Jewish on Campus
FROM THE EDITOR
Dear friends,
The closing chapter of Allegra Goodman’s 1996 novel, The Family Markowitz, opens with Ed and Sarah Markowitz’s four children coming home for Passover, just in time for the seder. Their children are all young adults—Miriam is a medical student while her younger siblings Ben, Avi, and Yehudit are undergraduates—and they each challenge their parents and grandparents in different ways. Miriam, who has become strictly Orthodox, frowns upon her parents’ relative laxity; she brings her own Haggadah and recites every word. Ben is easygoing, almost too happy to do what he is told. Avi has brought his Methodist girlfriend, Amy; the rest of the family wishes he were dating a Jewish woman. Yehudit, the youngest, is sick with a bad cold and barely present.
Goodman uses the Haggadah’s own four children as a literary device, suggesting each sibling as a ‘90s version of either the wise, the wicked, the simple, or the one who cannot ask. As in the Haggadah, the seder ritual stands in for the entire Jewish tradition, and the give-and-take between the children and their parents expresses eternal anxieties about cultural transmission. Ed and Sarah examine their children’s behavior and ask: Have the children learned what we tried to teach them?
I started college in the fall of 1996, around the same time The Family Markowitz was published, and it has always rung true to my own experience. Reading it today, though, all I can see are the immense differences between then and now. Two stand out.
First, when Ed adds prayers for compromise between Israelis and Palestinians to the seder liturgy, his words echo the hopes embedded in the Oslo Accords, which at the time were new and exciting. The members of this family are all Zionists, and they believe that a better future for the State of Israel and her neighbors is around the corner. The only complaint comes from Miriam, who would prefer no deviations at all from the traditional text of the Haggadah. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and over the ensuing eight months of war, through the holidays of Simchat Torah, Chanukah, Purim, Passover, and Shavuot, a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become more elusive than ever, and in some families and communities, Zionism is no longer a given or a unifying force.
Second, while the Markowitz parents are immensely proud to have four kids pursuing higher education at prestigious universities, they don’t seem to know much about life on campus. Going to college, pursuing advanced degrees—for this Jewish family and others like them, these are norms, and university life is stable and reliable. But on many North American campuses, the last academic year was distinctly unstable. Campus demonstrations and protest encampments organized by Students for Justice in Palestine and other organizations equated concern for Palestinians with anti-Zionism, expressing virulent hatred of the Jewish state and all who support its very existence. On many campuses, student demonstrators were joined by faculty and staff; anti-Zionist politics crept into the classroom.
Many Jewish students found themselves afraid, confused, and uncomfortable, some in a way they never had been before, as they argued over Israel and Gaza with friends and roommates who previously had shown no interest in the region. Some students discovered themselves to be Zionist with a strength they had not known before: showing up in the front row at counter-protests, wearing Israeli or Jewish symbols around campus, putting themselves forward when the campus newspaper or national media needed someone to provide a “Jewish perspective” on anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Others tucked their heads down, avoided the protest sites, and kept quiet. Some found themselves wanting Jewish community either more than ever or for the first time ever. And some found themselves drawn to pro-Palestinian protests strongly enough that they were willing to ignore the question of Zionism or even to adopt an anti-Zionist stance.
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For decades already, technology, social media, and other cultural changes have shortened the distance between campus and home for many Jewish students and their parents. Parents today know more about their children’s lives than they did in earlier generations; they are also more likely to be directly engaged with what is happening on campus, ready to call a university administrator or student affairs staff member at a moment’s notice. The same is true of alumni and other stakeholders. Between this and the news media, events on campus this last year were never only on campus.
Many of us began asking more directly than we had before: What is a university for? What should its priorities be? How do Jews fit into these visions? What will the long-term impact of these events on campus be for North American Jews and Zionists? The initial idea for an issue of Sources devoted to the theme “Jewish on Campus” began in a conversation last summer with a group of Hillel professionals who were already seeing growing anti-Zionism and antisemitism on their campuses. October 7 and ensuing events only intensified our commitment to addressing these issues.
The issue includes several pieces responding directly to the events of the last year written by Hillel professionals reflecting on the last academic year and looking ahead to the next one. Adena Kirstein, Executive Director of Hillel at the George Washington University, reminds us that the college years are an important stage of self-development, and students need us to care about their wellbeing for reasons other than antisemitism on campus; Seth Goren, CEO of Hillel Ontario, outlines the best ways for off-campus stakeholders to be strong partners in fighting against campus antisemitism; and Benjamin Berger, Vice President for Jewish and Israel Education at Hillel International, distinguishes between defending and exploring as orientations Hillel educators can take when students ask about Israel. Later in the issue, we hear from a group of rabbis and professors in Waterville, Maine, Lauren Cohen Fisher, David Freidenreich, and Rachel Isaacs, about the multigenerational Jewish community they have built between students at Colby College and local residents.
In his piece, rabbi and scholar Josh Feigelson uses the history of undergraduate education to shed light on the longstanding American Jewish commitment to higher education, while Northwestern professor Barry Wimpfheimer takes a close look at the role of the humanities in campus activism, arguing against the irresponsible use of post-colonialism and other theories to vilify Israel and demonstrating how these analytical frameworks might be put to better use for understanding the Israel-Hamas war. In a conversation with me, Marc Baker, President and CEO of Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (CJP) and his son Lishi Baker, co-president of Columbia Aryeh, discuss Jewish peoplehood and leadership at this moment, both on- and off-campus.
I am especially excited that this issue includes four essays by students, winners of our first campus writing challenge. Stephen Bartell, a math major at Princeton University, reflects on the ways that campus protests and counter-protests shut down any possibility for nuanced conversation; Issy Lyons captures a snapshot of her experience as a soldier in the IDF receiving news from Jewish friends at American colleges; Lilah Peck takes us into the Bayit, a Jewish housing coop at UCLA, and how living there informs her sense of self; and Chana Fisher, a recent graduate of Rutgers, expresses gratitude for the chance her college years gave her to explore her religious beliefs and practices.
Each of these pieces offers thoughtful and reflective analysis about being Jewish on campus today. Please join me in exploring this moment and imagining a better future.
Claire E. Sufrin
