibility to defend both its current existence and its future aspiration to be a Jewish and democratic state within safe and secure borders.

Hillel’s mission and its pluralistic approach to Israel align with my own values.  At NU Hillel, we work to create opportunities for students to engage with Israel as a political, cultural, and ideological entity from a variety of perspectives.  Through this engagement we encourage students to develop their confidence in articulating their own relationship with Israel and their understanding of Israel’s role in Jewish life.  We understand that intrinsic to the very word “Israel” is the idea of wrestling, helping them grapple with questions that range from “Why does Israel matter?” to the various political options for Israel’s future.

And students are at the core of everything we do.  When NU Divest launched its campaign, students from Wildcats for Israel, J Street U Northwestern, and the Hillel Exec Board took the lead in forming the NU Coalition for Peace to counter the divestment campaign.  All of those students understood – regardless of whether they were on the right, left, or center – that when Israel is demonized and delegitimized on campus, a part of Jewish identity is, too. 

In the aftermath of the disappointing divestment vote, I had four important takeaways.  The first two relate to how we “do Israel” on campus.  We need to better articulate and support our vision for Israel engagement.  And we must continue to challenge and combat anti-Israel activity on campus, especially when it begins to blur into anti-Semitic messages. 

These were true before the divestment campaign – and they are even truer now. 

But there were two other takeaways:

First, we were reminded that Hillel sits at a fascinating and, at times, contradictory place.  As the center for Jewish life on campus, we represent a diverse community, and we understand that if we try to accommodate everyone’s position on Israel  (or anything else) we won’t stand for anything. 

So we stood against NU Divest, and there were some students (and others) who felt our stance wasn’t strong enough, others who felt it was too strong, and a few – very few, but they’re there – who supported NU Divest and felt Jewishly “homeless” because Hillel actively opposed the divestment campaign.  Hillel is here for all of those students, and I believe that it is possible for us to welcome every Jewish – and non-Jewish – student on campus while standing resolutely in support of the Jewish and democratic state of Israel. 

An example:  We proudly bring up to 100 students each year on our NU Hillel Birthright Israel trips.  As we prepared for our trip this summer, a few students expressed concerns that they might be “brainwashed” by pro-Israel propaganda on Birthright.  We made it clear that, yes, a Birthright trip is a pro-Israel trip, but on our Birthright trips we are open to challenging every assumption.  Case in point:  We take our students to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where the guides describe the miraculous creation of the Jewish State of Israel in the face of an onslaught by Arab armies, and how Israel’s Declaration of Independence was first read aloud, there, by David Ben-Gurion.  We listen to a recording of Ben-Gurion’s voice and the strains of Hatikva.  It is a proud moment.

But we don’t stop there.  We walk outside the hall and initiate a discussion of whether the modern state of Israel is living up to its own ideals, enshrined in that Declaration, of being “based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex….”   We ask why the non-Jewish minorities of Israel – who make up fully one-fifth of the entire population of the country, are virtually absent from the story at Independence Hall. 

Our opposition to the demonization of Israel via BDS does not mean that we sugarcoat the challenges Israel faces or view it through rose-colored glasses.  Purple-colored, maybe, but not rose-colored.

The second key takeaway was recognition of NU Divest’s success in transforming divestment from Israel from a marginal cause into a vessel through which seemingly every other progressive or radical grievance could be amplified.  During the campaign, NU Divest trotted out old canards like “Zionism = racism”, but also new slogans like “Ferguson = Gaza” and “Black Lives Matter = Palestinian lives matter.”  Such equivalences, while provocative and tweet-friendly, were absurd.  NU Divest, like the broader BDS campaign, consistently presented Palestinians as complete victims, denying not only their portion of blame but even their agency in the conflict.  To equate Gaza with Ferguson highlights Israel’s use of force in the conflict but ignores thousands of rockets fired by Hamas at civilian populations, tunnels created by Hamas for terrorist infiltration, and leaders in Gaza who are committed (in their charter!) to wiping the Jewish state off the map. 

For the hard-core activists of NU Divest, such context didn’t matter, and they imposed a kind of orthodoxy of belief.  If you didn’t believe that Israel is the sole oppressor in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, you were not only wrong here but you couldn’t possibly be on the moral side of any political argument.  You were blinded by your privilege, your upbringing, your perspective. 

This tactic was effective in dividing the campus – or at least certain segments of it – and left many in the Jewish community feeling isolated from groups and issues with which we’ve been connected closely in the past.  Many Jewish students felt confused and even attacked.  Many hold progressive views.  Some work toward the goals of Black Lives Matter, and some fight for immigrant rights along the U.S. – Mexico border.  In the divestment debate, those students who supported Israel and expressed concern for Palestinian suffering were called colonialists:  “How dare you speak for Palestinians?”.  Those who supported Israel and talked about gay rights there were accused of “pinkwashing”.  Those who supported Israel and mentioned its advances in environmental technologies were accused of “greenwashing”.  There’s seemingly no end to the colors, but the result is the same:  No matter how much context you try to provide, any support for Israel is recast as a tool of oppression. 

For me – and for many of our students – this experience was a wake-up call and a prod to attempt to rebuild connections with some of the individuals and groups that supported NU Divest.  No, not the hardcore activists who demand reflexive orthodoxy – they are not interested in such a relationship, and they in fact reject dialogue because they claim it “normalizes” the legitimacy of the State of Israel. 

Such orthodoxy is anathema to our tradition, and contradicts a core value we observe on Yom Kippur.  As Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, “at the heart of teshuvah is the belief that we can change.  We are not destined to be forever what we were. (my emphasis)”  We can change our own beliefs, and we can change the perceptions of others.  Our students can promote human rights everywhere, including those of Palestinians, while at the same time wholeheartedly supporting Israel’s existence as the planet’s only Jewish state.  Our students can disprove the false equivalences presented by the BDS movement, and they can and must do the difficult but essential work of rebuilding relationships with students with whom they may disagree on some issues but with whom they may also share some core values.  Not for the purpose of reversing a vote, but to explore mutual interests, to find places of common concern, and to embrace opportunities for common cause.

And this is a chance for us, as individuals and as a community, to be more introspective and honest – though not apologetic – about our own relationship with power and privilege.  At Hillel, we’re embracing this opportunity, from a seminar we hosted last spring on “Jews and Privilege” (it will be repeated in the winter) to a renewed push by Hillel student leaders to participate fully in campus conversations related to privilege.

Before closing, I want to name the question that might be on some of your minds, one I’ve been asked dozens of times since the divestment campaign and was even on the cover of the Chicago Jewish News last Spring:  “Nu, NU?”.  Is Jewish life at Northwestern difficult now?  Is it “bad for the Jews” here and on other campuses?

At this season of teshuvah, when we focus on remembering – zikaron – we invoke our history in ways that may cause us to ask if darker periods of our history are repeating themselves.  I believe that we must resist the temptation to adopt the narrative that the sky is falling, at Northwestern or elsewhere. 

Yes, we must be wary of the challenges.  But we must also acknowledge that we are a thriving Jewish campus community in one of the strongest Jewish communities in all of North America.  And we in America are blessed to live in one of the most successful Jewish communities in history in a Diaspora that coexists, for the first time in two thousand years, with a sovereign Jewish state in the land of our ancestors.

As historian Deborah Lipstadt put it last week in her keynote address at the JUF Annual Meeting, you can map Jewish experience between the two poles of “JOY” and “OY”.  There’s a lot of “oy” these days, and we cannot let our guard down, but we must also take a step back and see and appreciate that there’s an overflowing abundance of joy, too.

Last, but certainly not least – we need YOU to help us make 5776 better.  We have our work cut out for us.  Students:  If what I shared here resonated with you, join us in this challenging work.  And, if my words didn’t speak to you, let me know so that I can learn from you.  And, if none of this interests you, join us for a Shabbat meal or bake with Challah for Hunger or travel with us on an Alternative Break trip to Paris or Brazil.  We need all of you to become more connected and to help us develop ways to make Judaism come alive for you, your peers, and your friends.

And we need parents, alumni, and community members like those of you here today to continue to support our efforts.  Your contributions enable us to enrich the lives of young Jewish adults so that they may enrich Northwestern, the Jewish community, and the world.

On behalf of my wife, Professor Claire Sufrin, and our sons Jacob and Ethan, and on behalf of Northwestern Hillel, I wish each and every one of you a Shana Tova and g’mar chatima tova ~ may you be sealed in the Book of Life.