New Voices Editorial Board

Yet again, someone trying in good faith to take their seat at the Jewish communal table has had their chair pulled out from under them.


At a Nov. 16 meeting of the Jewish Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley, the students of the union’s general board voted to reject the Berkeley chapter of J Street U’s application for membership. The union, considered the official voice of the Jewish community at Berkeley, is an umbrella organization funded partially by Berkeley Hillel and partially by the student government. Though Jewish groups can seek funding and recognition directly from Hillel, as J Street U does, many also choose to join the union, which gives additional funding to its 15 member organizations.

November was Out in Israel Month. As the Out in Israel Month campaign’s website puts it, the initiative was designed to “celebrate the LGBT community and culture in Israel.” It should be no surprise that a well-funded public relations campaign such as this — targeted at several heavily Jewish college campuses, and centering on both gay rights and on Israel’s image — attracted a bit of controversy. Out in Israel Month was sponsored by, among others, two national right-wing pro-Israel campus advocacy groups, The David Project and StandWithUs.


Controversy around Out in Israel Month centered around a little portmanteau: “pinkwashing,” the practice of employing Israel’s good track record on LGBT rights to whitewash its less liberal-friendly policies in the West Bank and Gaza.


This debate is becoming yet another piece of the larger debate about on campus. Great. Because what we really needed was the opening of another front in the campus war over Israel/Palestine.

We have created a Jewish community so torn by internal politics about Israel speech that we can no longer so much as propose a social justice trip to Israel without creating a political divide in the Jewish community, alienating Jews of good conscience who have already been marginalized for their views.


Pursue is an alumni program cosponsored by Avodah and the American Jewish World Service. Knee-jerk reactions abounded when Pursue announced that it would sponsor an Israel trip. One Avodah staffer resigned in protest and a group of current Avodah participants circulated a petition, which demands that the trip include some Palestinian components like a visit to the territories and interactions with real live Palestinians.

Wringing their hands over the imagined plight of “the youth,” the Jewish Federations of North America came together in Denver last week for their annual General Assembly. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer — a founder of Manhattan’s traditional egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar — was the scholar-in-residence at the GA this year. In his address, Kaunfer drew the connection between our generation’s increased willingness to criticize Israel and our generation’s decreased involvement with the Jewish establishment. But the post-GA discussions that have emerged indicate a broader misdiagnosis of what ails the Jewish community — it’s the very definition of community.

Have things gotten so bad for the leader of the free world that he’s slumming it on the op-ed pages of college newspapers? Last week, an op-ed written by President Barack Obama targeted at the college crowd appeared in a handful of college newspapers, including The Harvard Crimson and the University of Texas at Austin’s Daily Texan.


For a sitting president to run an op-ed in student newspapers is uncommon, to say the least; this one drew the ire of some commentators. The College Media Matters blog said, “A related post yesterday on Fox Nation ran with the headline, ‘Obama Reduced to Writing Op-Eds in Student Newspapers.’ A separate commenter on a Politico story wrote, ‘It’s a transparent and ethically challenged vote-buying gambit.'”


We’re not convinced.