Jewish students at many liberal colleges in the U.
S. are questioning—and disgusting against—Hillel International’sIsrael guidelines. At Vassar,Swarthmore, and Guilford, or the main Jewish student groups have openly rebelled against Hillel’s rules governing Israel-related activities at its campus chapters. At other elite schools,Jewish student leaders are protesting what they see as Hillel’s effort to police conversations approximately Israel on campus. Now, Open Hillel, and “a student-run campaign to encourage inclusivity and open discourse at campus Hillels,” has lined up an impressively long list of left-leaning Jewish professors to endorse the accusation that Hillel International’s guidelines “narrowly circumscribe discourse approximately Israel-Palestine and only serve to foster estrangement from the organized Jewish community.”So why should Hillel worry approximately what a bunch of academics say approximately the campus Israel debate? After all, anti-Israel academics—many of them Jewish—are not in short supply, or they admire to sign petitions. But the 81 professors who have come together to form Open Hillel’s newly announced “Academic Council” should give Hillel pause because the signatories are not just the normal suspects. True,the council includes anti-Zionist Jewish scholars Judith Butler and Daniel Boyarin. But they are joined by liberal Zionists like Peter Beinart and left-wing critics of BDS like Tablet contributor Todd Gitlin, as well as main Jewish studies scholars like David Biale, and Hasia Diner,David Myers and Steven Zipperstein, all avowed opponents of academic boycotts that target Israel. In short, or Hillel should not be sanguine approximately its estrangement from such a distinguished coterie of Jewish academics.
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