Canceled for Being a Zionist, a Rabbi Calls for Interfaith Dialogue

It’s back-to-campus time and the vibes aren’t good. Since the Oct. 7 murderous Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza, there have been tens of thousands of lost lives, ongoing violence, famine and starvation of innocents, and the catastrophic threat of regional war with nuclear weapons.  Universities across North America have been the eye of the storm of hatred, intolerance and violence – and doing anything but fulfilling the mission of higher education: learning and fostering civil debate and intellectual growth. Even books, as I experienced last week in New York City, have been weaponized. My appearance with Joshua Leifer at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled on the grounds that I am a Zionist.

Even books, as I experienced last week in New York City, have been weaponized. My appearance with Joshua Leifer at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled on the grounds that I am a Zionist.  

Divisions have become so extreme that college classrooms – even where the course content has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas war – are now staging areas for leveling the incessant drumbeat charge of racism, colonialism and genocide against Jews. With students, faculty and administrators returning to campus on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, there is an opportunity for brave leadership to counter these destructive and hateful trends.

Campus Hillels, interfaith centers and mosques — spiritual homes for university communities seeking meaningful connection and the sustaining waters of learning and faith — need to step into this breach.  Rabbis, priests, pastors and imams must dig deep new wells of inspiration by honoring the shared religious and historical connections between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Despite the personal pain and anguish of war, they must model resilience, dialogue and the possibility for peace.

But if past is prologue, then it’s worth looking back in order to chart a new path forward for this generation of students who are understandably dismayed, distraught and disillusioned by the seeming intractability of a daunting range of challenges:  global warming, income disparity, the persistence of the hatred of difference and, since Oct. 7, the as yet unresolved hundred years’ war between Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully in a land that each people claims as their national homeland.  

It would be a mistake to think, as some have suggested, that the attention span of the iPhone generation will soon move on from the Israel-Hamas war, just as other mass movements of the past decade have arisen and flamed out: from globalization riots in Seattle and climate change marches across the globe to Black Lives Matter and women’s marches in cities across America.  We are not prisoners to an attention deficit, but to a deficiency of dialogue; and my own experience as a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison comes to mind.

A generation ago, while my own campus was often the scene of protests over U.S. foreign policy, the Israel-Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the British war over the Falklands and much more, I found refuge not only in university classrooms, where learning was still valued and respected, but at my Hillel as well.

Each Sunday morning, without fail, the Hillel, run by then-director Dr. Irv Saposnik of blessed memory, was a center for students, faculty and community members to gather over bagels and The New York Times.  The open space, with morning light pouring in, was a sacred sanctuary for discussions led by professors and graduate students from across a vast expanse of disciplines. Here were impromptu seminars which held at the center the shared value for argument, respectful disagreement and learning.  “Canceling” someone was a completely foreign concept.  Even when tempers flared, Irv, who had a Ph.D. in English and was also a professor of Yiddish literature, was ready with a joke or a laugh, to lower the temperature. It’s what he modeled in his staff and students, training a generation of future leaders to do very much the same.  To this day, I remain proud to call myself his student.

Today’s campuses need a similar movement led by those willing to step into this toxic breach and model what an education should be. While university presidents and campus security apparatuses continue to necessarily and urgently address issues of safety and outside agitators on today’s campuses, we need interfaith leaders to create sanctuaries for dialogue and learning and asylums of enlightenment, so that students, faculty and administrators can gather in community settings founded on dialogue, listening, learning and peace.  

When the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem in 70 C.E., leading to the exile of the Jewish people from their homeland for two millennia until the rise of Zionism that created the modern state of Israel, the rabbis of the Talmud did not blame the Romans for their demise but rather themselves. They taught in the Talmud that the Second Temple was destroyed for wanton hatred.  Factionalization, demonization, othering, canceling – in whatever language it’s dressed – is hatred at the core.  And a society overcome by the saturation of a culture of hate is a culture that cannot withstand pressures from outside or within.

There is another story in the Talmud about the great sage Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had to be smuggled out of Jerusalem by his students to escape Jewish assassins who wanted him dead for being willing to negotiate with the Roman authorities.  What did Yohanan want?  Houses of study away from the burning center; places of learning so that the eternal values of Judaism could survive the bloodshed of war; sanctuaries of argument and even disagreement – for the sake of heaven – so that word of God could be heard.

One path forward for our college campuses, in the midst of this dreadful war, is for an interfaith movement to transcend differences, building houses of study that value the aspirations of all those who seek truth, justice and peace. 

That word of God would give rise to both Christianity and Islam.  Therefore I say that one path forward for our college campuses, in the midst of this dreadful war, is for an interfaith movement to transcend differences, building houses of study that value the aspirations of all those who seek truth, justice and peace.

Rabbi Andy Bachman is founder of the Center for Midwest Jewish Communities and a Senior Consultant for the Jewish Community Legacy Project.