Including responses to recent on-campus agitation, tales of Jewish campus life back in the day and more, there is plenty to digest this week about college Jewry.
J Street U leader Logan Bayroff has an op-ed in the Forward calling for a more open, less polarized dialogue about Israel on campus in response to Hillel‘s recent Talk Israel tent events. He writes:
Yet while we don’t support the Palestinians’ move, the collective response of the organized American Jewish community is troubling. On campus, the “Real Partners, Real Peace” initiative is indicative of the trend. …“Real Partners, Real Peace” encourages students to distribute literature, write op-eds and host programming that makes the case, in short, that the Palestinians’ United Nations bid proves that Israel has no partner for peace.
[…]
None of this, sadly, is surprising. As a young person who grew up in the Jewish community, from day school through college I have long been taught to treat the conflict as a war between the good guys and the bad guys.
Word, Logan. Word.
Jewneric (this site–“A new platform for the Jewish voice”–is new to me) has a post called “The Rise and Fall of Israel on American College Campuses.” At first, the post looks like it’s a standard anti-establishment piece about the ills of large Jewish organizations:
The rise and fall of Israel on campus and the battle for Israel’s good in the media are a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. The disease is what I like to call maintain-ism, that the community must maintain the perceived status quo at all costs. It is an attempt at the appeasement of modernity and the winds of history.
Then, oddly and quickly, it takes a turn for the same kind of paranoia and alarmist bleating that the large institutions are guilty of, their most egregious sin, in my book.
Yet, like political appeasement, maintain-ism and the status quo, are abject failures. Not only do we see round and round of periodic and regular anti-Israel activity on campus and in the public sphere, we also see declining memberships in synagogues, a steady if not growing rate of intermarriage, a shrinking yearly campaign for the Federation system, a growing divide between Jewish young adults and the State of Israel, and an organized Jewish community that, in the main, is not able to address younger Jews.
In fact, I’d say that all this alarmist nonsense is the status quo!
Meanwhile, Time Magazine has a story about divisions between American Jews in the 20s and 30s and their parents when it comes to Israel:
“I’m trembling,” my mother says when I tell her I’m working on an article about how younger and older American Jews are reacting differently to the Palestinians’ bid for statehood at the United Nations. I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians who are dealing with ongoing Israeli settlement construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama’s promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.
“This is so emotional,” she says as we cautiously discuss our difference of opinion. “It makes me feel absolutely terrible when you stridently voice criticisms of Israel.”
And finally, the Foward has a review of a new book about Yavneh, the now-extinct first Modern Orthodox campus group that tried to make college life easier and more fulfilling for members of the resurgent Modern Orthodox movement in the 60s. If you ever wonder how Jewish campus life in America got to be the way it is, the review is worth a read:
One of the great stories of American Jewish life, the Orthodox resurgence of the 1950s and ’60s, has been told and retold by historians, sociologists and novelists. Almost unknown, however, is the narrative of the few Orthodox students on the American campus in the 1950s, and of the dilemmas they faced in their efforts to remain observant.
An important chapter in this narrative is Yavneh. An organization of Orthodox Jewish college students, Yavneh was founded in 1960 at Columbia University and had a deep and lasting impact on Jewish life on the campus. It is one of myriad American Jewish institutions that are long forgotten by historians — indeed by most American Jews.
