War in Israel/Palestine presents complicated landscape for American Jews on college campuses

Friday night I saw the play Prayer for the French Republic, which centers around a Jewish family struggling to gauge how safe they are in their home country. They consider moving to Israel and grapple with all of the complexities therein. Will they really be safer in Israel than in France? How quickly can they learn Hebrew? How quickly will they be able to reestablish their careers? 

In the end, the two parents and their adult children decide to move despite their many pragmatic concerns, and they do so because of a gut feeling that they have. They sense that they are not safe, and the children’s grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, understands. Sometimes you have to take extreme caution based on a gut instinct because horrific things happen in the world, especially to Jews.

I saw this play on Friday and woke up to news of the horrific Hamas attacks on Saturday. The news offered a clear and vivid response to the characters’ unanswered questions about safety in Israel. The play’s timeliness was striking in more ways than one: It also brought up the complexity of Israel/Palestine and the fraught relationship that some diaspora Jews have to the region. 

Israel is supposed to exist as a lifeline that was created to prevent another Holocaust, but the mere existence of this country, which was established with noble intentions, has caused decades of displacement, death, and human rights violations in the region. The French family grappled with this complexity in the play, as do the American Jews I know in real life.

On Saturday, after Hamas’ brutal attacks marked the beginning of a war, the initial response from American publications and from our country’s most notable politicians did not acknowledge this complexity. Rather, their response was pure and simple solidarity with Israeli citizens, the Israeli government, and American Jews by extension. But since that initial phase of responses, an ideological and moral debate in the U.S. has come to full fruition, at its most intense on college campuses.

There was a controversial anti-Zionist letter signed by numerous Harvard campus groups that has since been retracted by some and has also led to retaliation and intimidation from a Conservative group several states away. There was a similar letter signed by a Tufts campus group, which the University has denounced. This morning, a headline in The Boston Globe simply stated: “Campus disputes over Israeli-Palestinian conflict turn uglier.”

It is confusing and challenging for American Jews to figure out our relationship with Israel during times of relative peace, so I cannot imagine how difficult it is for campus Jews right now. They have so much to contend with. The mere fact that Saturday was the deadliest day for Jews in global history since the Holocaust is enough to process, but Jews on these college campuses are tasked with taking in way more than just that. It almost seems like there is pressure for students to choose a side, and the dilemma is presented with moral urgency. Either you support Israel’s right to defend itself in whatever way it sees fit, or you support Palestine in the same way. 

What I hope for Jewish students in the hotbed of this moral and ideological debate is that they can find safe spaces to process and to grieve this immense loss of life without pressure to choose a side. This is an especially difficult time to be Jewish on a college campus, and my thoughts are with those who are struggling.

I echo the sentiments of New Voices, a magazine by and for Jewish students, which they eloquently stated during the 2021 crisis in Israel/Palestine. Their statement captures the nuance that many American Jews are contending with, and I hope students in 2023 can find space to grieve while acknowledging these complexities:

“As a justice-focused Jewish magazine, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians and all other colonized peoples seeking freedom from occupation. We also uplift our own desire for global Jewish safety across the diaspora as a historically marginalized and displaced people, centering our practice of ahavat yisrael in the work.”