On the Death of a Student Movement
To become editor of New Voices is to shoulder a sizeable chip. When I started here in June, I was catechized in a wide-ranging list of grievances and slights, a catalogue of institutional enemies reaching back a decade and more. The heft of the list is a point of pride for us, a product of our longstanding habit of nipping at the hands of our institutional patrons. Some of the subjects of these heirloom grudges hate us back, such as the Alpha Epsilon Pi staffer who recently lectured us about an article published in the magazine in 1999. Others, such as Taglit-birthright Israel, barely know who we are. We have been trained to regard them all with equal ill-will. This is useful as an editorial tool, for there’s nothing more boring than a magazine without enemies. Still, the importance of cultivating these grudges is more than just functional.
A New Voices editor has an historical obligation to be a jerk. This magazine is published by the Jewish Student Press Service (JSPS), the last surviving vestige of a once-vibrant independent Jewish student movement of unaffiliated, student run groups that predicated their existence upon the belief that the Jewish student has the right and the duty to act as antagonist to the Jewish establishment. Following a decade of decline at the hands of the voracious Hillel Foundation, today this independent student movement is in its death throes. In June, the 83-year-old World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), a venerable international umbrella group of independent student organizations, announced that it had fired its entire staff, moved out of its offices, and sold its furniture. The impending disappearance of WUJS will leave the JSPS and a few struggling local WUJS affiliates as the last bastions of a vital tradition. Jewish campus activism, both in America and abroad, has been co-opted, and the antagonistic Jewish student could soon be absent from the national Jewish dialogue.
It wasn’t always like this. Back in 1969, a generation of Jewish students faced off with the Jewish establishment in a showdown that changed the course of American Jewish life. That year, students affiliated with a number of independent Jewish organizations, including the Havurat Shalom and the newly formed North American Jewish Students Network, a WUJS affiliate, disrupted the annual General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.
They came by the hundreds, and they came uninvited. Their goal was grand: to change the focus of Jewish philanthropy. At the time, Jewish federations were vehicles of assimilation, funding hospitals and other social services. For the Jewish students of the sixties, deeply influenced by the Israeli victory in the Six Day War and the rise of Black Nationalism, their parents’ discomfort with emphasizing their ethnicity seemed misbegotten.
“This was going to be the end of the assimilationist, acculturated Jewish community,” says Rabbi Michael Paley, who participated in the protests as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. “We weren’t going to do old age homes. We were going to use the federation system as part of our identity politics.”
Towards that end, delegates were cornered and lectured. There was talk of sit-ins and protests. In order to regain control of the proceedings, the organizers made concessions, and the students were offered a chance to put forth a speaker. They chose Rabbi Hillel Levine, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale and a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“We don’t want commissions to ‘explore the problems of youth,” Levine railed. “We do want to convert alienation into participation, acrimony into joy – the joy of being the possessors of a great legacy – a legacy which has meaning for today.”
“[Levine] was prescient,” says Rabbi Peter Geffen, who, though not present at the General Assembly, was a member of the independent movement. “The great thing about that protest was that it established the legitimacy of young people standing up to the federations and taking command of the future.”
It is perhaps a measure of the success of the protest that Geffen is today the founder of the Heschel School in New York and a full-fledged member of the Jewish establishment. In fact, many who were attended the protests have gone on to continue their fight within the halls of the major institutions. These include Levine, now a professor of Religion at Boston University, Sam Norich, Executive Director of the Forward Association, Paley, the Scholar in Residence at the UJA Federation in New York, and John Ruskay, CEO of the UJA Federation in New York, who, like Geffen, did not attend the protests but was associated with the movement.
Says Paley, “When John became CEO of the UJA, he said, ‘We won.'” The victory, however, was evidently for the cause, and not for the process. As the veterans of the student protests of the 1960s were reaching middle age and the height of their careers, a death sentence was passed against the independent Jewish movement that had brought them to prominence.
That sentence was handed down in the mid-90s, a heady time for the Jewish institutions. Warnings of a “silent holocaust” had accompanied the publication of the Jewish Population Survey of 1990, which famously found that intermarriage rates had skyrocketed from 8% to 31% since 1970. Richard Joel, selected in 1988 to revive the moribund Hillel system, capitalized on this fear, and was able to turn a financially troubled smattering of local houses into the institutional behemoth that it is today. This transformation was enabled by the report of a special committee of the Council of Jewish Federations, adopted by the board of the Council in 1995, which named Hillel “the central federation agency through which campus services are provided.”
The trouble was that it was not, at the time, the only means by which the federations were helping to provide campus services. A number of independent student organizations were receiving funding, either directly or indirectly, from the Council, and were cut off. The most immediate casualty was the North American Jewish Students Appeal (NAJSA), an umbrella organization that helped provide funding to a group of independent Jewish student organizations that included the JSPS, the journal Response, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, and Yugntruf, a Yiddish language group. NAJSA folded in June of 1995, and of the five constituent organizations active at the time of its closing, only JSPS and Yugntruf still exist.
It would be foolish to argue that Hillel has not been an enormous success. Still, this success is necessarily limited. By its very nature as a proxy of the Jewish institutional world, Hillel lacks the ability to play host to the student antagonists. That has not stopped Hillel from pretending, however. In an insidious move, Hillel has begun to create seemingly independent front groups that look like student-run organization. In 2006, Hillel signed a Memorandum of Understanding between Hillel and WUJS, in which WUJS agreed to “look to Hillel students as a primary source of mainstream student representation” in regions where new local unions were opened. This resulted in the December 2006 designation of the American Union of Jewish Students (AmUJS), whose leaders call Hillel their “biggest supporter,” as the official regional affiliate of WUJS in the United States.
Despite the designation, AmUJS hardly exists. Their weekly online magazine fizzled after a single issue. Their Facebook group is large, although not as big as “Ga-Ga: The Sport of Champions (at least Jewish ones).” Their self-conception is astoundingly fuzzy. “We’re here to give [students] a voice on issues,” says David Steinberg, the group’s co-chairman. His colleague, Adam Daum, a recent graduate of Cornell, acknowledges that it’s been difficult to gauge exactly what that means. “Our main focus isn’t going to be programming,” he said. When I spoke to Daum, he couldn’t tell me if the group would be sending anyone to this year’s WUJS conference. He said that he had to check with his contact at Hillel first.
The upshot is that AmUJS is no more than a name under which Hillel can send students to the annual WUJS convention in Be’er Sheva.
All of this would be more scandalous if WUJS were a vibrant, relevant forum. But it isn’t. Growing competition with Hillel for funding for regional operations in Latin America and Eastern Europe had crippled WUJS and its member unions, and today very little remains.
“I think that there’s a great irony,” says Peter Geffen. “Who is the establishment today that these students would have to come up against? It’s me and my peers. Whether we’re fully conscious of it or not, we structured the situation in a way that protected our power base. The people we were facing in the 60s were so delighted that young people cared at all that we met very little opposition. Some people were upset about the way we looked, the way we dressed, but in reality all I remember are unbelievably open doors. I don’t think that’s the way it is today…And we better get over it. Or there will be no future leadership.”
A future in which AmUJS is the only surviving ‘independent’ voice of the Jewish college student is a bleak one indeed. Don’t let that happen. Write for New Voices.
Kat Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.
