Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
I am an American. I am neither an Israeli, nor am I a Palestinian. However, I am a Jew, and a pro-Israel American, who lives in a country which has strong, positive relations with Israel. As a Zionist, I see it as my job to defend Israel as a Jewish State, and that means protecting…
Feeling caught up in the pressure to align themselves with either the liberal Open Hillel movement or the nascent reactionary Safe Hillel movement, Jewish students at West Virginia International University met and decided to start a new movement in response: Ambiguous Hillel. “We really had no other option,” explained WVIU Hillel president Jason Scheingross. “Our…
You may have noticed a lack of coverage of Israeli Apartheid Week in New Voices this year. This was, in part, intentional. For those who don’t know, I.A.W. is a international campaign, sponsored in part by Students for Justice in Palestine, to hold rallies, speakers, and performances on campuses worldwide to spread awareness of the…
Scores (if not hundreds) of Jewish and Pro-Israel students spent Tuesday night in a crowded ballroom at UCLA to advocate against the student government’s proposed passage of a divestment resolution. I, on the other hand, sat at my computer 125 miles away, wearing sweatpants and drinking Coke Zero with lemon watching the USAC divestment meeting…
I am livid. I am enraged with the Open Hillel campaign and its disagreement with Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership. The audacity of Open Hillel to think that Hillel International will sanction the use of its resources for programming that aims to boycott or delegitimize Israel is outrageous. Such behavior would be contradictory to a…
I have some reasonable propositions for how Hillel International should respond to the Swarthmore Hillel debacle based on four important facts missed by most other pundits on this subject. The first fact is that Swarthmore Hillel is uniquely financially independent. Swarthmore University has an endowment for all its religious groups on campus, and as…
by The Swarthmore Hillel Board On November 11, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset Avraham Burg was supposed to give a talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Harvard Hillel house. Instead, Hillel barred him from speaking at the Hillel house, and he ended up giving his talk in an undergraduate dormitory on campus. The…
Both Jewish and non-Jewish organizations are part of increasing opposition to a 2010 ruling by Hillel barring fraternization with pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] groups on campus. The 2010 ruling encouraged, but did not require, local Hillels to draft rules in line with the national policy that the organization would “not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers” that…
In a stunning twist, a national organization just invested a great deal of time and effort into researching the nature of Israel’s reputation on college campuses. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit established to spread knowledge of “the values our nations share” (America and Israel), has produced the latest report on anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment…
Justice Antonin Scalia came to speak at Wesleyan a few weeks ago. Cool, right? Isn’t it great that the University chose to bring a Supreme Court Justice and highly educated Constitutional scholar to campus in order to engage in discussion with the students? Well, not quite. I respect the University’s choice to bring to campus…
Brandeis Students protest Israeli Parliament Members [Brandeis SJP] On Monday, a Brandeis student group calling themselves Students for Justice in Palestine disrupted a town hall meeting in Newton, Mass where 5 members of the Israeli Parliament intended to speak. This activism comes on the heels of a similar effort by SJP last year. After the…
“Israel – Worse Than Apartheid?” was written on the whiteboard of an American University classroom yesterday during a “Discussion on the Israeli Apartheid Analogy,” part of AU Students for Justice in Palestine’s roster of events for Israel Apartheid Week. Being an SJP-organized event, opinions in the room tended to be favorable toward the pro-apartheid analogy…
Students for Justice in Palestine members at American University protested the administrative detention of Khader Adnan, who was arrested last December by Israeli police forces, by going on their own hunger strike for five days. Israel believes he is an Islamic Jihad terrorist, but has been unable to produce any evidence. Authorities never formally charged…
Students for Justice in Palestine is currently holding its first national conference at Columbia University from October 14 to 16. The keynote address — the only part of the conference open to the press — featured academic luminaries Mahmood Mamdani, an professor of government at Columbia, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, an anthropologist who has taught…