For College Students Who Keep Kosher, More Campuses Offer More Options

Kosher food is becoming an option at a growing number of schools, from Hillels to dining halls to restaurants

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

The great knish controversy erupted at Harvard in the spring of 1992. It began with a toaster oven. The unassuming appliance was introduced into the dining hall of Dunster House—one of Harvard’s 12 residential dormitories for upperclassmen—as a courtesy to kosher-keeping students. Until then, observant Jews had been restricted to consuming the few kosher staples on offer, like sliced bread and tuna fish. Now for the first time, with the aid of their new toaster, they could sample such delicacies as rabbinically certified frozen knishes and pizza bagels.

But this did not sit well with Noel Ignatiev, a tutor in History and Literature at Dunster. In a letter to the dining-hall manager, he protested the use of “public funds” to finance “sectarian” concerns, which he deemed an unacceptable breach in the “separation of church and state.” It was a curious complaint, given that Harvard is a private institution with its own Divinity School and that the money for the $40 toaster was essentially coming from religious students, who would otherwise be paying for a meal plan from which they could not actually eat. “I don’t know whether to be offended, annoyed, or simply to laugh,” then-Hillel President Shai Held told the Harvard Crimson. Students decided to split the difference, and Ignatiev was alternately condemned and mocked in the pages of the school paper, which reported the outcry under the immortal headline “Students Support Kosher Toaster.” That May, Ignatiev’s contract with Dunster House was not renewed.

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The ‘Mainstreaming’ Of Jewish Studies

Steve Lipman, Staff Writer, The Jewish Week

Houston — Administrators at Texas Christian University, an institution in Forth Worth affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, needed some advice last year on starting a Jewish studies program, which is now in the planning stages. A small program that had begun under the auspices of the school’s Brite Divinity School offered only a few courses a year to prospective members of the clergy; TCU administrators wanted to establish a larger Jewish studies program for the entire university.

Instead of contacting the leaders of decades-old, better-known Jewish Studies programs like those of Columbia University or Ohio State University, they called Matthias Henze, founding director of The Program in Jewish Studies at Rice. That program was founded in 2009 at Rice University, a prestigious private institution in Houston.

Henze, who knew members of the TCU administration from earlier academic meetings, said they had reached out to him because they knew he had started the Rice program from scratch. “They wanted to know how I built the program,” says Henze, associate professor of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and holder of the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Chair in Biblical Studies.

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“Gaza = Auschwitz”

Holocaust inversion—the claim that Israelis are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews—has come to the American university campus.

By Martin Kramer in Mosaic Magazine

Five years ago, during an earlier Israeli operation in Gaza, the British novelist Howard Jacobson explained why “call[ing] the Israelis Nazis and liken[ing] Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto” goes far beyond mere “criticism” of Israel:

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial. . . . Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians.

Experts call this Holocaust inversion. Based in the claim that Israel now behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews, it originated in post-World War II Soviet propaganda, and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media. In Turkey’s new president and long-time prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it now has a champion in a head of state. In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left.

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Campuses Hone Tactics As BDS Wars Loom

In wake of Gaza conflict, local students, officials expect tense atmosphere as semester begins.

Amy Sara Clark for The Jewish Week

In Gaza, there may be a cease-fire, but for Jewish college students, the war is about to begin.

Groups as varied as J Street U and the Israel Action Network are bracing for what many insiders believe will be the most contentious school year yet.

Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, who directs the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU, agreed that pro-Israel students are facing a challenge when they return in the fall.

“I think it’s widely held that this is going to be one of the most difficult semesters for Israel on campus in a long time. It’s not just because of the war over the summer, but it’s also because the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] moment has been gaining steam over the past few years, and the war over the summer just provides the fodder for the momentum to continue,” he said.

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Non-Jewish College Students Find an Unexpected Home on Campus—at Hillel

Whether they’re drawn by social programs, religious practice, or the food, non-Jews have changed the face of the organization

By Isabel Fattal for Tablet Magazine

Nellie Gayle’s introduction to Jewish life on campus began, appropriately, with bagels. In 2011, during her first week at Barnard College, a Jewish friend mentioned a bagel brunch at Hillel. The event sounded like fun, but Gayle, who grew up in an irreligious household in Eugene, Ore., figured that it would be impossible for her to attend, because she wasn’t Jewish. After some encouragement from her friend, she decided to go. Three years later, she returns to school this week as one of the most active members of Columbia/Barnard Hillel.

“Hillel encouraged me to explore my own spirituality,” said Gayle. She has even begun to incorporate certain Jewish values into her worldview. “Just coming into contact with Judaism has made me really committed to not speaking lashon hara,” or gossip, she said.

Be it bagels or spirituality, there’s something about Jewish communities on the college campus that attracts students who do not personally identify as Jewish. The number is not always sizable, but at many colleges there is a group of students who, while not technically Jewish, become some of the community’s most dedicated members. Often, as in Gayle’s case, it all begins with an invitation from a Jewish friend to attend an event at Hillel. For some students it might end at that one visit, but many others become attracted to Hillel’s wide variety of programs and social events. And so they become fellow travelers.

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