Yes, It May Hurt, But Jewish Knees Must Not Tremble

This week in a blog post for The Times of Israel, Kenneth G. Stern made the rather bizarre argument that while yes, progressive groups on college campuses making a point to exclude Zionist students from their organizations may be hurtful to Jewish students, while yes, it may feel like an attack on the very nature of their Jewish identity, and while yes, it places an unfair litmus test on only Jewish students to disavow their national sympathies, it must be allowed to happen because campus groups must be permitted to “define their own politics.” The piece provides a litany of reasons for why Zionists should not be banned from LGBT rights organizations or abortion rights advocacy groups at our universities. In fact, Stern offers more reasons to be against his central argument than to be for it, and yet he concludes that Jewish students must grin and bear the exclusion anyway in the name of an imperfectly articulated ideal of “selectivity.” 

Stern’s piece comes on the heels of a recently announced lawsuit by The Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Jewish On Campus against the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz, on the basis that a campus support group for victims of sexual assault all but purged from the organization two students who expressed support for Israel’s existence on their Instagram pages. The suits reads: “[SUNY New Paltz is] is denying Jewish and Israeli survivors of sexual assault on campus equal access to the educational opportunities and services they need, on the basis of their shared ancestry, ethnicity and national origin in violation of Title VI.” This issue being brought forth to the Department of Education has been a long time coming. Hundreds of Jewish students over the last decade, myself included, have made the same complaint that they were made to feel unwelcome and ostracized in left-wing spaces on campus simply because they refuse to deny Israel’s right to exist. The Department of Education will be entrusted to decide whether that is in fact discrimination, which I would argue strongly that it is. 

None should doubt Stern’s credentials when it comes to questions of antisemitism. He wrote the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism and served as legal counsel to the defense when David Irving, a renowned Holocaust denier, accused Professor Deborah Lipstadt of defaming him. He has researched antisemitism and different forms of hate at the American Jewish Committee and at Bard College and has written thoughtful evaluations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its ramifications on campuses in years past. However, Jews involved in these conversations must reserve the right to criticize each other’s opinions, especially when dealing with the social contagion of anti-Zionism that promises to wreak havoc on the Jewish community once its activists graduate from the campus and into our institutions. 

This opinion is one such case. Stern’s main argument is as follows: Because Jewish organizations such as Hillel and Chabad make a point to exclude anti-Zionists from their organizations based on political sensitivities, the exclusion of Zionists should be protected as well, and any political group has the right to set its own normative boundaries as to not upset their purpose. “One wouldn’t want to force a Young Republican club to include a Bernie Sanders supporter (or vice versa),” Stern writes. 

If groups on campus have the right to set their own boundaries to ensure their own purpose is fulfilled, then Jewish groups that seek to represent the Jewish community absolutely reserve the right to draw a line around the more than 90 percent of the world’s Jewish population that believe in Israel’s right to exist. Anti-Zionists are excluded from Jewish organizations because these organizations are Zionist by their very nature as Jewish. A Jewish group like Hillel excluding anti-Zionist BDSers is the equivalent of the Black Student Union excluding MAGA Republicans from their ranks. This is not ideological discrimination; these are Jews setting the boundary of their own community, which is a step taken by every other community in order to feel secure. This is especially true considering those who fall outside of this majority — and even more so those in the tiny minority who actively campaign for Israel’s dissolution — are so inseparable from traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories, tropes and rhetoric that their movement hardly exists without them. If anti-Zionism is antisemitism, as the IHRA definition of antisemitism (written by Stern himself) notes, then Jews should not allow antisemites into their spaces, especially if these individuals choose to use their Judaism to hurt their own community.

When progressive clubs that advocate for a variety of issues place rules on only one specific national expression and self-determination movement it is both a double standard and antisemitic.

The clubs that ban Zionists, unlike Jewish organizations that ban anti-Zionists, are, in contrast, not anti-Zionist by their nature. A campus labor rights organization, a criminal justice reform coalition, or, in the case of SUNY New Paltz, a sexual assault support group, may champion ideas on the left-hand side of the political spectrum, but their mission statement does not concern whether a Jewish state exists in any borders in the Middle East. In terms of organizations that are explicitly anti-Zionist, like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, well, Zionists students are not exactly beating down the doors trying to get in. There has never been a problem with Jewish, Zionist students trying to enter these organizations. But when progressive clubs that advocate for a variety of issues place rules on only one specific national expression and self-determination movement it is both a double standard and antisemitic. In these cases, when the causes advocated for by the organization do not rely on a need to reject the very existence of Israel, doing so only makes clear the latent antisemitism of the organization itself. And that is de facto discriminatory toward Jewish students, the people on campus most likely to be Zionists.

Following Stern’s logic, it can be conceded that campus groups have a right to exclude Zionists with particular political beliefs about the State of Israel. For example, a left-wing organization may be justifiably uncomfortable with a member who routinely advocates for the annexation of the West Bank or the displacement of Palestinians. However, the very existence of the State of Israel itself, as Stern concedes, is a fundamental and integral facet of Jewish identity and expression. Many Jews on campus channel their relationship with Judaism through Zionism and through Israel. To ban every Zionist from your table is the equivalent of banning most if not all Chinese students, Mexican students, or Swedish students who are simply uncomfortable with the proposition of their home country being annihilated. 

The title of Stern’s article is “Yes it may hurt, but campus groups have the right to exclude Zionists.” I would suggest that while yes, it may hurt to stand your ground as a proud Jew and a proud Zionist, we must not allow the non-Jewish world to dictate in which spaces we can and cannot participate. As former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin once said, “I am Not a Jew with Trembling Knees,” meaning it is incumbent on all confident Jews to refrain from showing weakness in the face of abject discrimination and subjugation. Doing this is not always easy, but if the campus is indeed ground zero of an upswell of antisemitism that is seeping into the broader culture at large, then yes, it may hurt, but Jewish knees must not tremble.

Blake Flayton is the New Media Director and columnist for the Jewish Journal.