An Imaginary Letter JTS Faculty Should Write Defending President Herzog’s Honorary Doctorate

Note: I am the son of a proud JTS graduate, inspired by a generation of Zionist Conservative rabbis and educators. This is the kind of response they would write – and that today’s JTS faculty should write — encouraging every Conservative Jew to sign and circulate.

Dear Students,

Your letter reveals you missed a core value defining our institution and the Conservative movement. Zionism has been a cornerstone of Conservative ideology for decades and remains a bedrock value. We challenge you respectfully. You’re free to disagree. We do, however, question your judgment, values, and understanding of JTS and Conservative Judaism.

JTS, our website declares, “is deeply committed to strengthening the North American Jewish community’s ties to Israel and to sharing the centrality of Israel to Jewish peoplehood.

We believe in machloket – healthy argument. But Judaism didn’t survive for 3500 years by only debating and never standing for anything. Judaism has preserved defining principles, including the land of Israel’s centrality and a love for Klal Yisrael, the Jewish people, 45 percent of whom live in Israel. Honoring their president honors them, our brothers and sisters still bravely fighting a war for their survival against evil Jihadists.

President Yitzhak Herzog doesn’t need our defense. We’re thrilled to celebrate the “office” and the “man,” especially now. During these polarizing times – in Israel, throughout the Jewish world – he embodies unity and hope.  With his well-tuned moral compass, he has defended Israel worldwide, fearlessly, substantively, while reminding Israelis and Jews that there’s far more uniting us than dividing us.

As someone in public life for a quarter-or-a-century, Herzog may have taken stands you or others dislike. If he said nothing you found fresh or controversial over decades – he wouldn’t be doing his job as a leader, nor would you be doing your job as thoughtful students.

We don’t grant honorary doctorates to tape-recorders mimicking us – but to impressive role models.  We toast his achievements, his compelling Zionist vision, and his country – our homeland.

And, please, don’t be dupes delighting the anti-Zionists who hate us, Israel, and America – and would happily kill you too. Don’t ape their genocide libel. One of you told The Forward: “I feel like there’s a genocide happening. And the silence is killing all of us.”

Didn’t we teach you better? Our job as academics is not to “feel” there’s a genocide happening – but to assess. Research what genocide means. Read the UN definition requiring “intent” to eliminate a people, “wherever” they are. Compare the scale of death in genuine genocides, from the Holocaust to Rwanda. Discover the UN’s urban warfare standard that democratic armies often legitimately kill ten civilians for every combatant. Compare that – even accepting Hamas’s numbers – to Israel’s ratio of one or two civilians killed per terrorist. And, as we mourn every innocent death, we ask – how did the world buy this big lie?

This lie that President Herzog encouraged a genocide that never occurred, looks even sillier when reading two sentences of hundreds of thousands of words he has said, rousing Israelis since October 7. Herzog said, shortly after the massacre: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware or not involved.”

Test the claim:

1. Did Palestinians celebrate in Gaza and elsewhere on October 7, with one poll showing 74 percent cheering the slaughter?
2. Did pro-Palestinians worldwide, including many on this Columbia campus, celebrate those unspeakable crimes?
3. Did any hostage, including a few who evaded their captors, find even one Palestinian helping?

That doesn’t mean Palestinians deserve to die. But those facts mock the Western conceit that it’s “only” Hamas fighting Israel, and everyone else is an innocent victim.

And, a fact-check. Your letter claims President Herzog’s visit following Bondi Beach “divided” Australian Jewry. That’s like claiming your JTS graduating class is “split” with six seniors objecting – and twenty-four welcoming Herzog. A few Jews protested – commanding outsized media attention. Those dissenters probably did more to further unify Australia’s passionately Zionist Jewish community.

Predictably, you quote Abraham Joshua Heschel, who is often misquoted as the patron saint of every trendy Progressive cause. Instead, read his prose poem to Zionism: Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Heschel rushed to Israel following the Six Day War, which Israel fought justifiably, after the Arabs threatened to destroy Israel and blocked international waterways — rather than murdering 1200 at once. He marveled in Israel’s victory, its strength, its poetry.

Expressing the Jewish consensus — programmed into Conservative Judaism’s DNA –Heschel wrote, that “To abandon these bonds” to Israel” was – and is – “to deny our identity. Again and again our hearts turned to Zion and Jerusalem.” Heschel called the Zionist Idea – meaning the Jewish “right, its title, to the land of Israel” — an “intimate ingredient of Jewish consciousness… at the core of Jewish history, a vital element of Jewish faith.”

Beyond affirming the “justice” of Israel’s cause against the “brutal threat,” Heschel sighed: “Auschwitz is in our veins.” Who dares suggest, he thundered, that “We, the generation that witnessed the holocaust, should stand by calmly while [Arab] rulers proclaim their intention to bring about a new holocaust?”

That didn’t make Heschel “pro-war” but “pro-life.” You owe President Herzog an apology for calling him “pro-war,” given Israel’s reluctance to crush Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, until they attacked us viciously.

Finally, a word to the four rabbinical students who signed the letter. JTS is multi-dimensional. As an academic institution, it imposes no political tests. Left or right, Conservative or Orthodox, Zionist or anti-Zionist can earn an “A” if deserved.

Our rabbinical school, however, is different. Graduating from there, makes you a Conservative Rabbi, representing our values, our viewpoint, our brand. An anti-Zionist Conservative Rabbi is as paradoxical as a Jesuit priest rejecting Jesus, or a ham sandwich purporting to be kosher.

If you’re anti-Zionist, you don’t belong at JTS. Just as we would object if you were racist or a Jew for Jesus, we don’t understand how anti-Zionists can become Conservative rabbis. Our Rabbinical Assembly calls itself itself a “strong supporter of Israel and Zionist activities” with members “working to strengthen Israel and Israel-Diaspora relations.”

A rabbinical school lacking red lines is like a human being with no spine: you collapse, suffocating your soul.

Finally, as we remind you to respect our code of conduct and not disrupt any speakers, we hope you will listen to President Herzog. He may repeat his August 2022 call for “Responsibility Zionism,” while celebrating the 125th anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s founding Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzog proclaimed: “Together, we’ll choose responsibility every day and keep our country and our people safe; together, we’ll continue debating, arguing, and grappling” with tough questions “while fostering a respectful, enriching, and responsible dialogue between all parts of the Jewish people.”

One thing Herzog probably won’t mention: his many funerals, shivas, and hospital visits.  He just does that – bearing the national and emotional burden masterfully. So, rather than disrespecting Israel’s president and recycling anti-Zionist libels, why not learn from President Herzog – and emulate him?

Sincerely,

Gil Troy (modeling the correct JTS faculty response).

The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest E-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.