A Very Distressing Phone Call

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Over the weekend, I got a heart-mangling phone call from a young Jewish woman who’s just a few months into her freshman year of college. For the purposes of this newsletter (and her privacy), let’s call her K. I’ve known her for many years. She’s lovely in every way: creative, artistic, adventurous, animal-loving, unassuming and sweet-natured. She was so excited to start college — and for a few weeks, she was incredibly happy. She loved her classes, her professors, the beauty of her new town. The intimidation of beginning adult life in a totally unfamiliar place, far from her lifelong surroundings, was eased by the fact that she had a very close friend who had chosen the same school.

But then, a few weeks into the first semester — and for the first time within their friendship of many years — a certain tension set in. The other girl, whom I’ll call D, has suitemates who are passionately anti-Israel.

D started to join in their activism. K remained non-reactive. She loves and has a strong connection with Israel but it’s a quiet bond. No one on her campus would ever know her political opinions unless they explicitly asked her. She’s not loud or aggressive or looking for confrontation.

Still, it made her uneasy when D and her roommates announced a new policy: another Jewish friend of theirs, who happens to be Israeli, would no longer be welcome in their shared housing suite. Like K, the Israeli girl is not politically active on campus. She’s not an overt Zionist. She wears a Magen David but that’s her only outward signifier of identity.

D’s roommate told the Israeli girl that she needed to join in their anti-Israel activism on campus if she wanted to remain friends with them and retain her welcome in their apartment. The Israeli girl, to her infinite credit, was not willing to be manipulated in this way and so is no longer allowed to visit D’s dorm suite.

D was not the driver of this policy, but nor did she object to it. She wasn’t willing to rock the boat.

This troubled K. She said to D, “You’re all barring her from your home and dropping her from your lives because she won’t join demonstrations against Israel? I also haven’t joined any demonstrations against Israel — are you going to excommunicate me too?”

This turned out to be a prescient question. K was calling to tell me that D had broken off their longtime close friendship over the weekend. She told K that she agreed with her roommates and could no longer be friends with someone who refused to stand against genocide.

When K — who knows much, much more about the conflict than D does — invited D to a small gathering of Jews (all of whom D has known and liked for years), so she could at least hear another perspective about the war — presented in a low-key, gentle and non-threatening way —D declined.

Here I think it’s worth mentioning that none of D’s roommates are Palestinian, Arab or Muslim. Just white progressives awarding themselves ally cookies and working themselves into a self-righteous froth.

This call has haunted me ever since we spoke. K was reeling, and I was incredibly upset as well.

K is not much older than my own daughter. I experienced her story as a mother would. If I imagine one of my kids excited about college, and incredibly happy to be there, and then the whole situation slowly turning like milk, going sour, impossible to swallow for being shot through with anti-Jewish poison, I feel physically ill. K no longer knows whether her chosen college is a place she can feel safe or welcome.

By sheer chance, my last Jews Of The Universe column, as some of you might have seen, was about an activist fighting campus dynamics precisely like these. During his time at Columbia University for his undergraduate studies, Rudy Rochman co-founded and led an organization called SSI, or Students Supporting Israel. What set it apart from the school’s Hillel chapter, or the local Chabad, was that it was run by the students, for the students.

I can’t overstate how key this aspect of the org seems to me. I think that initiative and agency on the part of the kids is essential to the mission. K’s school doesn’t have an SSI chapter, and since our conversation, I’ve been wondering what it would take to create one. I’ve also been wondering about the possibility of a nationwide social media group for Jewish kids in college right now.

The issue of Jew hatred on campus is so widespread and pervasive that when a Facebook group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism was established this past year, it drew its first 29,000 members overnight. Now it has upwards of 60,000 members and there is indeed real power in a group this vast. MACA was instrumental in the firing of college presidents for allowing anti-Semitism to fester unfettered in the wake of the October 7th massacre. They have been a formidable force for combatting all kinds of antisemitism within the world of academia.

As wonderful as this is, in my opinion, it does not fulfill the need to have college kids themselves be informed, organized and willing to stand up together against this hate campaign. The entire point of college is to have parents take a step back and let their offspring begin their adult lives.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll be gathering some local Jewish teens in my home to brainstorm ideas for a U.S.-wide collegiate support group, accessible through social media. If you’re in the Portland (Oregon) area, and you have a teen or college student who’d like to join, please know they’re more than welcome. And if you have your own ideas about anything that could serve college kids in this way, and give them a sense of being part of a tight-knit familial network in real time, please don’t hesitate to share. We have to meet this national crisis with strength, resolve and conviction.

Before we ended our call, I told K what I often tell all of you:

Chazak v’ematz. (Take strength and courage.)

Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn. (We will outlive them.)

Am Yisrael Chai.