Boycott, divestment and sanctions: what the term means and why you should care

by Lizzie Zakaim for FreshInkForTeens.com

The room grew tense as the speaker’s audience became increasingly disrespectful. Ishmael Khaldi, the first Bedouin diplomat in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came to speak at a Hillel event at Rutgers University in 2010. He came to talk in a fair and diplomatic fashion about life in Israel for Arabs and Israelis, but his speech was sabotaged by supporters of BDS (the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement).

“A lot of BDS and anti-Israel students came and ruined our event,” said Liran Kapoano, a Rutgers graduate and now director of the Center for Israel Engagement (CIE) at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey in Paramus. They got there early, sat in the front row and were “talking and hissing” throughout his speech. When it came time for Q&A they bombarded the speaker with “angry statements” and accusations. They were a disturbance to the event and ruined the experience for everyone else attending. No one got a chance to ask anything productive. “It’s the idea of uncivil discourse. People can’t sit comfortably in a room without feeling intimidated,” Kapoano said during an interview in his federation office.

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Why Small Campus Jewish Communities Are the Best

by Miranda Cooper, newvoices.org

When applying to colleges, I gave barely any thought to Jewish life on campus. This was not because I didn’t care about being engaged with a Jewish community; on the contrary, between leading my Temple Youth Group, attending regional NFTY events, working as a teaching assistant at a religious school, and moving up the ranks at a URJ camp, I was very attached to my various Reform Jewish commitments throughout high school, and wanted to continue this involvement in college. But having grown up in Pittsburgh, where you can walk down the main thoroughfare in Squirrel Hill and pass four shuls, a JCC, a yeshiva, and your friend’s Bubbe, it just never occurred to me that I might find myself in a place where I would actively have to seek out Jewish life. So unlike some of my friends at Williams College, for whom a strong Jewish presence on campus was a major factor in their college decisions, I had no idea that any one college might have a “better” Jewish community than another.

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Who Owns the Holocaust?

Op-ed by Evan Goldstein for newvoices.org

I've got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:

    "It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots…it is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew…one does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is."

There is so much to be said, and at the same time, no words that feel worthy of being spoken, after encountering Baldwin’s brilliance. He speaks for himself, and to reduce his unapologetically true witness to an analytical datum is intellectual malpractice. Baldwin is braver than most. But I think it is time for American Jews to give everyone permission to speak as truly as James Baldwin about our history. It is time, in short, to let the Holocaust be history, which does not mean forgetting so much as remembering the past honestly as past. It is, to be sure, part of our history (among others’), but it must be history nonetheless, not an a-historical symbol of radical evil that we claim to own and deploy against those who, like Baldwin, question the politics of Jewish identity.

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Please Be Disturbed: Triggering Can Be Good for You, Kids

Brutalities cry for attention. Attention to the appalling causes disturbance. Deal with it. You’re at school to be disturbed.

By Todd Gitlin for Tablet Magazine

In college, I took a sociology-history course that included a segment on Nazi Germany. One day, we were ushered into an auditorium where we sat through Triumph of the Will, probably the greatest Nazi propaganda film ever made. Leni Riefenstahl’s diabolically inspired 1935 paean to Hitler and his Nazi gang of usual subjects is brilliantly shot and edited to hold viewers rapt with wave after wave of spectacles. For almost two hours, the reverent, obedient masses go through the requisite motions at Nuremberg on Party Day, forming vast human battalions, reverberating in a demonic call-and-response with their lionhearted idol. In most of Riefenstahl’s sequences, individual life melts into rituals of submission and the mass worship of power. Equally compelling, and therefore terrifying, were the interspersed images of radiant young blonds frolicking in the sunshine in a summer-camp atmosphere. Weirdly, I remember best, probably for its erotic implications, a sequence in which some young Germans drink, or wash, from the same water spigot. Taken a few at a time or en masse, the Nazis are enraptured by the opportunity to sink into the (to them) transcendent embrace of der Führer. If ever there was a celebration of “Strength through Joy,” this is it. The ideological fusion is complete: eternal life, eternal surrender, eternal mass murder in the making.

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