The Birthright organization—which provides young American Jews with free trips to Israel—partners with various Jewish groups in arranging its tours; recently, it announced that it is dropping the Union for Reform Judaism as a “certified trip provider.” Reporting the news, an article in an Israeli newspaper attributed the decision to the Orthodox infiltration of Birthright, blamed the “Orthodox, settler-aligned” Jewish Home party for abetting this infiltration, and described the decision as a split between American Reform Judaism and a major Jewish institution. But nothing could be farther from the truth, writes Gil Troy, who is the voluntary lay chair of Birthright’s education committee:

The Reform movement will indeed no longer host Birthright participants. But that’s because Birthright participants have consistently failed to choose the Reform movement’s offerings. . . . [T]he decision stems from the simple fact that the Reform movement’s trip provider, URJ Kesher, again failed to meet its recruiting quota. . . . The movement is now examining what it calls “other modalities” to continue working with Birthright.

Birthright participants choose their program providers freely, and a trip organizers’ status is determined objectively. [An institution] doesn’t stop being a trip organizer by failing to meet recruiting goals once; [it] must fall short in two of the last three rounds.

Rather than a ploy on the part of Birthright’s Orthodox components, the release of the Reform movement signals nothing worse than market forces at play. Young Birthright participants just aren’t choosing the Reform option. The Reform movement, America’s largest Jewish denomination, has been one of the smallest Birthright trip providers for years. . . .

What’s most upsetting about [the response] is the contempt for Birthright participants. Rather than treating this next generation of young Jews as the smart, savvy, somewhat cynical, often wary, perpetually meaning-seeking people they are, [it] infantilizes them, assuming they’re lemmings, easily suckered into fetid right-wing Orthodox waters. The portrait is insulting, intolerant, and inaccurate.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.