Do Jews Have a Future at the American University?

In 2015, Mosaic took stock of the problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses, much of it tied to the anti-Israel agenda of the academic left. In the last five years, not much has improved, then-inchoate challenges have surfaced,and new dilemmas have emerged. The Tikvah Fund is convening a series of discussions to help Jewish parents, Jewish students, and Jewish educators think through Jewish life and learning on campus:

Is the American Jewish love affair with elite colleges coming to an end? Why have so many of American universities tolerated anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and how should embattled college students respond? Does university culture strengthen or undermine Jewish identity and Jewish faith? Now, with the COVID-19 crisis in full-force, the American model of higher education may be facing its greatest disruption in a generation: the dorms have closed, the classrooms have moved to computer screens, and many students and families are wondering: what does this all mean? And could this be a moment when Jews—and all Americans—rethink and renew the higher learning in America?

Tikvah is pleased to announce a multi-part “townhall series” on the future of college assessed, analyzed, and debated from a Jewish perspective. We will be joined by some of America’s leading educators and experts—such as Jonathan Haidt, Alyza Lewin, and Ruth Wisse.

Read more at Tikvah

More about: American Jewry, Israel on campus, University

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society