Hate Fests on College Campuses Challenge Jewish Students to Bolster Identity

While Israel celebrates Independence Day today, Jewish students at the University of California at Irvine will have a hard time ignoring the hatred and hostility towards the Jewish state and its Jewish citizens that poisons the air on their campus. UC Irvine’s annual Israel Apartheid Week, organized by the Muslim Students Union (MSU) is now in progress, making this an especially difficult time for the school’s estimated 1,000 Jewish students.

But Rabbi Zevi Tenenbaum, director of Chabad at UCI is well prepared.

Tenenbaum secured a spot on the main road where MSU erected the apartheid wall and conducts demonstrations. Twenty five year-old Joe Wolf, who is pursuing a PhD in astrophysics used to lay claim to this coveted spot on the main road, but he gave it to Chabad so they could set up a table with Jewish literature.

“It’s important for Chabad to have a presence at the main road,” he says. “Chabad provides information about Judaism which widens the discussion about Israel and gives students a broader spectrum with a Torah based view.”

At UCLA, Chabad student volunteers have chosen to mark Israel Independence day by setting up a booth with a backdrop of the Western Wall, and invite students – there are approximately 3,000 Jewish students at UCLA –to stop by to wrap Tefillin, chat, and pick up Jewish literature.

“Our response is to connect to Judaism and strengthen the student’s Jewish identity,” says Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, director of Chabad House at UCLA. “We focus on being proactive and educating students about Judaism.”

Last December, twenty one year-old Barbara Efraim, a political science major at UCLA was a guest at breakfast with Vice President of Israel Moshe Ya’alon. Later that day, as she turned in her final to political science professor, Efraim mentioned the event she had attended that morning.

“Why don’t you ask Ya’alon why Israel unilaterally takes land from Palestinians?” her professor asked.

Efraim admits she was shocked by the question, but the attitude was all too familiar to her. At UCLA, she encounters virulent anti-Israel sentiment, and students, she says, are “exposed to anti-Jewish activity everywhere, especially during Israel Apartheid Week, when the MSU (Muslim Student Union) sets up an apartheid wall.”

With the climate on many campuses around the country hostile towards Israel, Jewish leadership is looking for ways to help Jewish students avoid intimidation and to empower them to advocates for Israel.

According to Rabbi Shloime Chein, who directs the Rohr Chabad Student Center at UC Santa Cruz, educating students and broadening the discourse to include Israel’s case is vitally important for Jewish life on campus. Most students simply don’t care, “because they prefer to avoid any conflicts and not get involved at all.”

“The average American kid grows up thinking that ‘conflict’ is bad, so when they hear about conflict in the middle east, they automatically turn off and avoid the entire issue,” explains Chein. “I try to give them a feeling for Torah, Am Yisrael and what Israel means for us, so that they will care enough and support Israel.”

Twenty one year-old Antaeus Edelsohn, a double major in film and economics concurs. Students don’t feel that the Israel issue is within their purview, he says, “so at Chabad and other student organizations, the goal is to show them how this directly relates to them.”

For UC Berkeley’s 4,000 Jewish students, 2010 marked a difficult year when a student senate passed a resolution calling on the school to divest from corporations that do business with Israel. Anti-Jewish harassment and lectures disguised as academic presentations which were rather platforms for anti-Semitic diatribes, proliferated on campus.

“In an academic arena, issues are being presented with a clear bias toward one side, and this does a disservice to students in the classroom who don’t hear the other voice,” says Rabbi Gil Leeds, director of the Rohr Chabad Jewish Center at UC Berkeley.

But increasingly, students at UC Berkeley are counteracting anti-Israel activism by reporting these kinds of offenses. Brian Maissey, a regular at the warm, home-away-from-home Friday night dinners at Chabad is the president of Tikvah: Students for Israel.

“Telling our story and making our voice heard strengthens us,” says Maissey, 21. And in these times, “students want to learn more about Judaism. I grew up in secular home, and here I’ve learned a lot about Judaism because I was suddenly faced with this situation.”

In a way, then, the hostilities are challenging Jewish students to bone up on the basics of Jewish identity with “more students at Chabad seeking support from a threatening climate in Jewish classes and educational programs,” says Leeds.

Even at UCI, a hotbed of Palestinian ideology and Israel-bashing, the silver lining is becoming apparent: students are turning to Judaism and to engagement for Israel to make a difference.

Jonah Balakhaneh, 24, will relocate to Israel in December with a BA in political science. Eventually, he plans to take a leadership position in Israeli politics.

“I would never have gotten involved in this if I wouldn’t have come to UC Irvine,” he says. “Experiencing anti-Semitism here has forced me to find a voice of reason, and now I want to make a difference in Israel by looking at the many narratives and using conflict resolution to create peace in Israel.”