We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: The week after next, paid subscribers will get May’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire.
Paid subscribers also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Columbia President Nemat Shafik’s congressional hearing, which. As I wrote in the piece, “To watch the hearing was to be reminded that to haul a university president before Congress both fails to fight antisemitism and misunderstands the function of universities.”
This week on the Election Tricycle, we spoke about how candidates try to fight complacency.
This student editorial about what happened the next day — namely, that Shafik called the NYPD to campus to come and arrest student protesters — made me very proud to be a Spec alumna. Student journalists across the country have been rising to meet this moment.
New Lines had an interesting piece on the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal and the rise and potential future of his AAP.
CNN has a report on the mass grave discovered at a hospital in Gaza.
From the BBC: “The Slovak government has approved a proposal to abolish the public broadcaster and replace it with a new body, prompting renewed fears for the independence of the media under Robert Fico's populist-nationalist coalition.”
From the Guardian: “Poland and Lithuania have said they are prepared to help Ukrainian authorities return men subject to military conscription to the country, after Kyiv announced this week that it was suspending consular services for such men who were now abroad.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…Jewish students!
These aren’t really thoughts on Jewish students. These are a few disjoined reflections on how we’ve been talking about Jewish students. I think I’m writing more about the protests elsewhere, but I did want to use this space to think through the following.
I’ve seen some say that it’s tokenizing to note that there are Jewish students at the pro-Palestine protests/Gaza encampments happening now on university campuses. I have to say that I strongly disagree with this. This is a major dividing line for Jewish people, and especially younger Jewish people, and it’s only right and appropriate to point out that there are Jews on multiple sides of this issue, all viewing their positions as expressions of their Jewish identities (I would argue that this is also true for students who are neither protesting against the war nor waving Israeli flags).
When people say “Jewish students,” they may have a particular position on Israel in mind. When people call for the National Guard to be sent in to clear Columbia’s campus for the good of Jewish students, they probably have a specific subset in mind, too. But we know that young Jewish people are increasingly critical of and disconnected from Israel (and per the one poll we have on this, that younger Jews are less concerned about campus antisemitism than their older counterparts). It’s not wrong to remind people of that, or that the disagreements happening elsewhere between Jews are also playing out on campuses.
What that doesn’t mean, however, is that there is no antisemitism at any of these protests. Further, safety—and here I mean safety from harm or harassment, not from discomfort or disagreement—shouldn’t be contingent on one’s political position, or religion, or ethnicity, or etc.
The Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld had what I thought was a good thread on this issue, in which he articulated that part of the problem is that we’re talking about antisemitism without all agreeing what is and is not antisemitic, and that some of the calls to punish universities by, say, defunding them would inevitably impact the Jewish students those making the calls are ostensibly trying to protect. To this, I would add only that to strip a population of its plurality and diversity in the name of defending it is ironic at best and misleading at worst.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I’m speaking on a panel on antisemitism at the Capital Jewish Museum next Tuesday. If you’re in Washington, DC, consider coming.
This LA Times profile on Rabbi Sharon Brous is worth reading.
Here is an upsetting (to me, anyway) story about rabbis deciding that people murdered on Oct. 7 are not Jewish enough to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
New Lines has a story about the India’s Bene Israel community and how it’s holding on with food.
This was, I thought, a good piece about liberal Tel Aviv’s mayor inviting a religious Zionist to his city council coalition and what it means.
-ET
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