From the second best Jewlicious post I’ve read this year:

The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees - which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.

The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.

And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.

Categories: Food, Funny, Jewishness
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My favorite JewBlog, Not Chosen, Just Posin, written by a gentile at a Jewish magazine, has gone of the air.  It was the only blog I read regularly in what passes itself off as the Jewish blogosphere, which probably says something.  For some good laughs, read through the archives while they’re still there.

Categories: Jewishness
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Rosner’s Domain has an interview with another Jewish demographer (I noted his talk with Ira Sheskin here). This time, he questions

There is no question that intermarriage is changing the face of American Jewry (and Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora). But the evidence suggests that intermarriage is not the cause of the problem. The underlying issue is that many Jews do not grow up experiencing a rich Jewish home life and their Jewish education is ineffective and, too often, distancing. A colleague who is a Jew-by-choice recently joked that it was easy for him to embrace Judaism - he didn’t have the baggage that born Jews did of a having had to “suffer” in Hebrew school as children.

Dr. Saxe heads up the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, which conducted the meta-analysis counting project I mentioned here. As far as I can tell, the institute is fairly new and hasn’t really put out much research yet, though other scholars at Brandeis working on similar matters certainly have.

One thing to note is that Dr. Saxe extrapolates a lot from his Boston Community Survey, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that trends in Boston apply nationally or globally, and there are a number of reasons to expect otherwise. Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the problem isn’t intermarriage, no matter how the numbers line up, but a lack of engagement on the part of the Jewish community.

Categories: Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Polling
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A new study from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute says there could be over seven million Jews. Why are there so many different numbers, and why are Jews so hard to count.

One of the biggest reasons is that it’s hard to determine just who is a Jew. People identify as Jewish on religious, ethnic, and cultural grounds, while others identify by birth, and still others were clearly born to Jews but do not personally identify as Jewish. This makes picking out who is Jewish in a survey extremely difficult. You have to ask the right questions, the right ways, and then figure out which answers mean someone is a Jew. Changes in how you define a Jew can cause swings of literally millions of people.

But once you come up with a definition for who’s Jewish and who isn’t, you’ve still got trouble counting people. That’s because no matter how you define it, there just aren’t that many Jews in the population. Think of a jar with 1000 marbles in it. Of those, somewhere between 975 and 985 are yellow, while the rest are green. The green marbles, between 15 and 25, represent the size of the Jewish population. Now imagine that you have to count them by taking a small sample, say 100 marbles, out of the jar. If the jar were half green and half yellow, this would work pretty well, but with only a small number of green marbles, your sample of 100 could give you one, two, or three, each of which would give you radically different estimate of the number of green marbles in the whole jar. Counting Jews works the same way - the statistical sampling methods used in normal social science break down when trying to reach a very broad but very small group.

Further, Jews are less likely than the population at large to respond to random digit dial phone surveys. In other words, when you try to take the marbles out of the jar and count them, some marbles won’t let you, and the green marbles are less likely to let you. Given the huge swings a few marbles can give you, this makes them even more difficult to count. Because Jews won’t talk to the survey interviewers, we don’t really know how much less likely they are to answer the phone, so we don’t really know how to weight things. We also don’t know the characteristics that make one person more likely to answer than another.

Each of these caveats makes counting Jews extremely difficult, and leads to the controversy around the numbers given by Jewish demographers. So what are the different techniques that are used? Random digit dial surveys, like the massive National Jewish Population Survey use a weighting technique, similar to what political pollsters use, to try and bring the numbers in line with what they know to be true about the population as a whole. These can be controversial, whether for counting Jews or voters, as they start to tinker with the underlying science of public opinion research in ways that not all social scientists or statisticians agree. The NJPS also needs an extremely large sample to cover the whole country, and this means it’s prohibitively expensive to conduct accurately.

Another technique, used by Dr. Ira Sheskin at the University of Miami, takes a collection of community studies and combines them all together to get a national account. Since most Jews live in urban areas, Dr. Sheskin’s community studies, of which he has done many, are more likely to target those numbers where Jews are concentrated. He also over-samples in “core” Jewish areas, increasing his response rate. However, this method has its own shortfalls. For instance, many elderly Jews are “snow birds,” with summer homes in the Midwest or Northeast and winter residences in southern areas like Florida and Arizona, making it likely that they’ll be double counted. The same thing happens with younger Jews who may go to college in one city while claiming residence in another. And finally, it ignores the “long tail” of Jewish communities, smaller cities that still have Jewish populations.

Researchers at Brandeis’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute used a third method. They took publicly available survey data, rather than data specific studies on the Jewish community, and conducted a “meta-analysis,” trying to merge it all together to come up with a good accounting. In other words, instead of taking 100 marbles out of the jar, they found twenty people who had each taken 100 marbles out of the jar for different reasons, and used their counting. Not only does this give them more samples, but it also allowed them to save money for expensive polls with large samples that are required for the other two techniques. Unfortunately, there are a number of risks here. Different studies use different samples, questions, methodology, making it complex to determine how to weight any specific data point, and restricting the available data to what those other studies are interested in. Nevertheless, it provides an innovative, and significantly more cost effective, technique for gathering data not only about how many Jews there are, but information about them as well.

So which of these methods works the best, and how many Jews are there? Because of the problems described above, there’s no way to really know. The best answer is that it’s somewhere between four and eight million, and that whatever number you pick is probably off by a million. And like with most things Jewish, there’s going to be a healthy debate around the issue so that any two Jewish demographers will probably give you three different numbers.

Categories: America, Community, Information Asymmetries, Jewishness, Metrics, Polling
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Prudie has gotten interesting again, tackling a number of great dating issues (rather than crazy divorcees), meaning my favorite advice columnist is back. A reader asks her:

Dear Prudence,
My son is 21, a junior in college, and seriously dating an 18-year-old freshman. He brought her to our house for Thanksgiving, and she is attractive and charming. The problem is that we are Jewish and have mandated to our three sons that they must marry a Jewish woman. We are heartbroken that he is dating a non-Jewish woman. We are not sure if we should forbid him from dating her or if we should leave them alone and hope that they break up and he finds a nice Jewish woman to marry. Please don’t tell me that I should get over this and accept whoever he wants to marry. My wife and I cannot accept a daughter-in-law of a different faith. I don’t want to over- or underreact, and don’t know what to do.

—Heartbroken

Prudie’s answer nails it, the best way to encourage your child to have a Jewish home and marriage is to make Judaism appealing.

Categories: Community, Dating, Jewishness, Matching Mechanisms
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Googling around I found this Jewish Week article on why Jewish mega-philanthropists aren’t donating to Jewish causes:

Our annual research of mega-gifts — gifts above $1 million — turns up at least 50 people who could match or exceed Stanton’s generosity. Typically, these are wealthy Jewish business leaders who give only relatively modest gifts to Jewish causes.

It’s tempting to write these people off as uncommitted Jews, but it would be wrong.

If Jewish causes want to receive mega-gifts, they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to compete on equal ground with the secular hospitals, symphonies, museums and universities, all of which court and inspire Jewish donors.

The money-paragraph at the end:

Look at it this way: Today’s philanthropists think like investors, because that’s how they got wealthy. They want their money to achieve a return; they want results.

That means Jewish causes need to change the way they run their businesses.  Want to attract investment?  You need a clear definition of what you hope to accomplish, a strategy for accomplishing it, and clear metrics that demonstrate your progress.  Even more importantly, those metrics have to reflect your goals, not your activities.  Non-profits, especially in the Jewish community, need to treat their donors like corporations treat their shareholders, and start to demonstrate real, measurable results.

Categories: America, Community, Governance, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school’s catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.

About a Jewish school in England with a majority Muslim student body.

Categories: Community, Education, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
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Rosner’s domain interviewed Jewish demography expert Dr. Ira Sheskin:

Where the lowering of the numbers will have an impact is on small Jewish communities. A Jewish community of 10,000 which now supports, say, 3 synagogues, a JCC, a kosher butcher, and several Jewish agencies and organizations, may very well lose some of this infrastructure if, say 20 years from now, the population is down to 5,000. So the impact of the lowering of the Jewish population will be at the local level more than at the national level.

Many resources in the Jewish community are being applied now by Jewish Federations and Foundations throughout the country to assure the Jewish future. Sheldon Adelson just started a foundation which will provide $200-$250 million per year in grants to Jewish communities. The challenge is to devise programs and services that will provide a quality of life within Jewish communities that will keep people wanting to be Jewish.

Dr. Sheskin also addresses intermarriage later on, though he tacks differently than i would. For those interested in Jewish demographics, most research studies are available for free online from the Jewish Databank. There, you can find the summary reports of most community and national studies, as well as the raw data for many of them, including the National Jewish Population Survey.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Polling
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Phoebe at Jewlicious bemoans that all Jewish events are Jewish singles events, taking her recent Birthright trip as the example:

The problem with Birthright (or at least the version I experienced) as it currently exists is the level of desperation. One can’t help but wonder, if Israel’s such a great country, then why do people have to pay us to go visit it? If Jewish women are so beautiful, as Momo keeps insisting, then why do Jewish men have to be told to notice this?

At some point, the leadership of the Jewish community has to wake up and end the forced mating program before Jews become like pandas, unwilling to breed in captivity to save the species. Instead, they need to go back to stating the value proposition of Judaism, the reasons that it’s worth saving.
Also, her post is one of the best I’ve ever read in the JBlogosphere.

Categories: Community, Dating, Israel, Jewishness, Matching Mechanisms, Strategy
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Israeli Knesset Member Yossi Beilin makes the case that Jimmy Carter said nothing Israelis themselves don’t say:

It is not that Israelis are indifferent to what is said about them, but the threshold of what passes as acceptable here is apparently much higher than it is with Israel’s friends in the United States. In the case of this particular book, the harsh words that Carter reserves for Israel are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially with respect to the occupation.

In other words, what Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories — and perhaps no less important, how he says it — is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.

I think that the American Jewish Community is grossly mishandling their reaction to Carter’s book, not that I’m surprised that the organized Jewish community is mishandling something. Despite nearly unanimous criticism of Carter’s book from nearly everyone I know, and countless more in the jBlogosphere, I’ve yet to find anyone (Beilin excepted) who has actually read the book.

Categories: America, Books, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
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The cool kids in the Jewblogosphere , which I’m just starting to navigate into (thanks mom for the advance recon!), are debating whether social justice is central to Judaism. It starts here, they’re going all week, and Canonist has already chimed in a bit. They raise different points that I might take on later this week, but I’m going to tackle something else today.

The entire debate makes the same mistake that the Jewish community always does by confusing social justice with Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Tikkun Olam is making the world a better place, very broadly defined. It influences everyday interactions like how you perform at work, how you treat your neighbors, what you do with your empty beer can, and whether or not it’s OK to cheat on your taxes, just to name a few.

In contrast, social justice is still very narrow, and usually means leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist political leanings. Income redistribution is seen as social justice, but it doesn’t usually make the world a better place (see, Zimbabwe). If you count equal rights in the picture, you get another amorphous concept. Should we treat everyone equal, or make everyone equal? Because social justice is so narrowly defined, and because there’s real philosophical differences that usually emerge from the popular definitions, it’s really tough to make it a viable central theme for the Jewish community.

Making the world a better place, in contrast, is simple to understand and gives powerful meaning to peoples lives. Contrary to what you may think, nobody else in the marketplace of religions is selling it, and it has wide appeal.

Here’s an anecdote to illustrate the difference. An recent college graduate becomes an engineer and figures out how to make a manufacturing process 7% more efficient. He has just made the world a better place, because now you can make 7% more product for the same amount of money, but he probably hasn’t made society any more just (and he may have even made it less just). For his efforts, he is rightfully compensated by the company he works for, and he takes $5000 of that money and donates it to a charity which uses local labor, and therefore can build and stock an entire library for his contribution.

Another graduate strongly believes in social justice, and decides that education in the developing world is important to them. Because of this, they forsake the salary and benefits of a first job, and instead travel to the developing world to build a school. They want to get their hands dirty. Though they’ve never worked in construction, jointly with a group of 20 other recent graduates, they spend 8 months in Ethopia helping a Western project manager to construct a rudimentary building that a village can then use as a schoolhouse. Of course, they couldn’t get paid to do this - they’re making the world more just, so they borrow money from their parents to pay the organization supporting them about $4000 to cover food and lodging, as well as another $1000 for transportation to get to Ethiopia. Remember it took 20 kids to do this.

I don’t mean to criticize the graduate who spent time volunteering abroad (OK, I do). More than that, I mean to criticize the communal values that define Tikkun Olam in such a way that the volunteer is somehow seen as helping the world more than the engineer. Whether or not Tikkun Olam was central to ancient Judaism doesn’t matter, it’s certainly central to modern Judaism, and it’s what Judaism brings to the table better than any other religion (or non-religion) competing for people’s attentions.

Judaism offers a lot. It is a culture rooted in laws for every day life, a revolution at its time, that are based around values that are still relevant today. What Judaism offers that gives meaning to peoples lives is an end state not of another world, but of this one. I don’t mean to get too theological in this (maybe another day), but I see Judaism as a partnership with God to make the world a better place. Does campaigning for equal rights do this? Absolutely, but it’s not the only way. Does buying only fair trade coffee? I’d argue not so much. But that argument - about how we’re going to make the world a better place - is another example of the richness of Jewish culture. It’s just one for another post.

Categories: America, Jewishness, Marketing, Philanthropy, Strategy
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I’ve recently been complaining around the Shabbat Dessert Table (where my conversations about Jewish life happen) about the lack of a coherent vision in modern Judaism that was attractive to my generation. So when I stumbled on In Search Of The Next Big Jewish Idea in Jewish week, I thought I was getting my answer, something I could reference instead of the massive blog posts I was planning to write. Instead, I found an article that may as well have been titled “What should we throw money at next?” Here’s my breakdown of some key passages:

In recent years the most compelling and successful Big Idea to strengthen Jewish life has been birthright israel, the project begun by several mega-philanthropists who believed that young Jews around the world deserve, and would benefit from, a free 10-day trip to Israel, connecting them to their history, to the land of Israel and the people of Israel.

If Birthright is supposed to be the most compelling and successful Big Idea in the Jewish community, they’re starting from a bad position. “Free vacations” isn’t a Big Idea, it’s a bribe, and a dubiously effective one based on a poorly thought out premise. We are not off to a good start.

Studies show that these visits have a powerfully positive impact on most participants, strengthening their Jewish identity. (The biggest shame is that many additional thousands of young people have been wait-listed on birthright trips for lack of communal funds, with a number of federations failing to meet their own proposed budgets for these trips.)

I could go into an entire post - probably a journal article - about how these studies suck. They ask people who just got a free vacation an amorphous question about their Jewish identity and if it improved. Most importantly, though, Birthright participation is a major self-selection bias. If you want to do a good study, use the wait list as a control group, poll them both and compare the results, rather than compare participants to non-participants. But like I said, this is a topic for another post, and I’m getting off topic - where’s my Big Idea?

It was only fitting that CAJE held the symposium, since CAJE itself was a Next Big Idea when it was founded three decades ago by Jewish teachers as a counter-cultural, grassroots attempt to give support and attention to their work, underpaid and underappreciated.

Great! The big ideas are coming from CAJE, which the quality Jewish educators I know think of as crazy consultants who fly in from New York or LA to waste their time, and the crappy ones think of as the people who give them a paid day off. CAJE might have been a big idea at the time, but as far as big ideas go, I feel like it flopped pretty bad. Maybe things are different in New York, though. OK, let’s see what their panelists had to say:

Rabbi Elliot Dorf, rector of the University of Judaism, is concerned that Jews aren’t replacing themselves because they marry and start families late. How do we solve it?

His suggestion: encourage these young people to marry and have children while in graduate school, and for the community to create and subsidize affordable day care in Jewish institutions.

I don’t know if he’s clueless or just hasn’t thought this through, but Jews aren’t alone in marrying late, it’s a generational thing. Encouraging them to marry will drive more people away than it will attract - especially with the chaning nature of marriage as an institution. Affordable daycare is a great idea, but my intuition says that it will have a marginal impact on family size or start time.

My favorite, and the only one that makes sense to me is here:

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, spoke of Steinhardt’s idea to articulate and disseminate a Common Judaism, a distillation of core Jewish values that speak to the widest possible audience of Jews today. Rabbi Greenberg added his own longstanding idea of creating a retreat center in the New York area.

The Common Judaism is important to me. It says “here is what Jews believe,” and creates a differentiating factor for Judaism in the marketplace of ideas that allows Judaism to compete for finite attention - which has a smaller budget than most Jews’ money-budgets. The retreat center is a stupid idea - there are enough opportunities for Jews to get sent into the woods to study, we don’t need another one.

Dr. Bethamie Horowitz, research director of the Mandel Foundation, asserted that “Jews don’t have to be cloistered” to live Jewish lives anymore, and that rather than ask “why be Jewish?” the question should be “why not be Jewish?”

That doesn’t even make sense to me. The answer to “why not be Jewish?” is because being Jewish is hard - it has added responsibilities and obligations. “Why be Jewish” is the question that identifies what you get for that extra effort. Her ideas sound like really stupid marketing spin to me.

Rabbi Jan Katzew, director of lifelong learning at the Union of Reform Judaism, said that “the single greatest problem” in his work is that “it costs too much to live a rich Jewish life.” He said that many leadership programs and quality day schools with high tuitions “enrich the rich and exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

I think Rabbi Katzew needs to redefine what it means to live a rich Jewish life. Cost is an issue if a) a rich Jewish life isn’t worth it or b) the costs are higher than the value of a rich Jewish life (can I teach Econ 101 at UJ?), or c) a rich Jewish life breaks the budget. A rich Jewish life shouldn’t have a dollar cost - not because schools and kosher food become free, but because you should be able to live a rich Jewish life without them. There is a nice opportunity for an Economics of Religion discussion here, but I’m not going to get into it.

Cyd Weissman, New York director of the Re-Imagine Project, called for “bringing down the walls” on a number of levels — between “learning and living,” between professionals and lay leaders, lay leaders and teachers, and to “create space” to foster a sense of “oneness.”

Quit smoking the doobie smackers. This is another one that doesn’t even make sense. Come up with something concrete, because the Jewish community doesn’t need more vague ideas. Everything I know about the Re-Imagine Project I just learned from their website, and it seems like a good idea, just not a Big Idea. It’s process improvement or strategic realignment for synagogues, but the synagogue is no longer the central Jewish communal institution.

The article ends on a question from an audience member:

A woman in my small discussion group said she and her husband raised their children with Jewish rituals, Hebrew school and synagogue attendance but that the children, now in their 20s, were not at all interested anymore.

“What can we do to bring them back?” she asked.

The problem is that ritual, Hebrew school, and synagogue attendance all need to provide value, or else they’re just a chore. If she had taught her children Jewish values in such a way that they served as some sort of guiding principle in their lives, or demonstrated the worth of being Jewish (and with the synagogues, rituals, and Hebrew Schools I’ve seen, it’s tough), it’s much less likely they would have left, and it would probably be much easier to bring them back.

This turned into a pretty long screed, but there were so few good ideas in that article, and my frustrations with the organized Jewish community are continuing to grow. The last thing the Jewish community needs right now is something else for a philanthropist to throw money away on, even though the philanthropists are lining up to do so. It’s time some serious thought was put into gathering the right data and coming up with real non-programmatic solutions to the problems faced by the community. This means reassessing human resources policies, allocations, governance structures, communal institutions, and coming up with a real strategy for providing Jewish meaning in the 21st century.

(this was too long for me to proofread, so if you catch anything, let me know)

I found the article through the canonist blog, and I’m not sure where I found that.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Aside from those who believe that there is no such thing as free speech, most intellectuals can be counted on to oppose efforts at censorship. In my own case, it was the Jewish environment in which I was raised that led me to value free speech and expression. Although I grew up a secular Jew — my bar mitzvah was as pro forma as they come, and after that, I have returned to synagogue only a handful of times — I was spoon-fed a version of Jewish liberalism in which we Jews were always expected to come to the defense of unpopular ideas. When American Nazis announced in 1977 their intention to march in Skokie, Ill. — a town in which one-sixth of the population was related to a Holocaust survivor — the American Civil Liberties Union defended their right to do so, and many of the leaders of and contributors to the ACLU were Jewish. I recall taking considerable pride in the ACLU’s actions, not out of Jewish self-hatred, but out of pride in Jewish liberalism.

From “Free Speech, Israel, and Jewish Illiberalism” by Alan Wolfe in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wolfe discusses how Jewish organizations, but more often, large individual Jewish donors, will pressure institutions to drop anti-Israel speakers, exhibitions, and articles, in contrast to the traditional liberal Jewish principle which answered disagreeable speech with more speech. It’s spot on and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It gets me thinking, though: why the shift? Here are some hypotheses I’ve come up with:

1. Gentiles are too afraid of offending Jews: There’s a tendency, especially in America, to over-estimate Jewish sensitivities (I’m reminded of a censored episode of Family Guy, which every Jew I know found hysterical). Most Jews might still support the right of anti-Israel speakers to be heard, but when a few make a stink, gentiles, who aren’t in touch with the Jewish community, assume that the they just offended the lot of us, and afraid of the Antisemite label, panic. This isn’t just a phenomenon with Jews, though - people often tread lightly around minorities, weather they’re talking about race, gender, ethnicity, or religion. We’re just sensitive as a society.
2. Gentiles are too afraid of losing Jewish money: I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial sense, I mean it in the sense that Jews are disproportionately philanthropic, and offending them en masse is a bad idea for any institution. This isn’t really a religious thing, it’s another instance where an organization is beholden to their donor stakeholders, and it often happens with much more mundane institutions (I’m thinking of bad purchases by art museums). In this case, I think the problem doesn’t lie with Jews having lost their liberal attitudes towards free speech, but with individual Jews exercising their donor muscle illiberally. I’m conflicted about this, because while they shouldn’t censor speech, I don’t think they have an obligation to sponsor speech they disagree with. Bottom line: when it all comes down to it, I highly doubt that Jewish contributions to universities and cultural institutions are nearly as sensitive as these institutions’ leaders seem to think.
3. Jews are more afraid of anti-Israel speakers than Nazis: I can really believe this one, especially among baby-boomer Jews, who have internalized a real fear for Israel’s survival that Gen-x and younger Jews just don’t relate to. Nazis in America aren’t seen as powerful, so we can let them march, but there are Jews who are genuinely afraid of what anti-Israel speakers have to say, whether because it has a grain of truth, because they fear so heavily for Israel, or because they feel it has more mainstream support. Regardless, what this says is that Jews who feel this way are liberal when it’s convenient, and that’s just a bad way to set up policy like this.
4. Most Jews Are Still Liberal: As of a few years ago, members of the ADL were still telling me that “more speech” is the counterweight to hate speech, and the leadership hasn’t changed significantly since. The position of the Israel on Campus Coalition and its constituents is that campus activists should focus on a positive message for Israel, talking about things other than conflict. The debate really isn’t that important, so it’s safe for Jewish activists to ignore controversial speakers. When I did PR and communications for the Michigan State Jewish community, my first successful press release was for a pro-Israel event with a moonwalk, my statements in response to anti-Israel events looked like this:

“The college campus should always embrace the free discourse of ideas,” Dworin said.

However, Dworin said the film only presents one side of the conflict.

“I think it is disingenuous to show these women, who have killed other human beings, as if they have a monopoly on victimhood,” Dworin said.

These are just a few hypotheses, and I think there’s an interplay between all of them, and other factors, at work when Israel elicits illiberalism. When it comes down to it, the real issue for me here isn’t about Isreal, it’s about the free speech and civil liberties implications, and how we deal with speech that we disagree with.

Categories: America, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
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