The Failure of Jewish Organizations on College Campuses.

"One person's hate speech is another person's education."


Jonathan Rosenblum has written an interesting article for Jewish Media Matters, in which he addresses the failure of many major Jewish organizations to step up to the plate and fight anti-Semitism on US university campuses. It is in two parts.

Jewish Students Under Assault Part 1

http://www.yated.com/content.asp?categoryid=7&contentid=339

(Yated Ne'eman)

Jewish Students Under Assault - Part I


By Yonason Rosenblum

Jewish college students find themselves increasingly under attack on campuses around the world. The seventh annual Israel Apartheid Week just took place on 55 campuses worldwide. Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney rightly described such events seeking to “promote Palestinian human rights” as “accompanied by anti-Semitic harassment, intimidation and bullying.” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper lamented that the “anti-Israel mob” is frequently “allowed to prevail.” And opposition leader Michael Ignatieff described the anti-Israel events as a “cocktail of ignorance and intolerance.” At Ottawa’s Carlton University, a non-Jewish supporter of Israel and his Israeli roommate were surrounded and then chased by an Arabic-speaking mob, one of whose members swung a machete that missed the head of the non-Jew by inches.

The demonization of Israel to which young Jews are exposed begins long before university studies. The campuses are merely the venue for the most intense exposure. British journalist Melanie Phillips described on Israel TV this week the “demonization, dehumanization, and delegitimization” of Israeli Jews that has become the daily fare of the mainstream British media, and which she documents in nauseating detail in her new book, The World Turned Upside Down. Channel Four recently broadcast the four-part historical fiction, The Promise, whose theme was summed up thus by Richard Millett: “Rich European Jews came to Palestine after the Holocaust, stole the Palestinians’ land and murdered British soldiers.” Another Channel Four film portrayed Jewish soldiers killing Palestinian children for blood sport, a charge repeated in a recent BBC TV lecture by MP Richard Morpurgo.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, explained on Jordanian TV already in 1990 how a powerful Arab lobby could conquer the campuses and media by allying the Palestinians with the American Left - ‘60s radicals now tenured professors, African-American student groups, and, above all, Jewish progressives. Vast sums of Arab oil money have been used to advance the process. Over the last ten years, $600 million in Arab money has flowed to American universities - most to the elite universities, where the next generation of American leaders are trained - to fund Middle East Studies programs, for which excoriation of Israel is always the soup du jour. The recent resignation of the head of the prestigious London School of Economics over the receipt of a very large donation from Libya, and the granting of a spurious PhD. to Muammar Gaddafi’s son Seif in return, is an example of the same Arab largesse with strings attached in England.

The Jewish progressives have certainly filled their assigned role. Thirty professors of Jewish studies recently signed a petition asking Orange County, California, prosecutors to drop charges against Arab students who conspired to prevent Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Oren from speaking at University of California at Irvine. The use of the criminal justice system to regulate student speech, the petition said, “is detrimental to the values exemplified by the academic and intellectual environment on our university campuses.” The Jewish professors did not explain what intellectual environment is fostered by forcibly preventing pro-Israel speakers from being heard.

Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, co-founders of the David Project to combat the anti-Israel tenor of American universities, describe the success of Zogby’s project: Radical professors express the dominant narrative that Israel is a racist, genocidal nation.

“Outside the classroom anti-Israel groups hold conferences, screen films and conduct theatrical demonstrations that portray Israel in the harshest terms,” they say. “Israel’s advocates are prevented from speaking; pro-Israel events are disrupted; Jewish students are intimidated verbally or even physically, and are excluded from pro-Palestinian events. Pathetic attempts by Jewish students to initiate dialogue Palestinian students are rejected. . . .” Political correctness, Jacobs and Goldwasser continue, dictates that the Israelis are, by definition, always guilty and the “darker skinned, impoverished Palestinians eternally innocent.”

EVEN THOSE of us who would never contemplate sending our children to university should be profoundly troubled by these trends. Jewish students invariably find themselves identified with Israel, and the effort to flee that association can also lead them to stop identifying as Jews. At this year’s AJOP (Association of Jewish Outreach Programs) convention, an entire session was devoted to the impact on campus kiruv when Israel is no longer a source of pride or identification for many, if not most, Jews. At least at the subconscious level, intermarriage can seem like the most effective way to avoid being labeled one of those “racist” Jews, who are concerned only about their own kind and sure that their lives are more valuable than everyone else’s.

The pressure to not identify as Jews becomes even greater when the demonization of Israel so readily slips into traditional anti-Jewish tropes. In a recent survey conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is associated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party, nearly half of all Germans surveyed agreed that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, and 35.6% agreed with the statement, “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.” The comparable figure for the second question in England was 35.9% and in the Netherlands 41.1%.

Nor do academics even feel the need to hide their visceral distaste for Jews, not just Israelis. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz just returned from Norway, where none of the country’s three leading universities would agree to sponsor a lecture by him on Israel and International Law, offered free of charge. The same universities have hosted speeches by prominent academic proponents of BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) against Israel, such as Ilan Pappe. The framer of one Norwegian academic boycott petition began with an explicit reference to Jews’ - even secular Jews’ - “self-satisfied [and] self-centered tribal mentality.”

The impact of the attacks on Israel on young Jews is profound. David Berkley, president of the Manchester Zionist Central Council, recently discussed with The Jewish Chronicle’s Jonathan Kalmus the effect on Jewish youth of having grown up with “Israel the regional superpower, Israel the aggressor, the occupier and human rights abuser.” (It was not even entirely clear from the quote in The Jewish Chronicle whether Berkley, like many leaders of mainstream British Jewish organizations, himself agrees with that characterization.) David Tuck, a 17-year-old Manchester Grammar School student, told the Chronicle that while he had “always thought Israel has a right to exist” - apparently a major concession - “it is hard when there is so much anti-Israel news and a lot of people I go to school with are quite strongly anti-Israel.” Another student in Manchester’s Zionist King David school echoed that sentiment, and admitted that he and many of his friends brought up in left-leaning families hold critical views of Israel. Blogger Edgar Davidson confessed that his daughter, who attends an Orthodox Jewish school, tells him that when Israel comes up in the Jewish studies classes, students routinely express the opinion that Israel has no right to exist because the land was stolen from the Arabs.

ON THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES, there will always be a hard-core group of students whose identity is strengthened by the sense of being a minority under siege, but for most the effect is just the opposite. Even those with the strongest Jewish identity become apologetic, if not absolutely cowed, when the subject of Israel arises. Consider the response of the Brown Hillel to the placement in the campus newspaper by the David Horowitz Freedom Center to an advertisement called the Palestinian Wall of Lies in response to Israel Apartheid Week. None of the Hillel students had written to the campus newspaper to protest Israel Apartheid Week or to remonstrate with the local Muslim Students Association for sponsoring it.

In an open letter to the Brown newspaper, the student leaders accused the Palestinian Wall of Lies advertisement of being “Islamophobic and racist,” and expressed their opinion that there should not be place for these “spiteful, bigoted words” in the Brown community, even under the guise of political speech. The letter did not quote one word from the advertisement, much less try to refute it, and implicitly called for censorship of anything that Muslim students might find hurtful.

Communications guru Frank Luntz recently described to the Jerusalem Post’s David Horowitz a focus group he did with 35 Harvard and MIT students, 20 non-Jewish and 15 Jewish. Within ten minutes, the non-Jewish students had started talking about “Israeli war crimes,” “the Israel Lobby,” and “Jewish power.” And all the while the Jewish students just sat there as if struck dumb. It took a full 49 minutes until the head of the Harvard Israel Action group tried to answer. After three hours, Luntz dismissed the non-Jewish students and berated some of the brightest Jewish students in America for having being unwilling or incapable of responding. The latter sat there painfully embarrassed by the realization that if they could not even speak up to a group of peers, they would never be able to defend Israel any place else. And the situation at Cambridge and Oxford, where he spent three years in graduate school, Luntz confided, is even worse.

By way of partial explanation, Luntz suggested that the Jewish students have been raised by parents for whom tolerance and being non-judgmental are the supreme values - particularly the vast majority of Jewish students from left-wing backgrounds. As a consequence, they are uncomfortable standing up for Israel against Palestinian claims.

Luntz is right. When speaking to Jewish student groups, I have been stopped after a minute or two by a student asking, “How do I know that you are not just feeding me propaganda? I want to hear an Arab speaker.” The students do not even have enough feeling of shared identity with Israeli Jews to first want to hear the Israeli side.

David Olesker, who teaches Israel advocacy, stresses that even among student groups brought to Israel there is no assumption that Israel needs or deserves a defense. In this respect, Jewish students are the polar opposite from Arab and Muslim students, who are highly politicized and relentlessly on message. Any private disagreements they may have are rarely expressed publicly. And one will never hear a Muslim student asking to hear the Israeli position. As one Jewish student at the University of Chicago explained to Olesker, the Arab students are simply more attached to their roots than we are.

The failure to provide Jewish university students with more tools to defend themselves constitutes one of the great failures of organized Jewry in both the United States and Great Britain. But the explanation is not hard to find. In their ambivalence towards Israel, Jewish students merely reflect the ambivalence of the larger community, including many in leadership positions in organized Jewish life.

That subject is next week’s discussion, along with an analysis of what can be done to reverse the current situation.


http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/1439/jewish-students-under-assault-part-ii

Jewish Students Under Assault -- Part II


by Jonathan Rosenblum

Yated Ne'eman

April 8, 2011



http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/1439/jewish-students-under-assault-part-ii


The failure of the mainstream Jewish organizations with respect to Jewish students on campus is twofold. First is the failure to aggressively defend students from physical and verbal intimidation, especially when they identify with Israel. Second is the failure to provide them with the information they need to defend Israel and to fend off a type of Stockholm Syndrome.

Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser draw an interesting parallel to an incident that took place at the University of California-San Diego in 2009. A noose – presumably a symbol of lynching – was found on campus and students occupied the chancellor's office in response. Everyone from the governor on down condemned the incident, and the university quickly established a task force on minority hiring and a commission to address declining black admissions. (The noose, it turned out, had been placed by a minority student.)

Yet, write Jacobs and Goldwasser, when Jewish students and Jewish buildings are attacked and defaced, "Jewish leaders sit on their hands. No one calls for sensitivity training for Muslim and leftist students about the history of blood libels. . . ."

Students who fight back aggressively usually do so independently or with the assistance of little known groups like The Fellowship for Campus Safety and Integrity or The Institute for Jewish Community Research. Jessica Felber, a student at University of California-Berkeley did not just sue the Palestinian leader who rammed her from with a loaded shopping cart and sent her to the university emergency medical services, as she held aloft a sign "Israel Wants Peace." She sued the University of California for "ignoring mounting evidence of anti-Jewish animus" and "physical intimidation and violence by Students for Justice in Palestine." And Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at University of California-Santa Cruz fought for years – in the end successfully -- to get the U.S. Office of Civil Rights to open an investigation of her own university for allowing an environment in which "professors, academic departments, and residential colleges promote and encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti Jewish views and behaviors."

This type of confrontational suit is anathema to many of the mainstream groups, who recall Israel Zangwill's old description of the Order of Trembling Israelites. Jacobs and Goldwasser, for instance, had to create a new organization, the David Project, when they decided to do a documentary exposing the naked anti-Israel propaganda to which students were subjected by Columbia University's Department of Middle East Studies.

When it comes to providing campus speakers and information as well, much of the heavy lifting is being done by smaller groups: CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Chabad, the Aish HaTorah affiliated Hasbara Fellowships. Among old line "defense organizations" only the Zionist Organization of America is highly active in the field.

Hillel would seem to be the logical choice to lead the campus fight for protecting Jewish students, as well as making the case of Israel. Yet the organization's devotion to maintaining the "big tent," which includes anti-Israel Jewish groups as well, renders it ill-suited to the task. One Hillel even funds Jewish groups that support BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) against Israel.

THE ORGANIZED JEWISH COMMUNITY cannot protect Jewish students who identify with Israel, in part because it is itself so ambivalent about Israel. The rise of J Street is emblematic of the tension within the community. J Street has never heard a criticism of Israel that it did not endorse: the group opposed the United States exercising a veto of a U.N. resolution singling out Israeli settlements for special condemnation. Nor has the organization ever heard a criticism of one of Israel's enemies that it could endorse. It has opposed sanctions against Iran, and is currently working against a congressional letter urging the administration to take a tougher stand on incitement against Israel in the official Palestinian media and educational system.

Just as Hillel seeks to preserve a big Jewish tent, at the cost of preserving any consensus on Israel, so does the mainstream Jewish community. The General Assembly of Jewish Federations created a new initiative last October to combat the BDS movement. The Israel Action Network (IAN) was budgeted at $6,000,000 and to be headed by Martin Raffel, the vice-president of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs. In a recent speech, quoted by Richard Baehr of Frontpage Magazine, Raffel, the leader of the anti-boycott effort, distinguishes between those advocating a total boycott of Israel, and those, including left-wing Jewish groups, who only advocate a boycott of goods produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines. The latter, he argues, should not be placed outside the tent. Thus the head of the mainstream community's anti-boycott efforts legitimates the tactic as applied to Israel, and leaves the opposition to a technical one over where to draw the lines.

The Washington Federation allocates communal funding to support an anti-Israel Jewish theater troupe called Theater J. One of the troupe's special offerings was Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, a short play based on the metaphor of Israeli Jews as today's Nazis. And the company also sponsored a bus trip to a showing of the anti-Israel agitprop play My Name is Rachel Corrie. The Orange County, California Federation and the University of California-Irvine Hillel participate in the Olive Tree Initiative, which features two-week trips to Israel, where students will hear from both Palestinian and Israel speakers who share a common animus for Israel. And, in the name of preserving multiple voices, the New York Federation CEO defends partnering with Jewish groups that support economic and political warfare against Israel.

Fousesquawk comment: This specific issue ties in with David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine, which is featuring an opinion piece by Nicole Hungerford on the UC-Irvine Hillel chapter and the Olive Tree Initiative.


http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/front-page-magazine-weighs-in-on-hillel-the-olive-tree-initiative-and-the-tale-of-two-rishmawis/

(Cont.)

As the communal consensus about Israel crumbles, it is hardly surprising that Federations and Jewish defense organizations are unable to assist pro-Israel students on campus. Nor can one blame Jewish university students for feeling tainted by any association with Israel, when so many of their elders feel exactly the same way. The late NYU professor Tony Judt, a teenage kibbutz volunteer in Israel, wrote a famous piece in The New York Review of Books in which he termed Israel – indeed the very idea of a state built on religious-ethnic identity -- an atavism for which there is no place in the modern world. His strictures, needless to say, applied only to Israel, not to any of the world's 57 or so Muslim countries. Towards the end of the lengthy piece, Judt let drop what really griped him about Israel: He was tired of having criticisms of Israel directed at him at university teas and sherry hours.

One hears the same ennui in New Yorker editor David Remmick: "Even people like me, who understand that not only one side is responsible for the conflict and that the Palestinians missed an historic opportunity for peace in 2000, can't take it anymore." Remmick isn't interested in the issues, or rights and wrongs, but in the fact that Israel embarrasses him in the left precincts where he hangs out. "Sorry, it can't go on this way," he lectures Israel. President Obama is trying out of good will to get a peace process going, and Israel should go along with whatever he suggests, argues Remmick.

He couldn't care less about the security concerns Israelis have about further territorial withdrawals, or about Palestinian incitement, or anything else. Israel has made life more difficult for him and must capitulate in order to remove the unpleasantness to Remmick.

If Jewish adults cannot bear being looked at askance by their left-wing comrades, and have wearied of being associated with their militaristic Israeli co-religionists, how can we possibly expect university students to do any better?