New Voices Editorial Board

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.