Hey, tribe.
I hope you’ve had a good week. While the madness at universities across the nation continues to be stressful, I promised you some points of light today and that’s what I’m going to bring. For me, there have been so many.
On the campus protest front, let me move the lens to UCLA, which rivals Columbia as a flashpoint for the nation’s focus.
First, a few scenes from that campus:
Here you can watch a creepy clip of masked, vested enforcers keeping a Jew from entering the library. Apparently wristbands identify the good Jews and our Jew doesn’t have one.
“It’s time to go,” they tell him.
“Why?” he asks.
“You don’t have a wristband.”
“Why do I need a wristband?”
“It’s time to go,” they repeat.
Whenever he moves to try to gain entrance to the library, they block his path.
“You want to leave, bro?” another one asks.
“No,” he answers. “You guys want to prevent Jewish students from entering?”
“No, we got a couple of Jewish students,” they tell him. “Are you a Zionist?”
“Yeah, of course I’m a Zionist.”
The reply is inaudible, but gist is very clearly that only anti-Zionist Jews are allowed entry.
“So you don’t let Zionists in the library that I paid tuition for?” he asks just before the clip is cut off.
The idea that this kind of policing of Jewish students by other students was allowed to go on for even one hour is so outrageous it takes my breath away.
Imagine being a Jew at this school with no one stopping this behavior for days on end.
In another incident, a protestor with a keffiyeh wrapped around his head beat a pinata plastered with a photo of Netanyahu, while a group of onlookers — also clad in keffiyehs — shrieked with approval. In a clip capturing this, presented by the NY Post, a woman with a bullhorn screams “Beat that —” followed by the kind of bleep that covers an expletive. Los Angeles Magazine reported the full quote as: “Beat that fucking Jew!”
Here is a protest van parked at the campus, complete with Jewish stars (many entwined with swastikas) and a reference to Jews as “Puppet Masters”.
David Marcus, CEO of a California company called Lightspark, decided to drop by the UCLA campus to see the protests for himself. In a tweet from 4/27, he reported:
Went to UCLA this afternoon to talk to people peacefully. Few interesting takeaways:
1) Most of them openly say they support Hamas, a designated terrorist organization;
2) They say 10/7 atrocities, rapes, murders, didn’t happen. The official line is “even the NYT debunked it!”;
3) 10/7 was justified. It was resistance;
4) 100% of the people we spoke to had the exact same narrative and MO, trying to recenter the conversation to 1948, without knowing any of the details when challenged;
5) They have their own security and control access to their encampment;
6) We remained very calm, but they got really aggressive and angry;
7) When you approach people who clearly are junior to others, “handlers” show up very quickly to takeover;
8) Since many of them are truly ignorant about historical and present facts, when they know they’re going to embarrass themselves, they all say “read our 5 demands to divest, now I’m going to stop talking to you.”
More organized and orchestrated than I expected. Very sad to see so many young people in a higher education setting being manipulated and brainwashed and totally devoid of critical thinking.
In any event, the UCLA protests were marked by an extraordinary counter effort, the likes of which I haven’t seen elsewhere, and it’s this that I want to make the focus of today’s newsletter.
The Jewish response there speaks to something I was wondering for weeks on end: where was the counter-protest at Columbia? I was seriously tempted to fly across the country to stand with the Jewish kids. Daily I would rant to my husband: “There are millions of Jews in New York City! Where are they? Every anti-Semitic opportunist from Susan Sarandon to Cornel West to Ilhan Omar has shown up to support the anti-Zionists. Where are the Jews?”
Over the last few days, I had a jokey explanation: apparently, they’re in LA.
First, an anonymous donor paid to put up a huge screen adjacent to the UCLA protest encampment, which blares footage of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7 around the clock.
The counter-demonstration at UCLA by a sea of Jews waving Israel’s flag, singing Hatikva, and dancing brought actual tears to my eyes. The images side by side were breathtaking. On one side was a group of people driven by rage and hatred and exclusion, on the other was lightness, joy, community, family.
Some Native Americans even mounted a tiny counter-demonstration of their own. Holding signs that read “Jewish Students Are Welcome On Native Land” and “Native Men Believe Israeli Women,” they stood facing the encampment while a Native man played a drum and chanted. The video clip is here.
On a different evening, more Native pro-Israel counter-demonstrators pounded drums and held signs with messages like: “Hamas & Supporters Are NOT Welcome On Native Land” and “Jewish Students Are Welcome On Native Land.”
There was also a highly entertaining and delightful lone wolf who donned a platinum wig to troll some of the encampment’s representatives. I hadn’t heard the name Milagro Jones before seeing this clip, but it was very satisfying to hear him mocking the masked protestors for their hypocrisy and gatekeeping. When one of them told him, “You’re free to leave,” he responded:
”I am! Cause I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m free to leave when I want. That’s the cool thing about being a U.S. citizen. When you work hard and get into UCLA — see, I got my GED in prison. So that means less than 1% of us will ever get any college degree. I’m getting my degree from UCLA, the #1 public university in the nation. So I’m free to go ANYWHERE ON THIS CAMPUS I WANT.”
Further, I felt uplifted and restored by reading two essays during the past couple of days.
Both writers are to the left of me. That’s okay.
We don’t agree on several points. That’s also okay.
It’s okay because my litmus test for engagement and goodwill is so modest and minimal that it basically comes down to this: I will listen with respect and engage in dialogue with anyone who 1) is not seeking to end Israel as a Jewish state; 2) acknowledges the deep anti-Semitism in huge swaths of the anti-Zionist movement; 3) acknowledges that Palestinians have played a major role in getting to the place we’re in today; 4) acknowledges this is an extraordinarily complex topic, in which each side of the conflict has done terrible things.
That’s it. Meet all four criteria and I’m glad to call you a friend. We don’t need to be in lockstep. You don’t have to love Israel or even like it much.
But as low as that bar is, so few pro-Palestinians reach it. I’m so often struck by the fact that there are seemingly 100 Jews ready to severely castigate Israel for its bad behavior for every 1 pro-Palestinian willing to assign any responsibility whatsoever to their own side for their own fate.
At any rate, here is an essay that I appreciated deeply, even though I didn’t agree with every aspect of it. It’s by Mo Husseini and the link is here.
Another essay I found absolutely beautiful, an essay that made my heart sing, was by a woman who attended Columbia with me as an undergrad: Haviva Ner-David. Haviva and I were classmates in a writing seminar led by my favorite writing teacher of all time, who’s tragically no longer with us. Her name was Doris Jean Austin.
Haviva is a lifelong peace activist and an exquisitely beautiful person. I’m so proud to be able to call her a friend. In her essay, she details her long history of advocacy for both peoples, and writes:
If I were studying at Columbia today, I would ask myself: Should I join your protests? After all, I, too, am pro-Palestinian.
But I am also pro-Jew.
And when you chant, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” and “From the Sea to the River, Palestine will live forever!” you are not calling, as I and my Palestinian-Israeli friends are, for peace, justice and equality for all humans within those borders. You are calling for the violent destruction of the country where we live, and the murder of its citizens — including the Palestinian ones. As we saw on Oct. 7, Hamas has no more sympathy for other-than-Jewish Israelis — not even for Muslim ones — than it does for Jewish Israelis.
When you say, “I am Hamas!” you are not identifying with innocent civilians, including children, women and seniors who were massacred and kidnapped or the women raped in captivity (according to eyewitness accounts from hostages who were freed). Even my Palestinian Israeli activist friends strongly condemned Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 and say Hamas is terrible for the Palestinian people.
I strongly encourage you to read Haviva’s essay in its entirety here.
Finally, over these past weeks, I have wondered — as I’m sure many of you have as well — just how representative these protestors are of the collegiate demographic in general.
We all know how easy it is for the most vocal and visible and sensational actors to take up all the air time, fill the whole frame, while a silent majority wants nothing more than for all of them to stop commandeering such an outsized amount of national attention.
I wondered, in particular, whether this was the case at Columbia.
Now, one anecdote does not balance the scales. And yet.
I was thrilled to learn that Columbia University has just elected Israeli student Maya Platek as the Columbia Student Government President for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Of course I immediately feared she’d been elected for an anti-Zionist stance.
But I needn’t have worried.
Platek is a passionate member of a student group known as SSI, or Students Supporting Israel.
In a post-election speech, Platek addressed this group in the center of campus. She made many observations about the protests taking place around them. These included:
Our classmates and professors choose to manipulate history in order to demonize us as people have done all throughout history.
They choose to rewrite our identity in order to justify terrorist regimes.
They choose to celebrate brutal massacres against the Jewish people.
They choose to advocate for our removal off of this campus over our nationality.
They choose to argue that they are righteous to advocate for our deaths.
Wake up!
You can listen to the clip here.
My beloved family, as we go into our Sabbath, I hope all these expressions of solidarity and Jewish pride will warm your heart and rekindle a sense of hope, as they did for me.
I’ll be back with you on Monday and in the meantime, I send sincere wishes for at least one day of rest and renewal.
We will overcome, again. Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai.
The blocking of the Jewish, Zionist student from going to the library…it’s as if the Hamas lovers are creating an apartheid campus.
Sunday there will be a community Yom HaShoah Commemoration at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland, at 5 PM. Never Again!