Founded by Jewish students at Harvard in 2012, Open Hillel seeks to persuade campus Hillel houses and the organization that coordinates them to change their rules regarding Israel-related programming. These forbid cooperation with groups and speakers advocating actual boycott of the Jewish state or calling for its destruction, but allow events sponsored by left-wing groups like Breaking the Silence, which excoriates the IDF. Jared Samilow explains that Open Hillel is not the tolerant defender of free speech it claims to be:
Open Hillel troopers no doubt fancy themselves brave martyrs struggling to speak truth to power, but this is a comical inversion of reality—at least on a college campus. Unicorns aren’t as rare as pro-Israel humanities professors. Hardly a month passes by without some student government or faculty association condemning Israel.
And guess what? If upholding [Hillel’s] guidelines really does alienate some Jewish students, that’s unfortunately the cost of doing business. If you stand for a real and meaningful principle, then it’s inevitable that somebody will feel unrepresented. The only way to appease everyone is to stand for nothing. If there are Jews who cannot feel comfortable in Hillel unless they are granted a soapbox for their anti-Israel crusade, then that’s just a “loss” we’ll have to absorb.
Besides, we shouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. In perhaps the greatest irony, it turns out that the “open” in Open Hillel is about as accurate as the “democratic” in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Holly Bicerano, who served as a campus outreach coordinator for Open Hillel, recently wrote a blog post about why she quit, explaining that “many Open Hillel leaders have no problem with advocating exclusion and alienation within Open Hillel; . . . many [are also] intolerant of pro-Israel voices that they dislike.” The ringleaders behind Open Hillel aren’t perturbed by the concept of non-inclusiveness; they’re just miffed that they’re the ones being excluded, when they’d prefer to be the ones doing the excluding.
Read more on Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: http://jcpa.org/hillel-cant-soapbox-jewish-millenials-anti-israel-crusade/