The biggest piece of advice I have for Jewish parents

There has been alarming news from college campuses over the last year and a half.

We have seen inflammatory rhetoric, perhaps most notoriously from an extremist student organization at Columbia that endorsed a member’s claim that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

There have also been a small number of violent incidents, including the time counterprotesters turned aggressive at the UCLA pro-Palestinian encampment. Another incident occurred when a group of UC Berkeley students protested an Israeli speaker by crowding the building and confronting attendees.

This is alarming. There is no doubt about it. But these sorts of incidents are small in number.

There is plenty to be nervous about, but my biggest piece of advice is to focus more on the positives than the negatives. Rather than focusing your attention on, for instance, antisemitic rhetoric that students chanted during a pro-Palestinian encampment, focus your attention on the Jewish community. 

I encourage you to be curious about the positive aspects of Jewish life. There are so many questions to ask, and these are only some of them:

• Do Jews on campus find safety and solidarity among peers? What does that look like?

• What support do Jewish faculty and staff provide?

• How do Jewish student leaders support and advocate for their peers? 

• How big is the Jewish population? 

• What sort of programming is there? 

• What ideological diversity exists within the Jewish community? 

• How does the Jewish community navigate its ideological diversity?

It can be upsetting to witness, but tension and inflammatory rhetoric around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not indicative of a rot at the core of the student body. It is unfortunately par for course because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is prolonged and volatile. It incites strong emotions in those who learn about it.

Jewish students do not need to limit their options because of extremism that exists among a small but vocal portion of the student body. Jewish students can still find belonging in communities where there is tension around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.