Songs in the key of (an incredibly inspiring Jewish) life
All those headlines about anti-Israel activity and bullying professors have you feeling gloomy about the future of Jewish life on campus? Then you should have been with me last weekend and the weekend before. I have seen the future of the Jewish people, and it sings and dances.
On Sunday, it was the 54th annual Israel Folk Dance Festival, held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in the shadow of Lincoln Center. Nineteen dance troupes took part in the event, including groups from six colleges.
Who even knew that college students were still doing Israeli dance? But there they were, kids from Brandeis, Boston U., Washington University in St. Louis, JTS, and the much maligned Columbia University (more about that later). All had smiles on their sweaty faces as they raced through their horas and images of the Old City flickered on giant video screens. I was having a very Camp Judaea moment, on a gloomy Sunday on West 66th Street.
I felt the same elation the week before at the Shabbat A Cappella festival at Rutgers University. Organized by Kol Halayla, the Rutgers Hillel a cappella group, it featured Jewish a cappella groups from six colleges, and four (!) secular groups from Rutgers. If a cappella makes you think of barbershop quartets or Gregorian chants, think again. Scott Hall was packed with hooting fans, who greeted some of the groups like rock stars — or at least future rabbinical students who could really move their hips.
I can’t imagine a better advertisement for Jewish campus life than these two events. Every Jewish school — day and supplementary — should be inviting these college dancers and singers to their assemblies. There is something about song and dance that totally bypasses the intellect and sprints straight for the kishkes, the place where junior high and high school students do 85 percent of their thinking. I had no Jewish life to speak of when I was in college, and I remember spending all of freshman and most of my sophomore years looking for what I’ve since learned to call a “chevrah,” a group of close friends and confidantes. Over consecutive weekends I saw the Jewish life I missed out on, and hoped my kids saw the Jewish life they will want to take part in when they head off to college.
Not to buck the conventional wisdom, but I don’t think it is guilt or panic that will make the next generation of Jewish kids excited about being Jewish. And with some notable exceptions — birthright israel comes to mind — the organized Jewish community seems to be banking on a lot of guilt and crisis-mongering. To return to Columbia University for a moment, the controversy at the school over its Mideast studies department has engendered a lot more heat than light on all sides. The rituals of activist name-calling and administrative defensiveness seemed to have obscured the original issue. So when the ad hoc committee assigned to investigate student claims of harassment by pro-Palestinian professors released its tepid report, The New York Times led with the news that the university found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.”
That’s fine, if the gist of the students’ complaints was that their professors were being anti-Semitic. What they were really objecting to were professors who were bullying them for their pro-Israel views, in violation of a campus code that, according to the ad hoc committee, insists that faculty make every effort to be “accurate, to be objective, to demonstrate appropriate restraint, and to show respect for the opinions of others.”
It’s become a reflex within much of the organized Jewish community to equate pro-Palestinian rhetoric and scholarship with anti-Semitism. But in the case of the Columbia mess, it ended up hurting the students’ cause by in effect lowering the bar on faculty expectations. And it sends messages to prospective college students that campuses with healthy and exciting Jewish communities are hostile territory.
Which is not to say that Jewish kids aren’t confronted with a lot of angry and distorted rhetoric from the pro-Palestinian side, in the quads and the classrooms. But here the Columbia report seems to get it right. Faculty “may express views that make students genuinely uncomfortable, but discomfort is not of itself proof of irresponsible pedagogy.” Activists should take care not to cry “anti-Semite” when others interpret the history of the Middle East in different ways. But they should insist, as does the American Association of University Professors, that faculty and fellow students have an obligation to “respect the dignity of others, to acknowledge their right to express different opinions, and to foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and free expression on and off campus.”
We shouldn’t send our kids off to the Ivory Tower scared of what they might find when they get there. Strengthen them with the facts and give them the support they need when they need to fight back. And make them truly excited about being Jewish. If you are going to march into battle, you need the right steps, and a good song.