In Defense of Hillel
5 min read
In 1923, as elite American universities began adopting quotas restricting the number of Jews they admitted, an organization was formed to provide a home for Jewish students on campus where they could congregate to pray, socialize, and feel welcome. This organization was called Hillel, and it has been the central address for Jewish life at colleges and universities ever since. That’s how I found my way to it when I was a student at UCLA; overwhelmed by the size of the university, I was looking to connect with a smaller group of individuals with whom I likely shared values, history, and a sense of cultural belonging.
I found this at Hillel, where I discovered so much about who I am in this world, and formed relationships that have lasted my entire adult life. That is why I have been heartbroken and horrified in recent months as the broader Hillel organization has become the target of regular threats and attacks.
Hillel is where I was taught how to pray, how to learn, and how to participate in charity and social-justice work. Hillel is where I learned to define my Judaism not by my immigrant grandparents’ experience and the Holocaust, but by the joy and beauty of Jewish culture as it is unfolding to this day.
Hillel has been foundational to so many Jewish stories over the past century. In the 1930s, it established a student refugee program, saving the lives of nearly 150 young European Jews. In 1947, it helped Hungarian-born Tom Lantos come to the U.S., where he became the only Holocaust survivor to ever be elected to Congress. In the 1950s and ’60s, Hillels across the country organized robust support for the civil-rights movement. In 1960, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Hillel director Max Ticktin addressed 500 students in a march on Library Mall and called for an end to both local and national discrimination, and encouraged students to fight against racist Jim Crow laws. I have raised my children at Hillel, continuing to participate in many capacities even after I received my doctorate; many Hillels are also community centers of a sort, providing religious and spiritual services, meals, and a sense of belonging for those who find themselves at a transition point in their life. When I travel the country and the world, I often visit a local Hillel, and find myself feeling perfectly at home.
And this organization is being attacked all over the country, a dynamic that emerged after October 7 and that appears to have grown only more frequent and intense in recent months, as students have returned to campus. At the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a message on social media posted by the UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine stated that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” specifically mentioning Hillel. The post went on to say that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned,” and that Zionist groups will not be normalized or welcomed on campus. At Hunter College, in Manhattan, students at Hillel found a sign depicting an assault rifle, calling on students to Bring the war home next to a sign reading Hillel go to hell with an upside-down triangle, indicating that this Hillel is a target.At a recent Baruch College Hillel event held at a Midtown restaurant in New York City designed for incoming freshmen to learn about campus life, Jewish students were met with protesters shouting references to the hostages recently executed by Hamas; a video posted on Instagram featured a protester shouting to a female student, “Where’s Hersh, you ugly-ass bitch?” (The reference was to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American citizen recently murdered by Hamas.)
In my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, I thrived as a student leader at Hillel under the guidance of a boldly liberal Zionist rabbi. He said then what I still believe now: The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and dignity, and deserve better from their own leadership as well as from Israel. As students, we sought to have peaceful, respectful conversations with students on campus who advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We were met with accusations of racism, swastikas chalked on the bricks of Bruin Walk, and protesters who donned Hamas armbands and stared at us in stony silence. We watched in bewilderment as the “Zionism is racism” campaigns began to take hold on campuses across the country. It was astounding that students would not engage with even those of us who were trying to find common ground and believed in coexistence.
In the 1990s, many of us felt that we had little choice but to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state. The refusal of some students to engage in dialogue was once an unspoken policy; now it is an explicit one. Anti-normalization is the name for this trend. It is rooted in the idea that merely talking with people who hold a different point of view from you is tantamount to recognition or acceptance of that view and should be avoided at all costs. The refusal to engage shuts down any dialogue and any sincere attempt to bridge our pain and find ways to communicate with empathy and compassion. This tactic reveals an intellectual weakness, an inability to respond reasonably to a point of view that is not your own. And it is fundamentally contrary to the basic values of the university and academia at large: exposure to and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to find creative and positive outlets for differences of opinion.
It is, to put it plainly, undemocratic to support the tactics of drowning out and protesting Israeli or Jewish speakers simply because they are Jewish. It needs to be called out for what it is: anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitic to seek to deny Jewish students the ability to access the most important organization for Jewish life on campus. We cannot allow this to be normalized.
As for me, I have been uninvited from venues since October 7 simply because I am Jewish. I have been shouted down, asked to leave, accused of a hatred I know not how to summon. And my response is one that I and generations of students have learned at Hillel. Hillel teaches that we should not be afraid to be Jewish. We can be proud to be American. And we deserve the rights and privileges awarded to every minority on campus: a safe place to gather, to pray, to learn, and to fight for what is right.
