Declaration of independence by young American Jews

This posting has these items:
1) Jewish Forward: Want To Engage Young Jews? Look to Open Hillel;
2) JTA: After rejecting BDS ban, Open Hillel holds first conference, lengthy report showing how seriously the Jewish establishment is taking the event;
3) Haaretz: The Israel conversation American Jewish leaders aren’t willing to have, Peter Beinart on why Jewish leaders should engage with the arguments, not try to stop them;
4) JVP: The Open Hillel movement: A serious challenge to Jewish institutions’ stifling of debate, Rebecca Vilkomerson on the debates the patriarchs fear;

The fair at the first Open Hillel conference last weekend. All photos by Gili Getz


Want To Engage Young Jews? Look to Open Hillel

By Naomi Dann, Jewish Forward blog
October 13, 2014

“I bought my ticket right after my rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon. I knew I needed this community,” a student participant at the Open Hillel conference told me today.

The student went on to thank Open Hillel for providing a long overdue space for young Jews to come together and question the institutions, frameworks and viewpoints we have been taught. The message rang out loud and clear today at the inaugural Open Hillel conference: My generation is not content to be spoon-fed talking points, courted by free trips to Israel, or talked down to from patriarchal institutions that advocate policies at odds with our values. We want to proactively grapple with the hard questions that define the political and moral choices facing our community today.

Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership construct a political litmus test that prohibits the ability of students to engage with these questions. For Hillel, openness is an only-if-you-agree-with-our-funders kind of deal. The line is drawn at support for nonviolent resistance to occupation through boycott, divestment and sanctions — beyond that you become a “demonizer’” or “delegitimizer.” These are the rules of the conversation as dictated by Hillel, but the students are not content to stop there.
It was clear today, after hours of packed workshops, panels, speeches, and conversations in the hallways, at lunch and in the elevator, that the Open Hillel conference had struck a nerve. The floodgates have been opened and they aren’t shutting anytime soon. Over 350 people participated in this weekend’s conference — a far cry from the “small group of activists” Hillel International president Eric Fingerhut dismissed in his recent op-ed.

We asked ourselves some hard questions. Can, or should, we support the Law of Return and simultaneously deny the Palestinian Right to Return? Can we support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel as a tool to pressure policy change — without fear for the future of the Jewish people? How can we combat the Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism that pervades American Jewish conversations about Israel/Palestine? How do we talk about the Palestinian experience of the Nakba in our Jewish communities?

We interrogated the talking points each side trots out, but we didn’t stop there. It wasn’t enough to say “that’s demonizing” or “that’s anti-Semitic” or “that’s delegitimizing.” Instead we sought to understand and contextualize the experiences behind the political opinions we heard. We kept asking questions, seeking to hold onto tensions, discomforts and points of growth.

Speaking at the opening plenary on Saturday night, renowned scholar Judith Butler summed up a central question in the minds of all the attendees I met at the conference. “You are here to ask the question: Can I affirm my Jewish values and express criticism of Israel?” The space that Open Hillel created this weekend was a place where people could be their full political selves and engage this question head-on.

Dorothy Zellner, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Say No! on New York’s Upper West Side, spoke on a plenary Monday afternoon about how the experience of being SNCC organizer during Freedom Summer relates to her activism for Palestinian rights. Warning students that speaking out against oppressive Israeli policies will incur real pushback, her voice choked up, and she said: “You need to have a long-term vision: What you are doing by speaking out is a mitzvah that will live on long after you do.”

This is why I am here.

The security of a Jewish future will depend, not on the might of the Israeli military, but on the empowerment of young Jews to grapple with and act on urgent questions of social justice. We are here, we care, and we want to have these conversations without boundaries and red lines.

Jewish communities keep asking themselves over and over again, “How do we engage young Jews?” Well, here is your answer: Drop the policies that alienate students and attempt to police thought and opinion. Be accountable to student voices, not just donors’ political agendas. Empower student leaders and decision-makers, don’t infantilize them.

Let Hillel truly be the student-oriented group it claims to be. Let us speak.

After rejecting BDS ban, Open Hillel holds first conference

By Batya Ungar-Sargon, JTA
October 14, 2014

Various organizations tabled at a fair held Sunday at the Open Hillel conference. Above, a student talks to an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. (Gili Getz)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard senior Rachel Sandalow-Ash scanned the exuberant crowd that packed a campus auditorium on Saturday night.

“Wow,” she said, speaking to an audience of some 350 composed primarily of American college students. “This is amazing. This is really cool.”

Sandalow-Ash, 21, went on to discuss the importance of nurturing a pluralistic and intellectually diverse Jewish community.

“We believe that no one should be excluded because of their views on Israel-Palestine, or really for any reason at all. And we believe that real discussions of Israel-Palestine have to include Palestinian voices as well,” she said to raucous applause.

The crowd had gathered at Harvard for “If Not Now When,” the inaugural conference of Open Hillel — a 2-year-old student group that seeks to abolish Hillel International Standards of Partnership rules that prevent campus Hillels from collaborating with people or groups that “delegitimize” the Jewish state, or support efforts of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeted at Israel.

Since Hillel adopted the guidelines, the “Standards for Partnership,” the Hillels at Swarthmore College, Vassar College and Wesleyan University have declared themselves “Open Hillels” and said they would not conform to them.

The two-day Open Hillel conference included lectures, panels and workshops on topics such as “Israel/Palestine Politics of College Campuses,” “Race in the American Jewish Community,” “Intermarriage: Good, Bad, or Neutral for the Jewish People?” and “Philanthropy and Power: How Big Donors Shape the Agenda in the Jewish World.”

Speakers at the event included Rashid Khalidi, a controversial Columbia professor of Arab studies who was recently barred from speaking at Ramaz High School; gender theorist Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has made provocative statements about Israel and its enemies; Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who identifies as a “progressive Zionist”; and journalist and City University of New York Professor Peter Beinart, the author of the 2012 book “Crisis of Zionism,” and a sharp critic of Israeli policies.

A host of students and community organizers also spoke and led workshops.

In recent years, Hillel International has made Israel advocacy more central to its mission, launching and growing its Israel Fellows programme, bringing to U.S. college campuses individuals who have served in the Israeli military and, in 2010, installing the Standards of Partnership. The guidelines preclude campus Hillels from partnering with or hosting groups or speakers deemed hostile to Israel.

The organization, whose network serves some 550 college campuses around the world, “views Israel as a core element of Jewish life and a gateway to Jewish identification for students,” according to its website. And while it won’t partner with organizations that fall beyond the ideological boundaries set forth, such as pro-BDS groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, its leaders have said that all students are welcome at its campus centres and events.

Hillel International is not the only organization determined to persuade college students of the importance of being pro-Israel.

In 2002, Hillel co-ordinated with the Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation to establish the Israel on Campus Coalition, whose mission is “to evaluate the worrisome rise in anti-Israel activities on college campuses across North America” and serve as a co-ordinating body for a host of pro-Israel campus groups.

The following year saw the beginning of the David Project, which has a stated aim “to positively shape campus opinion on Israel by educating, training, and empowering student leaders to be thoughtful, strategic and persuasive advocates.”

The David Project was started by philanthropist Charles Jacobs, who heads up Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which is dedicated to exposing Islamic extremism.

This year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself pledged millions in Israeli taxpayer dollars to the Diaspora, a portion of which is being allocated to American college campuses and to Birthright Israel, though the specifics remain unclear as to how that money will be spent.

The fears that drive these efforts are not unfounded.

Research suggests that young Jews are moving away from the idea that being Jewish and supporting Israel are inextricably linked. The recent Pew study on the American Jewish community found that 92 percent of American Jews aged 18 to 29 believe that people can be Jewish “if they are strongly critical of Israel.”

It remains to be seen just how reflective Open Hillel is of American Jewish college students. Does the movement represent a mainstream effort to break free from strictures imposed by Hillel International? Or is Open Hillel a niche group of activists representing only a small fraction of Jewish college students on the far-left fringe?

Noam Neusner, a spokesman for Hillel International, said that “the vast majority of Jewish students are in support of the guidelines.” He also said that the organizers of Open Hillel are “still part of the Hillel family,” but said he found their complaints perplexing.

At the conference

“What’s the issue here?” Neusner said. “What are they complaining about? Do they want Hillel to become a pro-BDS organization?”

He did not directly address the issue of whether Hillel International would withdraw funding from campus Hillels that violate the partnership agreement.

“We’ll deal with those situations if and when they occur,” he said.

In contrast to Hillel International, conference organizers said that Open Hillel is representative of a significant portion of the Jewish student population.

“There are definitely some students who would be uncomfortable if Hillel’s partnership standards were done away with, but there are also many students who are uncomfortable with the status quo,” said Sandra Korn, a recent Harvard alumna and conference organizer.

About 25 Harvard students from an estimated undergraduate Jewish student population of 1,675 attended the conference. Students from dozens of colleges and universities across the country made up the majority of the 368 registered attendees. Most were Jewish college students, though a group of Muslim students from Princeton University and Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski of Bethel, N.Y., who is anti-Zionist, also were among the attendees.

“I was struck by how much at the conference could easily have happened at Harvard Hillel with no resistance whatsoever,” Jonah Steinberg, Harvard Hillel’s rabbi and director, told JTA via email. “We only refuse to host programs, events, and speakers whose aim is to promote the severing of our essential connection with Israel, which is the destructive goal of the BDS movement.”

Steinberg attended portions of the conference, as did Getzel Davis, the associate rabbi at Harvard Hillel, which adheres to the partnership rules.

“Some really like them; some really don’t,” Davis said of the guidelines. “Where we are is where our consensus led us.”

The conference was entirely student-run and, aside from two small grants from Harvard, was funded through grassroots efforts. Of the more than $36,000 collected, the median donation was $35, organizers said.

An array of organizations had tables at the event. They included educational institutions such as the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and dovish advocacy groups such as J Street U and the New Israel Fund, as well as groups more sharply critical of Israel, such as Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

Students and activists affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace had a strong showing.

So, too, did students who are explicitly Zionist and personally oppose BDS efforts, but disagree with Hillel’s partnership rules.

Among them was Josh Wolfsun, a Swathmore junior, who helped draft and promote the declaration that his campus would house the first Open Hillel.

“I don’t violate any of the Standards of Partnership,” Wolfsun told JTA. “But a lot of it was friends of mine and people I knew. A lot of it was Jewish friends of mine who weren’t part of Swarthmore Hillel because they felt that the views that Hillel was drawing a line around and saying ‘these are OK’ didn’t include their views.”

Sandalow-Ash echoed those sentiments.

“It’s a very weird thing as a student in a student group and in Hillel, which is supposed to be an organization for college students, to have your programming constrained by people not on your campus saying we don’t think Jewish students should hear what these people have to say,” she said.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish Voice for Peace, speaking at the Open Hillel conference, see item below this one.

The Israel conversation American Jewish leaders aren’t willing to have

Don’t ignore or demonize the young American Jews flirting with anti-Zionism. Argue with them.

By Peter Beinart, Haaretz
October 14, 2014

On Sunday I spoke at the inaugural conference of Open Hillel, a new student organization that, as the name implies, wants to open Hillel—which oversees Jewish life on America’s college campuses—to a broader debate about Israel. It was an invigorating experience, and a strange one. When it comes to Israel, I’m not used to being among the most hawkish people in the room.

Open Hillel has no political agenda beyond facilitating a more open discussion about Israel inside the American Jewish community. So why did the conversation—at least the part I witnessed—have such an anti-Zionist feel?

The first reason is generational. For the most part, older American Jews don’t question Zionism, even if they don’t like Israel’s policies, because they don’t question the need for a Jewish state of refuge. Generationally, they are close enough to the Holocaust, to the Soviet and Ethiopian emigrations of the 1980s and ’90s, and to personal experiences of anti-Semitism in the United States, to believe that Diaspora Jewish life can be fragile. They may not be able to imagine moving to Israel themselves, but they sleep better knowing it’s there.

For younger American Jews, it’s different. They’ve never seen any significant group of Jews fleeing to Israel to avoid state-sponsored anti-Semitic persecution. And they’ve faced no barriers as a result of being Jewish in the United States. So the Zionism of refuge strikes no chord. As a result, when they grow alienated from Israeli policy—as many of the students at the conference clearly were—they’re more likely to question the entire basis for the state. Unlike their parents, they don’t distinguish between what Israel does and what Israel is.

The second reason the conference leaned so far left is because of Gaza. Among American Jews, this summer’s war was an equal opportunity radicalizer. It pushed hawkish Jews further right and dovish Jews further left. J Street, which opposes Israeli settlement policy but seeks acceptance within the American Jewish mainstream, largely sat the war out. That proved a boon for the pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) group, Jewish Voices for Peace, whose ranks were swelled by American Jews alienated by the war. According to executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson, JVP has added 25 new chapters and 60,000 new online supporters since mid-June. That newfound strength was on display at Open Hillel.

But the third reason the conference leaned so far left is the simplest: No one from the right showed up. Conference organizers say that, among others, they invited representatives from AIPAC, Stand With Us, the David Project, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston and, of course, Hillel International—but none came. They almost never do. For years, the American Jewish establishment has dealt with Jews who cross its ideological red lines by either ignoring or vilifying them—but almost never publicly talking to them. To do so, they claim, would legitimize fundamentally illegitimate views.

That decision is growing ever more self-defeating. The young American Jews at Open Hillel who are flirting with anti-Zionism are not anti-Semites. (Although, of course, some anti-Zionists are). They are merely doing what young people always do: Challenging settled assumptions based on a different life experience. They don’t need the American Jewish establishment’s legitimization; that establishment is illegitimate to them. What they need, in the best Jewish tradition, is to be argued with.

But I’m not sure the American Jewish establishment knows how. For years, mainstream American Jewish groups have short-circuited discussions about Zionism by accusing its critics of anti-Semitism. They’ve grown so dependent on that rhetorical crutch that they rarely publicly grapple with how Zionism – a movement that privileges one ethnic and religious group – can be reconciled with the pledge in Israel’s declaration of independence to offer “complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of race, religion or sex.” Unlike some at Open Hillel, I don’t believe this tension requires abandoning Zionism or the belief in a democratic Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one. But the students I met on Sunday are asking hard, important questions, and they deserve a communal leadership that responds with ideas rather than silence or slurs.

They, after all, are the ones who still care enough to ask.

The Open Hillel movement: A serious challenge to Jewish institutions’ stifling of debate

By Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish Voice for Peace newsletter
October 16, 2014

I had the enormous privilege of participating in the first “Open Hillel” conference at Harvard University this past weekend.

Organized by and for students, Open Hillel is a historic effort to challenge the “red lines” that Hillel International has created, which excludes Jewish students who cross Hillel’s declared boundaries of what is acceptable conversation on Israel and Palestine.

The energy was electric. Everywhere, people were talking—and listening. In the overflowing halls, clustered around the bagels, before and after panel sessions—you could almost see peoples’ minds expanding.

Is this what the mainstream Jewish organizations are so afraid of? Young people thoughtfully talking to one another?

The conference was unique, especially in the Jewish world, in bringing together different perspectives.

On the plenary I participated in, we had fundamental differences about the best strategies for change, one state vs. two states, and whose voices should be listened to most closely. But that was OK. Not only OK, but it resulted in a conversation that was robust and spirited.

Throughout the weekend, sessions ranging from Palestinian nationalism to anti-Semitism, from Islamophobia to race in the Jewish community, and so many other topics elicited rich and intense discussions.

Judith Butler, a renowned scholar who has had multiple speaking invitations revoked for her outspoken criticism of Israel, opened the conference by talking honestly about fear, including her own, of being called anti-Semitic when she speaks out for fundamental Palestinian rights.

On my panel, I picked up this theme, saying: We all struggle with this work, and it is important to feel that struggle. There is fear, and pain, and discomfort, and if you aren’t feeling those things you are probably not doing it right.

True, there is no comparison to the fear that an 8-year-old in Gaza—the age of my own daughter—feels after being bombarded from the sky at three different times in her life. But the fear is real, and they are also connected, because if we allow our fears to rule our actions, US foreign policy will not change.

If this summer has shown us anything, it is that we need to be bold.

Because on the other side of that fear and pain and struggle is liberation—the liberation of doing what you actually believe and feel.

This first Open Hillel conference was a manifestation of both the struggle and the potential liberation, and all around me I could feel the joy and amazement of being among people who are going through the same struggle together.

This is a serious challenge to Hillel International and by extension to the mainstream Jewish establishment. Are they really willing to let go of this smart, engaged, committed cohort of young people, just because some of them want to hold Israel accountable for its human rights violations and systems of oppression, and all of them want our community to be able to talk about it?

Mazel Tov, Open Hillel. May you go from strength to strength.

Click here to join us in congratulating the organizers, and see some of the many highlights from the conference.

With hope.