Open Hillel, an organization dedicated to welcoming anti-Israel discourse into Jewish life on campus, has issued a new manifesto with signatures from a long list of professors. Edward Alexander explains what’s at stake:
Although Open Hillel has several chapters of its own on campuses as adversarial counterparts to Hillel, it has now decided that the cause of “inclusivity” and “diversity” requires Hillel itself to extend a hand of welcome (and cash) to BDSers and other Jewish Israel-haters to subvert a central pillar of Hillel’s own raison d’être. [Open Hillel’s latest] manifesto demands that Hillel aspire to the standards of free expression, of “diversity of experience and opinion,” that prevail in universities generally, and especially in “our classrooms.” . . .
In “The Sermon,” a famous Hebrew short story of 1942 by Ḥayyim Hazaz, a character named Yudka declares that, “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist”; nowadays, it would be truer to say that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”
[A] word or two about this ideal of “inclusivity” or, as it is more commonly called, “inclusiveness”: is it possible that nobody, in the course of their academic careers, ever told these . . . occupants of endowed chairs [lending their support to Open Hillel] that exclusion is as much a function of intellect as inclusion?
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/jewish-academics-turn-against-hillel/article/2000640