Crisis on Campus: A Deeper Look at Universities and Activism

Universities have become hotbeds of anti-Israel activism, creating concern across the Jewish community. However, student experiences are often a lagging indicator, reflecting deeper problems at the faculty, administration, government relations, and alumni levels. This panel takes a holistic view, considering perspectives from academics, students, and critics, and offers a deeper dive into the root causes of the problem while suggesting a path forward.

About Our Moderator & Panelists:

Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, Ph.D. has devoted over 30 years to innovative leadership in pluralistic Jewish education and interreligious learning. He is currently the Head of Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo, Alto, CA. Before moving to Silicon Valley, Rabbi Lehmann served as President of Hebrew College in Newton, MA, and President of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. He was the Founding Headmaster of Gann Academy – The New Jewish High School of Greater Boston, Founder and Director of the Berkshire Institute of Music and Arts (BIMA), co-founder of the Hevruta Gap-year Program of the Shalom Hartman Institute, co-founder of the Jewish high school Moot Beit Din competition, and co-founder of the North American Association of Jewish High Schools.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater is the Program Director for the Antisemitism Education Initiative (AEI), a project of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. An award-winning writer, educator, trainer, researcher, and organizational leader, Drinkwater’s work is rooted in fostering inclusive communities. He has been involved for decades with Jewish, LGBTQ, and social justice organizations throughout the United States and the world and holds a PhD in U.S. History from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a specialization in Jewish history and LGBTQ history. As a visiting professor at CU Boulder and at Rutgers University, Drinkwater has taught courses on American Jewish history; genocide and the Holocaust; queer U.S. history; gender and sexuality in Judaism; and global Jewish history from the ancient world to the present.Starting in 2003, Drinkwater served as the founding executive director of Jewish Mosaic, a national Jewish LGBTQ organization. After Jewish Mosaic merged with Keshet in 2010, he continued his work championing diversity and inclusion before his shift to the University of Colorado in 2013. He is the co-editor of the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (NYU Press, 2009).

Maya Platek was born in Israel and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She is a senior at Columbia University studying Economics, Political Science, and History. Maya is the current Student Body President of her undergraduate college and a former board member of Columbia’s Students Supporting Israel chapter. Maya served in the IDF Spokesperson Unit where she worked in the International Social Media Department as Head Content Writer. At college, she started a petition that acquired nearly 80,000 signatures calling for the dismissal of Professor Joseph Massad after he referred to Hamas’s October 7 attack as “awesome.” Maya has written for the New York Post and appeared on CNN, NBC, FOX, BBC, and in the Wall Street Journal, about her advocacy and the rise of antisemitism on campus.

Nadav Douani is committed to bringing Israel’s brightest minds back home. For Nadav, enabling Israeli scientists to find career opportunities within Israel is a core Zionist mission. Since 2018, Nadav has served as CEO of ScienceAbroad, where he leads strategic initiatives with partners across government, industry, academia, and philanthropic organizations both in Israel and internationally. With over seven years in senior roles within the Israeli government, Nadav’s experience includes positions as Senior Adviser to the Minister of Education, Culture, and Sport, a key role in the Prime Minister's Office, and later as Senior Adviser to the Minister of Science and Technology. In these roles, he managed international relations and facilitated critical connections between the Ministry, government officials, and the Knesset. Nadav has also been an active member of the Hod Hasharon City Council for the past 16 years. A former combat soldier in the elite Yael unit, he resides in Hod Hasharon with his wife, Sarka, and their three daughters, Omer, Daniela, and Alma.

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Video Transcript

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. My name is Danny Lehman. I'm the head of the Gideon Hausner Jewish day school down the road. It's a local Palo Alto K through 8 Jewish day school. You may be wondering why a head of school whose oldest students are 14 should be moderating a panel about what's going on university and college campuses.

So I'll give you my theory because I really don't know the answer to that question. My theory is number one one of the questions that this discussion is supposed to address is how do we make it different four or five years from now? And the eighth graders who are graduating from my school this year, in four or five years, will be on college and university campuses.

And the question is how do we take the experience of the last year and a half, two years and make a difference in terms of changing the dynamics of what's happening on college campuses. And that's very relevant to the students and the parents that I work with every day. The second theory is that I actually, prior to being here in Palo Alto, I was the president of a two different graduate institutions of higher education Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts which has a rabbinical school and master's in Jewish education as well as programs for adult and high school kids and I was also president for a short period of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, which is an inter- religious graduate school with master's degree and PhD students.

That was unfortunately short lived mostly because of my Zionist commitments and other issues that I won't go into. But it did give me a view of what students who are in graduate studies coming out of undergraduate institutions are feeling and thinking. The GTU is right on the outskirts of the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley.

And so I was also engaged with what was going on at the UC Berkeley campus. And that gives me a little bit of insight since my kids graduated from college eight to ten years ago my more recent experience, I think, helps me understand what's happening now. And the third reason, which may be the real reason, is that Zach Bodner and Amitai Fraiman are parents of students in my school.

So that always helps. But I'm very pleased to be here. And I want to introduce our panelists and give a brief framing for our conversation this afternoon, which I think is, important discussion to have with all of you. So to my immediate left is Dr. Gregg Drinkwater. He is the inaugural director of the antisemitism education initiative at UC Berkeley. It's part of the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. He's a historian by training focusing on U. S. history, Jewish U. S. history, LGBTQ history. He's worked for a number of Jewish organizations focusing on LGBTQ rights. and opportunities within the Jewish community. And I think he has a very unique perspective to give because he's working currently on issues of anti Semitism education at UC Berkeley as a response.

You started in January, a year ago. 2023. 2023. So prior to October 7th. But in many ways is charged with helping the university educate students about antisemitism in the midst of this issue that we're all facing. So welcome and thank you. Next we have Maya Platek, who you heard this morning, and she's a senior at Columbia University in the College of General Studies. And as you may have heard, she's also the president of the student government of that college within Columbia University. Very interesting because she was elected back in April. So during this whole crisis and she's an Israeli who has served in the Israeli defense forces but also grew up in Japan, Israeli parents who are living in Japan, and went to Israel after high school to serve, and then came to New York to Columbia University and I think has a very important perspective as a current student and as a leader in student government and an Israeli on a very complex campus here in the U. S.

And then finally, we have Nadav Douani, who is the CEO of Science Abroad. It's an Israeli organization that supports Israeli scientists in academia, in research, in industry, all across the globe both to enable them to become a part of an Israeli scientific network, but also to encourage them to return to Israel and help them find opportunities for their professional development in a sense to respond to the brain drain and to reverse it so that Israeli scientists who are doing important work all over the world realize how much they can continue that work and contribute to Israeli society when they return.

Those are our panelists. They will probably be saying more about their particular context and environment as we go. And my first question for them is really to reflect on their personal experience over the last year or so. And think about an experience that will give us some insight into the landscape of what's going on university and college campuses with regard to anti Semitism, anti Israel protests from their personal vantage point.

So I'm gonna start with Gregg and please.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: Sure. So thank you very much and thank you everyone for being here. Obviously a topic that is not exactly always positive. So I appreciate you taking the time to come to this session and talk about this with us. I'm actually gonna push a little on, I think, what you were expecting, which was probably a post October 7th story and something directly related to campuses.

I'm going to tell you something that happened a month before October 7th, roughly, in 2023. My daughter was a senior in high school last year. She's now a first year student at the University of San Francisco, and she went to a public high school and from basically, all public school all the way throughout, so from kindergarten on, Every year we had some kind of incident in her public school, always very minor, of invisibility of Jewish students, of Jewish identities, of Jewish culture, and of Judaism where campus leadership, or school leadership rather just failed to recognize the needs of Jewish students or the realities that Jewish students face.

So things like organizing a major community building event that was gonna be an a hiking event on Yom Kippur. So she missed that and it was like this main skills building and team building thing for the second grade where everyone was going to spend the whole day together and do this exciting ropes course and she didn't get to do it.

Things like that happened every single year, right? Like clockwork, every year, whether it was around Yom Kippur or whether it was on Passover, there's always something. So we're at Yom Kippur. of 2023. As some of you may remember, if you have very good calendar, remember it was on a Monday, September 23rd, I think.

And my daughter calls me the Friday before she's in tears. Why? She was taking a theater class, and they were doing these projects where each of them had to do a presentation on a particular historical piece of theater that she'd gotten actually quite excited about. So she'd been researching it and prepping it, and the Friday before Yom Kippur, her teacher said, By the way, I hadn't decided yet when you're gonna present those little projects.

We're gonna do it Monday. And my daughter went to her teacher afterwards, who, by the way has a Jewish husband and Jewish kids, this teacher went to the teacher afterwards and said, that's Yom Kippur, I'm not going to be there can we find another way to do that? And the teacher, rather than suggesting, that we could change, that, oh, I'm sorry, I made a mistake, let's do it another day, or whatever she could have done, she said, you know what, that's fine we just won't count it against you, you won't be there, you won't do your presentation, that's fine, don't worry about it, it won't be part of your grade.

Remember, my, my daughter had been excited about this, she was looking forward to it. She called me in tears, and, honestly, whatever, it was a single assignment in a theater class, it wasn't that big a deal. She wasn't crying about that. She's not that much of a drama queen. She was crying because this was the culmination of 13 years of the same thing happening all the time And she said to me, and apologies for folks in the audience, quote When will people at my school f*cking see me?

When will they see me? When will they respect who I am as a Jew? I bring that up because I think it highlights the point you were making earlier about you working in a non higher education space at the time or now, which is that the kids in our college campuses today, those are the contexts in which they're growing up.

Now, some of you go to Jewish day schools and you have a very different experience of what it means to be in a K-12 setting before going to college, but most of the kids that you're going to be encountering when you get to college, if you're still in high school here and, or adults here who have kids are going to be going to college.

That's not their experience, right? They don't know much about Jews and the school systems have not been supporting them in that. So they're already entering college with a deficit, right? Jews are largely invisible unless you live in some, certain zip codes that have extremely high concentrations of Jews, right?

So it's, We're getting off on the wrong foot already, just in terms of the way in which our education systems in general deal with Jewish needs. Sorry, that was a very long answer. No, that's okay. Thank you. Maya.

Maya Platek: As you can imagine, there have been so many incidents at Columbia I could send you an entire laundry list of, oh, somebody had fake blood thrown at them, somebody's finger was broken, somebody was physically punched.

Lots and lots of incidents where you had people outside of campus quite literally shouting, I hope October 7th happens to you every day. There have been so much, but actually the point that I wanted to highlight today is a conversation I had about a month and a half ago around October 7th. with a non Jew who messaged me and said that she really wanted to go to the exhibit that a lot of the SSI and Ariyeh which are the two main pro Israel organizations on campus organized for an exhibit regarding like the hostages and like in memory of October 7th and they had like milk cartons with like hostage posters as well as it was just a general art exhibit and she messaged me and she said I want to go, but I'm really scared that I'm going to be physically attacked or harassed if I go there and I will be socially ostracized.

Do you know if there's a time, like later in this week, that I might be able to go without people knowing? And that entirely broke my heart because that was very much what is going on our campus. She then later said that I'm entirely with the Jewish students on Columbia's campus, but I've been too scared to speak out, and I'm like I have so much respect for you because you've found the courage to do that, but it made me really realize how alone the Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia are, because even amongst those that are our allies, they're too scared to stand with us.

They're too scared to go to an exhibit. Of hostage poster like with hostage posters. It's not even like a pro Israel rally or anything. They're just scared to be surrounded in those environments because they know that they'll be isolated. They'll be made fun of their photos will be plastered all over our like anonymous school, like a chat called side chat.

And it's also been very representative of the situation with amongst a lot of the faculty. I would say that with the exception of Jewish and Israeli professors, nobody's standing up for Jewish students. Nobody's standing up for Israeli students, even though. Many times it's been very blatantly clear a Title VI violation.

What we've went through and it's really sad to say but like the Jewish population on our college campuses are alone There's only been one incident where I've actually had a non Jewish faculty member who said anything publicly in support of Jewish students and it was Secretary Hillary Clinton She's the only person at Columbia.

That's not Jewish that has made any statement and I think that shows us what the state is. We have wonderful speakers. We have wonderful people that are standing up for what's right, who refuse to bow down. But They're all Jewish, and unless we are able to make allies outside of our community, how are we going to survive?

And it's just been one of those things, conversations that have stuck with me, unfortunately.

Nadav Douani: Thanks. No doubt. So before I'm giving my example, I would like you to think about something. We are talking all the time about anti Semitism. But there is one word that repeatedly everyone using it.

Jewish. Jewish. Jewish. It's Jew hatred. It's not anti Semitism. Because Arabs are Semite. Arabs are our cousins. We are from the same father. This is a Jew hatred. Because I know, I don't see anyone running after Arabs on the streets here. They're running after Jews. So please remember that, that they hate us as Jews, not as Semite.

We at Science Abroad represent 11, 000 Israelis worldwide, in Europe, in the U. S., in Canada. And after October 7th, we were flooded by examples, by things that's going on at universities. And we were scared about things that happened. And Jews took their yarmulke off, or they didn't agree to go with the symbols of the hostages because they were afraid.

They didn't speak Hebrew on the subway in New York. But there was one example. That came from here, from Berkeley University, that was shocking for me, deeply. There was a faculty member that tweeted, and she wrote to all the Zionists, by the way, not Jews, all Zionists, We know where do you live, we know your addresses, and there was two emojis, one of blood, and the second of an axe.

She was calling people to kill Zionists. By the way, that faculty member, She's a transgender. If she will go to Gaza, they will kill her. If she will go to Israel, she can celebrate in Tel Aviv in parade of love. Because we are a democratic country. And she is supporting people that will kill her in a minute when she will land in Gaza.

And from all the examples that we saw, in Italy, a Muslim doctor didn't agree to take care of a Jewish student that went to the hospital because he was Jewish. He just left the room. And this is, he is not allowed to do that. It's not legal. There is an oath that he should take care of everyone, like we are taking care of everyone, even our soldiers, the physician soldiers in Gaza, they're taking care of everyone because this is the oath that they took.

So when there is so many examples, the example that came from here from Berkeley was very shocking for me. And it was so loud and clear that she say, go and kill Zionists like it was in the pogrom. And if it was not liberal area, probably people will go and kill us.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: I just want to quickly, because I work at Berkeley, to correct a small point, not to say that there aren't some bad things at Berkeley, she was actually at UC Davis.

Nadav Douani: That particular individual. Sorry. Okay. First of all, that, why I told this story? Because I want to make sure that everyone will remember it. That's why you By the way, we approach to to the federal here and we ask them, to do something with her and to make sure that it will not repeat.

But thank you for that.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: We got plenty of stuff going on.

Nadav Douani: So many examples, unfortunately, it can come from all over.

Maya Platek: There's no anti Semitism competition.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: So I want to ask whether you, to all three of you, whether you think that this is particularly an issue for college and universities, university campuses?

Or to what extent do you think that there are larger societal issues at play for which the university campus is a kind of intense? example or a microcosm, but we really need to think of this as something larger than what's going on among the faculty or among the students who are radicalized.

But there's something much more general and pervasive in our society globally that may be at play on the university campus as well.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: Yes, what I mean by that is a couple of things. First of all, that campuses are where young people are, right? So it's just demographically, we're gonna see a s Now, a lot of people, by the way, in the United States don't go to four year colleges.

We sometimes forget that when we're talking about college campuses. It's actually not the ubiquitous experience. And certainly Not the four year colleges that we imagine where it's residential, you're living in the dorms, you do it in four years, right? The majority of Americans either don't go to college for four years at all, or if they do go, they go over a longer period, or they go to commuter colleges, etc.

So the quote unquote traditional four year experience is actually a minority of Americans. So I just want to remind us that we're not talking about everyone to begin with. When we are trying to think about where are younger people, a very large number of them are right college campuses. And We have polling data that show us that, overall, younger people are leaning more towards support for Palestinians, more critical of Israel than they were five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, etc.

Part of it is, I don't want to say that the campuses aren't contributing to how that's playing out, but I also just want to disagGreggate to some extent that there's something going on with younger people. We're seeing it highlighted at campuses, but it's happening more broadly with younger people.

The second thing, though, is that I also want to highlight that of the campuses that we see in the public eye, so Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, etc. Again, those are not, just to remind you, they're not reflective necessarily of the majority. And then we actually have data on this in summer of this year.

There was a research study that was correlating opinions of college age students around the war, around Zionism, Israel, etc. And it found that the campuses that had encampments were the campuses where you were likely to see higher rates of anti Zionist activism or Palestine solidarity activism, et cetera, and opinions.

Makes sense, right? But where were the encampments? They were pretty much only at liberal elite universities. Ivy League schools and large state universities, right? So places like Berkeley, places like UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, et cetera. Now there were some at some other campuses as well.

It's not an exclusive range, but the majority of the vast majority of the encampments were at actually a fairly small number. I'm not saying any of that to diminish or minimize what was going on at those campuses or in the encampments. I'm just saying, when we talk about the crisis on campus, we actually are talking about a fairly smaller subset of specific places.

In some ways, it's a half glass full version for me, right? Maybe there are some more optimistic ways to look at it that it's not quite as widespread as we sometimes think it is, even though it is horrible and I'm not in any way diminishing what's been going on.

Maya Platek: I would say, actually, I did my military service in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, so a lot of my job was specifically to counter misinformation that was going on social media.

I ran the IDF Twitter for a couple years, and then I was the head writer for the IDF social media. Pages in English. So I would say that I've always known that there's a lot of misinformation regarding like Jews and Israelis always going on social media. And I would say that you see it much beyond just college campuses.

You see there's so much misinformation going on in a lot of news outlets who like recklessly make mistakes or they trust the source from Hamas without waiting for like the actual information to come through and then retract it but then it's too late because people have already read that. However I would say that beyond the fact that you do have that level of misinformation What I think is dangerous and scary about what's going on college campuses is that they effectively reflect what the future of our world is going to look like.

I think that's what the danger is. Beyond that, they also serve as a source of legitimization of this rhetoric because it's, the thing is you have professors that are agreeing with these kind of viewpoints and that makes it so that it's legitimate. And that's why you have students that believe it.

I don't really blame students at all. For a lot of the misinformation that they believe because they're being targeted like with this Disinformation from every angle they see it on social media They see it in the news and then they're also getting that narrative from professors. This has also been a multi generation effort So you've seen it like over the last two three decades where you initially had a few voices that were iterating this sort of viewpoint that is now slowly and slowly become a significant minority, if not even potentially the majority in university campuses.

I do think that there are quite a few people that are still willing to engage in conversation, that they're moderate. Even if they're critical of Israel, they're not necessarily pro Hamas and Hezbollah. But at the same time, the fact that the fringe perspective has become more and more extreme, and you're starting to see people talk about how they all need to become martyrs, and they all need to become those engaging in the resistance.

It's a very scary reality, and it means that we're heading towards that direction, and it makes me wonder where the world will stand in 50 years. I think that's what the danger of the college campuses are. Of course, the safety of Jewish students is super important, but I think that's especially what is alarming about what's going on college campuses.

Nadav Douani: I agree with with the thing that you said here, and I want to add it. First of all, young people, want to look on the minority and say, okay, we're supporting the minority. And they see the Palestinian as minority. And they see us Jews as the colonialists, as David against Goliath, as Goliath against David.

And they go directly to, support the poor, the minority, and they need to understand that we as Jews are a minority. Maybe they can think, we're only 2%, I think, here, the population of the U. S. And we are a very small group, but they go and support them. But I need you to look on a wider perspective.

There is a huge forces. That lead by the Chinese and by, by Muslim countries, very rich Muslim countries that just buying the universities here in the U.S There is an article that was published a few months ago that show a direct correlation between the money that the Qatari government invest in the academia here in the U.S and then by the number of protesting, by the number of violent against Jews, anti Semitism acts. It was very directly. And you can see when their money is not invested in the university. There is no Jew hatred in that area. And when they are buying the university, when they invest in, in grants, when they invest in faculty members, When they do a brainwash for them, it change and you can go, we can do anything.

I'm fortunately against it. We don't have the money. We just maybe need to stop the money that go to the universities and look for the other side. President Biden visited now a huge summit in South America. Someone saw the photo at the end of the summit. It was, he's the president of the strongest country in the world.

He should stand in the middle next to the president of Peru because she was hosted the summit. He was standing in the back on the left side. You know why? Because the Chinese president was sitting in the front, standing in the front next to the Peruvian president. If you'll see the details about what's going on now in South America, China is the most important country for trade.

There is a huge forces that we are not seeing them. You talk before about social media, TikTok, see what's going on TikTok. This is a Chinese social network. They are pushing. All the things against Jews. And when you are publishing something in favor of the state of Israel, you don't see it. So if you will not understand that we need to do something stronger, something that will stop the money that they invest here in the academia.

This is invest for them, not for us. This investment is for the future of them by changing the mindset of young generation that will lead this country in 10 or 20 years from now. And if you will not stop that, It will be very, it will be a huge problem for all of us. Not only Jews, but people of the world that want a free world, freedom of speech, democracy, liberalism.

They will stop it by the power of the money. So young generation, young kids, unfortunately are too naive, without judgment of what they are seeing on the social media, without judgment about what their faculty are saying. And that's the reason why we sit at the university, and it will be very hard, it will take us a lot of efforts.

I'm sorry, one more word. The Jewish community here in the U. S., talking at the last, I think, 20 years about tikkun olam. We need to do tikkun olam to our nation, to our community, to the Jewish community. We need to work, and what's going on here at olam for our community. If we will understand that we are the minority, and Jew hatred is not allowed, it's not legal.

And we will do tikkun olam to ourselves. You'll see a change, because we will be united, doesn't matter if we are, where are, if we are Republican or Democrats. If we are right or left, if we are Orthodox or Reform or Conservatives, it doesn't matter. We need to do tikkun olam to ourself, work as a one group, a strong group, and then maybe a change will happen.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: So I'm curious about who you think are our most important allies, both within the university, from the president on down as well as with outside organizations. A lot of times I think the Jewish community feels that the Jewish organizations that are not embedded in campus need to come in as the the people on the white horse and help save the situation.

And I'm curious what you think about those outside. Institutions and their ability to impact what happens within the university community and who are the folks within the university? Is it the administration, is it the faculty who we really need to develop a collaborative relationship in order to not only protect the Jewish community, but to really respond to the anti-ISIS, Israel, anti-Semitic rhetoric that's going on.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: So I work at UC Berkeley, but I also provide consulting and resources and workshops and support for other campuses around the state and around the country. So I've seen a lot of different examples of how this plays out. And I can tell you the two things that really stand out for me about what needs to happen on campuses.

Two things. One, the campuses that seem to be in general, doing better, or at least able to respond and mitigate when incidents occur more quickly, and more readily, and more efficiently, are campuses where Jewish community campus leadership has built long term relationships with campus leadership, right?

So that if there's, for example, a Jewish studies program, or Hillel, or Chabad, whatever it might be, each campus is going to be a little bit different, that the folks involved in those organizations have built long term relationships of communication. And therefore, over time, trust with campus leadership, presidents, chancellors, whatever.

Each campus has a slightly different structure. And mid level as well. Various deans, head of student affairs, DEI, etc. Not to say it doesn't always work, right? I, each campus is going to be a little bit different. But, on average, if those relationships exist, they help. They're not going to solve everything, but they help.

The other one, though is some of the campuses that I'm aware of where the tensions were a little bit more diffused even in advance as opposed to having to respond to incidents after they occurred were campuses where there were conversations. between Jewish community leaders on campus, whether they were, again, the same figures, Jewish Studies, Hillel, Chabad well known Jewish faculty, Jewish student leaders in some cases and Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian voices on campus.

And again, not coming in a moment of crisis of trying to have those conversations. after October 7th, or after an encampment, or after a protest, or after a violent antisemitic assault. But they happened starting two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, right? They built relationships of trust over time.

And again, doesn't work in every situation, but when I look at the landscape of the campuses I've worked with across the country, campuses that have both of those are, in general, in much better position. on the point about external voices. External voices are sometimes extremely effective in the immediate, right?

There've been lots of examples I can point to where external Jewish organizations or others have raised an alarm about a situation on campus and caused. Through the sort of publicity and the attention have caused an immediate or fairly quick change. It doesn't always work, but sometimes it has.

But those often, because they're not built in longer term relationships, they're not building on a stable relationship of communication and trust, may not really return long term dividends. Let's say there's a faculty member who tweets something problematic, it gets viral, external organizations come in and say, we need you to do something about this.

Campus leadership hears them and says, okay, they do. So maybe that problem is solved in the short term. But that's not necessarily the same as having long term relationships of trust that can be proactive moving forward into the future. It's an all hands on deck. There is a role for external organizations on campuses, but in my experience, the internal deep relationship building is really gonna pay dividends over the long term.

And I think I'm already seeing that and will continue to see that in the years ahead.

Maya Platek: So as I hinted at earlier unfortunately, a lot of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus are very much alone at Columbia. I think it's partially due to the fact, and I think it actually is quite. incredible that you pointed it out is that at Columbia, there's been a generally a tendency to stray away from dialogue.

There was an effort by Columbia to actually engage in a conversation between, I actually think they brought in the professor that started SJP at UC Berkeley to speak with an Israeli professor.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: The founder of Students for Justice in Palestine is a professor at Berkeley. He's a lecturer actually.

Maya Platek: So they brought him to, they brought him to Barnard to engage in a conversation.

I don't remember who the Israeli or like the Jewish perspective was supposed to be. And the event was actually boycotted by SJP and boycotted by all the groups. So nobody ended up attending and they actually had to cancel it. And that was the only effort that Columbia ever tried last year to engage in dialogue amongst like people that had differing perspectives.

And ultimately, a lot of what was happening was that there was a tendency to push away from dialogue, push away from conversation, which enabled the dehumanization of, I think, Jewish and Israeli students and made it difficult for us to move forward. So it was a result of that situation and the very fact that.

Unfortunately, a lot of Jewish and Israeli students are very much alone and as well as faculty members. The only support or the allies that Columbia like that these students have made have been external. I would say that for example, I on a week after October 7th, I started a petition Regarding Professor Joseph Massad, who called October 7th awesome and incredible and something worthy of jubilation and awe on October 8th in an article.

It got 80, 000 signatures, but the university didn't respond for six months until it was brought up in Congress. And at that point, they condemned what he said. But at that point, the damage had already been done. He'd already entirely legitimized October 7th on campus. That became a very pervasive perspective amongst the faculty at Columbia.

You had hundreds of professors that were signing up about assigning letters and petitions as to why October 7th was a form of resistance for the Palestinians, which is really depressing to see. And these are the people that are like shifting the mindset for a lot of people. So ultimately a lot of the pressure that Columbia has made or any of the decisions that they've made to try to safeguard Jewish and Israeli students have been due to pressure from external sources.

But at the same time, when you look at it fundamentally, and I would have to say that there are efforts pushing towards dialogue on campus. This year that didn't exist last year, which is great, but it's a result of everybody feeling that the dialogue amongst with administration has been fractured, including a lot of the protesters.

You see the fact that with ultimately the power is actually in the faculty's hands at Columbia. For example, after the 1960s protests, Columbia's administration actually doesn't make the rules of how they necessarily implement. A lot of the policies. So it's actually up to the Senate, which is entirely made up of students and faculty members, to decide how to implement specifically restrictions on protests, or what would be counted as freedom of speech while also protecting students.

And as such, you actually have that power removed from the administration's hands. So I would say that going forward, it's more important than ever to actually collaborate with faculty and try to push forward so that there's a little bit more of a Moderate tone and how people understand Israel and how people understand the situation on campuses because without that, at least at Columbia's case, I know that in a lot of institutions, it's not at the same level.

It's not at the hands of the Senate with how everything is implied that, that is where the future is because ultimately you need faculty support for the Senate, but you also need faculty support to ensure that people are not being super, super polarized in their way of thinking. And you have that, all that misinformation going on in the first place.

Nadav Douani: We are under a storm of Jew hatred at universities. We cannot let ourselves to choose one way under another way. We need to do both. We need to do this, and that, and this, and that, and every idea can work out. So I think from one perspective, we need to work top bottom, directly to the president of universities.

The donors that give a lot of money. To those universities. We have a lot of friends, Jewish friends, Zionist friends here in America that support those universities. We even should work directly with them, directly with the president of university. They watch. Look what's happened a few months ago after the resign of the president of Harvard University of Penn University of Columbia University.

It's amazing, right? It's happened by Congress, but. The money that our donors, the Jews lover donors gave them an access to the universities, to the presidents that are now there. So this is one. We need to work from bottom up as well. We need to work with faculty unions. We need to bring them to the State of Israel.

Everyone that came to the State of Israel changed his perspective, changed the way he see and the way he thought Israel is. When you visit Israel, you understand that what they told you is a lie. And Israel is amazing country. So we need to work with those unions and bring them to the state of Israel for a week, for 10 days to see how Israel look alike, to see how their lives are working.

And, with someone blame us as apartheid country, I asked him if he knows. Who was the judge that sent the Jewish prime minister to the jail? A Muslim judge at the Supreme Court. So it's amazing. You can't say that Israel is apartheid state. So when you visit Israel, when you see how we are all working together, side by side, Jews and Muslims and Druze and Christians, and we are working on this country to make this miracle to happen, you need to bring them to visit the State of Israel.

But we need to do something else. We need to work with influencers. This is the new world. Influencers can change the mind of young generation like that. When Kim Kardashian visiting Israel and give baptism to her kid in Jerusalem and hundreds of millions of people see that, it change something. So we can work in the small place that called academia.

and think they are, outside of the world. No, it's not. We need to work with influencers and influencers. And there is a lot of them that love the state of Israel and support Israel and can help us change the mindset of faculty members, of president of universities, of young students. So as I said at the beginning, we need, we are not have the privilege to choose one.

We need to do so many things, and it will take many years to do that.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: So I'm wondering what you would say to folks, because I'm hearing this among parents and even students, who are saying, maybe we shouldn't encourage high school graduates to be going to these particular elite universities, be they private or public.

My own kids went to Columbia and Cornell and Michigan, but ten years ago, and as I think about what I would advise them as their parent to do today my sense of what would be a place where they can be themselves as Jews, as committed Jews, is different. And I'm curious about what you say to people who say maybe we should Send kids to smaller liberal arts colleges where maybe, the dialogue and the engagement is more civil and more open to different views.

Maybe we should send them to universities, in the South, people are saying for some reason, or Catholic universities, or maybe we should send them to universities in Israel, or maybe even this should be the time when the Jewish community begins to develop. its own universities like it did post Holocaust with Brandeis and maybe this is a time where we have to use our resources in order to create environments which are more supportive of our students during this very important age.

I'm curious what you think people should be considering for their own children, for their grandchildren for themselves as students in thinking about the kind of dynamics that currently exist at the places where Jews have been in some ways most attracted to, right? The larger, more prestigious elite institutions.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: So I already indicated that it's the large elite institutions in the large state schools that are the leading edge of the problem. That's where the majority of the concerning incidents have occurred by far. At the same time, I'm actually going to echo Comments that were made to the press and in an essay by a colleague of mine at UC Berkeley Professor Ron Hasner, a professor of political science and the faculty co director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, which is the largest Israel study center at any campus in the United States.

By the way, so people imagine Berkeley must be this horrible place where there's nothing going on for Jews. We do, just by the way, have the largest Israel study center in the country. We do, by the way, have one of those vibrant Hillel chapters in the United States, an extraordinarily vibrant Chabad, an undergraduate and graduate Jewish studies program, an Israel studies minor, kosher food on campus etc, right?

So it's a little more complicated than I think the perceptions people might have. In any case, Ron Professor Hasner in the spring, was asked exactly this question, and he didn't even hesitate. It was emphatic. No, of course Jewish students should come to Berkeley. They should go to Harvard. They should go to Columbia.

They should go to NYU. Of course. Why? One, we don't want to let the anti Semites win. That should be self evident. But two, the only way if we are having challenges at these campuses, one of, not the only way, one of the ways we're going to counter that is by continuing to have a vibrant presence.

of proud, informed Jewish students who are visible and loud about their Jewish identities, right? We need that. We don't want to just give away these campuses to anti Semitism, right? We need Jews at these places. Apply to, if there are parents in the room or, involved aunts and uncles, tell the young people in your lives, yeah, if you think you can get into these elite universities, Go for it.

Apply if it's a good fit for you.

Maya Platek: I actually wanted to say basically the exact same thing. I know that sounds unbelievable, but I actually wanted to start by saying Columbia actually has I believe the most amount of Israelis in the Ivy League. I actually think that's why it's been such a prominent focus in the media.

It's just that you have so many Jewish and Israeli students that are standing up for what's going on. What's happening on our campus and are speaking out about their experiences and as such it's gotten a lot of attention as it rightfully should. And I also wanted to say that there's like that community is incredible.

It's one of the strongest Jewish and Israeli communities I've ever seen. There's also definitely been a shift since October 7th. I think beforehand it was a relatively strong Jewish community. Columbia has dual degree programs with Tel Aviv university as well as the Jewish theological seminary. So there, there are a lot of people that are very invested in actually my brother's a.

Tel Aviv University, Columbia dual degree student. And you have a lot of people that are already active from multiple perspectives with their Jewish identity. You also have a lot of Israeli veterans who are at Columbia. And after October 7th, I think many of us became very unified and we really have each other's backs.

And I think it's wonderful. That transformation happened. Moreover, I think another big factor as to why I would say it's so important that we continue going to these universities is if we're not speaking out about this, then nobody's going to, as I already said, unfortunately, Jewish students, Jewish faculty are on their own when it comes to speaking up about what's going on our campuses.

But if we don't specifically recorrect every chance that we get, every chance we counter, we have to counter this narrative. If not, there's not going to be any other perspective on these campuses and we're actually going to be pushing even more towards an even more extremist perspective. I think without us countering it, there's no chance that we actually will see any progress in the next 30, 40 years and we're going to be facing a really dangerous situation as you highlighted.

I think beyond that I lost my train of thought, but Okay, it's okay. I It's okay. Yeah.

Nadav Douani: Can I do it the Israeli way? No, we are not giving up. We should fight back. This is, we are not, the days that we run away from problems from racism, the day we run away from they butcher us on the programs, they're finished.

Enough is enough. We should fight back. We should, you should send your kids to those universities. If they're the best, go to the best universities. We are a small group, as we said before. We are a minority, but we are a strong minority. Look, the state of Israel, how the state is Israel is amazing how strong he is.

She's, we are facing a terrible world. The world is, I spend a day in, in LA on Friday and we, when you hear something that sounds like a horn, I was looking at this, what's going on? And I'm living in the center of Israel, in Hod Hasharon. We have rockets, two bombs fall down in Hod Hasharon.

I have friends, I have a friend in Sderot. He's six years, six years old girl. Go to the restroom and leave the door open from the day she was born. Because she's afraid. They're in trauma. We are strong even though we are fighting back. We should be all over. At academia, doing business, at the media. We should be all over.

We should be at the Senate, at the Congress, at the local Congress, at the local Senate. We should be all over. We should not be afraid anymore. We should not run away from those people. And this is a terrible time for us. It's a terrible time for our nation And you know when you are going again to the uber and you're wondering if I can speak if I can speak with my daughter Hebrew here enough afraid to be afraid so your question is very And you talk about Brown University and we're talking about country clubs that was especially for Jews because Jews were not allowed to go there.

Not anymore.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: So one more question before I open it up and ask from questions from our audience. So five years from now, what has to change in the way the Jewish community engages in this issue in Jewish education? So that Our students five years from now are not facing this. Do we have to do things differently?

I run a school. What's incumbent upon me to do and to change in order for students to have that kind of resilience and that kind of confidence and that kind of commitment? And what should we doing as a Jewish community in order to support and to realize change so that this situation five years from now is not one that we're discussing here at Z3?

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: So one thing that was already, I can't remember who said it, but someone already echoed this earlier today. I think it may have been Rabbi Amitai, that we need to, in teaching Jewish young Jewish teens, Jewish kids prior to entering college, we need to be giving them a fuller picture of the complexity of Israeli society and of Jewish history, which includes telling them about some of the problems, some of the significant problems so that they don't go in to a college campus where there are a lot of people who stand in solidarity with Palestinians because Palestinians are facing a lot of.

They are facing a lot of oppression. They are facing a lot of racism. And this is news to some of our Jewish students, like they're vaguely aware of it, but they don't know the details. And so it's difficult for them to engage in those conversations. And so it ends up shutting down opportunities for dialogue between Jewish and non Jewish students at college campuses.

So the more that students go in and don't just have the rosy picture of Israel, right? I love Israel. And my daughter loves Israel deeply. She wants to go live there, but I also made it a point to have her understand the political complexity of the landscape in Israel, and some of the criticisms of the Israeli government, and some of the problems in Israel's history, so that she could go to campus prepared to actually engage in these conversations and not just be blindsided during the headlights of what are they talking about?

Maya Platek: So I actually remember what I was going to say. It was specifically that our students going into college campuses need to be very well informed about Israel, about the complexities as you just very eloquently stated, I want to actually go a step forward and actually say that it's also very important that they understand the complexities of the Middle East overall.

I think it's very important that people are very well aware of what Hamas is, what Hezbollah is, what Iran is doing. I think that there needs to be, I think students need to be really well prepared to talk about. Israel and our identity as well as Israeli experience from multiple angles at 18.

Which, I think, up until now, it wasn't necessarily prioritized, but it's become clear that is the only effective way for many people to be able to engage in really effective dialogue because ultimately the reality is a lot of the people that are being swayed against Israel's existence being swayed to be anti semitic to be Jew haters are those that are very misinformed about the situation and Ultimately, we cannot be the ones that are not eloquent that are not the ones that are knowledgeable.

I think that there's so much knowledge here and it's wonderful that we have conferences like this where you're able to tap into this knowledge. And there's been a re emphasis on Jewish education and Israeli education amongst the youth and going forward that really needs to be prioritized. I honestly don't know if I would have been able to speak out on the complexities of Israel if I hadn't lived there and I hadn't served in the IDF spokesperson's unit because.

Honestly, even though I was fully Israeli, even though I have Israeli parents, and I was always well aware of what the situation in Israel was, until it was, I was asked to explain it as like my job, I didn't become confident enough to be able to retaliate to a lot of lies and misinformation. So it's important that where people are ready at that stage when they're going to college, which is unfortunate.

As well, because ultimately college is supposed to be the place where you expand your perspective and everything, but unfortunately, that's the reality, and it's very important that we are all very well informed.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: And should they be exposed as a part of that well informed education with the Palestinian narrative?

Maya Platek: I Because if

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: they don't, if they don't know what's being said, don't have an opportunity to really think and then they get to a college campus and that's a dominant narrative, then how are they going to be able to understand themselves and how are they going to respond?

Maya Platek: As I was saying, as you sped, I think you put it very eloquently, both of you, that it's also important to engage in the complexities of the landscape there as well as like the complexities of even the Israeli politics and government.

I think you need to. be as clear as possible about how things aren't necessarily perfect, but that's okay, and that doesn't mean that our argument is delegitimized in that way.

Nadav Douani: There is a problem when you are last for answering something, because you're repeating things that other people say. So let me answer in a different way about that.

I wrote myself notes during the conference here, and I understand amazing thing that I understand for a few years already, but I understand it specifically now it's a Z3. That, you're working very hard to be Jewish here in the US. You're dealing with that issue all the time. You have sessions, you have conferences, you're going to Sunday school, Jewish school.

You are dealing with that issue all the time. In Israel, it's very easy to be Jewish. You're just Jewish. I'm not dealing with that issue. Because, okay, I'm a believer, I want to eat kosher, I'm going to a kosher place. I'm not dealing with that. It's not an issue for me. It's very easy. So keep dealing with that.

Please, keep dealing with that issue. It's amazing. This is something we need to import from here to Israel. Because I want my daughter, I have three daughters, I want them to deal with issues that you are dealing with. One of the issues that for me is very interesting is conservative, reform and Orthodox.

For us in Israel, we are all Orthodox. We are not familiar with reform or conservative. The first time that I met Conservatives, I told you yesterday, Daniel, when I was sent to Camp Romain, New England, after my military service with the Jewish Agency, it changed my life. I understand there is a way to worship God in a different way.

It's beautiful and it's amazing. So keep doing that all the time. Give your kids, give to your grandkids, the pride to be Jewish and dealing with that issue all the time. It's very important. Something else that we need to do to change in five years from now, it's to change the code of conduct at universities.

We, someone spoke about it before, not here in a different panel, but we need to work on that because if true hatred is allowed. You need to change it. This is not allowed. We are, again, I'm repeating this. I'm sorry. Like a broken record. We are a minority. We need the support. I'm not jealous that you are sending your kids to a place that they are not safe there.

This is crazy. Someone need to protect them. So if you will not changing that. Nothing will be changed. If it'll not, if it'll be illegal at universities, that narrative can be changed.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: Okay. I wanna open it up. I wanna remind people that this is about asking a question. And I want you to limit yourself to a single sentence.

And I'm not talking about a James Joyce sentence, make it succinct. There should be a question mark at the end of it. But we really want to hear from you. Don't.

Audience Member 1: You mentioned that it was the, oh you mentioned it was these sort of liberal arts elite universities that are having these hotbeds of Jew hatred and encampments.

Why do you think that is, and why is it not at other universities as well?

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: I think there's a number of factors, but one of the reasons is that those universities tend to attract the students who are most motivated to be making a mark on the world. Those are a teen or a young adult who's deeply motivated to make a mark on the world has probably already done some of the things that allows them to get admitted to these more elite universities, right?

There are also universities, this is more practical where students have the privilege, the time and the space to devote. to activism, to devote to other things. I can tell you, again, we have this sort of warped perception of what university life is like in the United States. Most students going to colleges work, sometimes full time jobs.

Some of them are helping pay for their families. Some of them have kids. They're going part time. They don't have time for this. They do not, right? When you're going to the elite universities, that's often a very different context. So there's far fewer students working, there are far fewer students with kids, there are far fewer students who are returning students in their late 20s or even 30s at the elite universities.

So there's, it's just a structural dynamic is part of it. Another question.

Audience Member 2: Since you all mentioned the faculty issue, so how do you propose we advocate to balance academic free thinking and free speech with what has become faculty embrace of an a Jew hate narrative. You don't care.

Nadav Douani: You

want an answer. You're right. She wants an

Audience Member 2: answer.

Nadav Douani: Yeah, you're Israeli? I know, okay. Very Israeli from you. I don't think there is a simple question, answer for that. I think it's a process. I need, I think we need to encourage our, the next generation to be a faculty. Just these, the Jews, to be a faculty, to take those position, not only to be a president of universities, to be a faculty, to give lectures, to be active in that field.

This is something that can be changed, this is one. And second, I spoke about that before, I think we need to be, bring them Israel, to Israel. We, there, like there is a birthright. This is amazing program. We need to do a birthright for those faculty members to see Israel in their own eyes, to meet Israelis, meet Palestinian here from without there's someone that tell them the story to see the story by themselves and then to be judged and decide what's going on.

This is my perspective about faculties.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: Can I add something to that just quickly that cause I think sometimes we. Because of the media focus and the congressional hearings, we focus on actually what is a smaller percentage of the overall problem because it's more visible. What I mean by that is there's tiers of things happening on campus and they're like a pyramid at the top of the pyramid are the really highly visible incidents that make the news, right?

And that are really big deals, assaults, vandalism, that kind of thing, right? Now those are big deals when they happen numerically, they're actually not. as common as we think they are. Like they're a big deal, but what's a much bigger deal in terms of numerical incidents are termed microaggressions.

The more subtle things that happen that may not be a violation of the law may not even be a violation of campus policy. It's just this coarse way of dehumanizing people, of disrespecting people or treating people as an other, but not in a way that's pushes the envelope enough to be actionable by the university.

That's all day, every day, especially on social media, especially student to student peer to peer, that kind of stuff is much more challenging to deal with. But it's actually the bulk of what students are experiencing. All the time, when we have data on this, for example, we did some research on where students are experiencing antisemitic incidents on campus and roughly 30%.

This is after October 7th of the last year, roughly 30 percent said they were experiencing it in the classroom from faculty. Now, 30 percent is way higher than it should be, right? That's a lot, but 70 percent more than twice that we're experiencing it from their peers. And most of that is these sort of more subtle things.

Inappropriate language on social media, dehumanization, othering, saying, I won't be friends with a Zionist, right? Like stuff like that. So that. That's actually, we need to be spending a lot more time thinking about the way we talk about other people and the coarseness of language and this sort of ridiculousness of binaries on social media.

Nadav Douani: We need to have zero tolerance. So 30 percent, you say 30 percent, it's a lot. Yeah. Zero tolerance for Jew hatred. So we need to fight it. We had a poll with our members. We asked how many of them deal, saw anti semitism at universities. 52 percent say they had anti semitism indirect. 300 Israelis was cancelled globally by their colleagues.

They didn't publish their articles. They didn't, they cancelled their invitation for seminars. 300 was cancelled. Why? Because they're Israelis. Zero tolerance for Jew hatred. Zero.

Maya Platek: I 100 percent agree with that. I also wanted to say that ultimately faculty are the ones that are supposed to be leading students in behavior.

And they're also leading them in like the train of thought. They legitimize a lot of the Misinformation, as I said earlier. And I think that ultimately the university needs to start holding faculty accountable for any antisemitism, any discrimination that they're taking part in, which has been entirely legitimized or pushed away as freedom of speech.

And fortunately on our campuses.

Audience Member 3: That's the very question I wanted to ask each of you that the problem seems that the UCLA. Try to revamp the code of conduct and they said it only applied to the students. It doesn't apply to the faculty. So they're exempt. They can't be punished. And what you said, all of the elite universities that are research institutions have huge problems with the faculty not allowing other faculty from Israel or Jewish faculty Jewish, other Jewish and academics to come.

So what happens when you can't deal with the faculty?

Nadav Douani: I will answer from the Israeli perspective. We represent here in the U S more than 4, 000 Israelis that came here to do their postdoc. And we see the numbers are going down because if you want to work for the Israeli academia it's a way, it's a mandatory to go here, not here to postdoc, and then come back to the state of Israel.

So you shouldn't be an anti semitism, anti semitic P. I. You should just say, all right, I don't know, want this troublemaker to come to my lab. It's too problematic for me that Israeli will be here, all right? And it will stop, and we see the numbers. People applying and rejected, because they're Israelis.

This is the problem that you see it all over. You face it all over, all the time. So you see it with faculty, you see it with students, you see it All over, unfortunately. So we need to do it step by step. And it will take time. I can tell you. We'll see. It will take 15 to 20 years until it will be changed.

Unfortunately. But we should work on that right now. Let me take a question in the

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: back because I'm favoring the front. But I'll get you. But no. Yeah.

Audience Member 4: I'm wondering if there are any elite universities that you think have handled the protest and how they did that. And as an alum of a university that was disappointed with the leadership and how they handled it what do you think we should do? And is that, is our power or voice in donations and not giving them?

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: Yeah, I'm curious about what you think about Dartmouth, for instance, which was always I think represented as an elite university that actually had a different dynamic than some of the others, or there are other examples.

Maya Platek: I'm, I can answer the donations part, honestly. I, actually, being at Columbia, I've actually felt that the withdrawal of donations by some of the biggest Jewish donors has had very little impact on the Columbia's policy.

For example, after the petition regarding Joseph Massad, Leon Cooperman, who had donated, I think, upwards of 50 million to Columbia, Withdrew and stopped donating, and they said that he'd reinstate his donations going forward if they were to fire Professor Massad. They didn't budge. And then Robert Kraft also withdrew his donations from Columbia, but at that stage, he's already donated a lot, and the university was hardly impacted by it, which means that there has to be other avenues to put pressure on the university.

So I think this is ultimately. This is ultimately through media. Perhaps if you are able to get general donations to stop. And I know that a lot of the universities did face that last year. But I think that ultimately it goes much beyond just donations.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: And about, I've seen this happen at many campuses where university administration, they do not like to be told what to do.

So I've seen it play out. I've seen donors say, I'm going to stop giving money unless you do X. And I've seen university presidents say, okay, we're done with this conversation. Like they just do not like to be told what to do.

Nadav Douani: About the donation award. Let me represent the Israeli universities.

They need your money. If a donation, like how many you said? 50 million? They didn't do anything? You can buy the Israeli university for 50 million. Give that money. They need your support. Our universities are governmental and they are poor.

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: And the very large Israel Studies program at Berkeley and the Jewish Studies program at Berkeley.

They, they always need more money. And all the other universities. the university,

Audience Member 5: so I want to ask Dr. Drinkwater, when you, your daughter was having this experience in school, did you as a parent call the school? Did you try to stop it? And what happened?

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater: Yes. Many times. And the challenges, each one of them was such a small.

situation that it, it felt it felt helicoptery to escalate, right? Okay you scheduled an event on a day that you shouldn't have because you, and then, they, everyone's apologetic oh, I'm so sorry they claim to mean right? But it's a pattern, and over time that pattern repeats, and it sends a message to Jewish students that they don't matter, that Jewish culture, Jewish identity, that Judaism is marginal.

And that just people aren't going to pay attention to you or they don't care. There's that book by David Baddiel, the British writer and comedian Jews don't count title of the book worth reading.

Audience Member 6: Hi. Okay. It's a tough question. It's Google translate at the same time. Okay. What do you have to say for the young Israelis that lost hope in the young American students right now?

We are know what's the reason that we are speak out. We know what we are in the IDF. We know that this is all about surviving. And these days when we are seeing that students that not speaking out because of a young stupid guy holding a flag and they don't do a thing about it. We're losing up and we're just, it's really terrible to say, but we are waiting for another 9 11 to happen here.

Maybe it will wake some people up. I'm here. I came here after four years in the army and I'm speaking out in campuses and it's ridiculous what's going on here. It's ridiculous. What do you have to say for my friends in Israel? Because They're not coming to Israel. Their parents here, the Jewish parents, they're not sending their kids to Israel these days.

They're afraid. And I can understand them. Maybe you cannot go to the Golan Heights. Maybe you cannot go to Gaza border, but you can also be in Tel Aviv. You can also see the hummus in Jaffa and you will feel the vibe yourself. You will feel like what's going on in Israel right now. I'm trying to bring Israelis to these campuses.

I'm trying to be, to to bring Israelis who served just now in Gaza and Lebanon. to the campuses to talk with these students what they need to say to them to wake them up because I lost my hope. Okay,

Maya Platek: that's a really tough question. And I say this as an Israeli who goes to an American university. And I look, I'm also not obviously Israeli just because I grew up internationally. So now everybody at Columbia knows I'm Israeli because it was very public over the last year, but up until then, I don't think it was necessarily the first thing people saw about me.

I think it's so important that they come to American campuses. Yes, you aren't gonna get necessarily the majority of people that are like going to listen, but you do have a lot of people that are still willing to engage in conversation, that are still willing to listen. They might be a little bit afraid to necessarily post about it.

But they are still willing to engage. Ultimately, you do have a very loud proportion of the student body that won't even engage in conversation, but that's not representative of everybody. And it's so important that they continue coming to these campuses. I know some of the most effective events that have happened in the last three months on Columbia's campus have been literally tables of I was in Israel.

over the summer, ask me anything, or I served in the IDF, ask me anything, or I just came back from Gaza, ask me anything. And I know that a lot of those conversations were really productive, and they're really important to have, because it makes people remember what a university is actually for.

Universities are meant to be places where you engage in conversation with people that have different perspectives than you. Ultimately, it's really sad that our universities forgot that and decided to bow down to anti dialogue, but I think it's really important that we continue to try to push for whatever opportunity for dialogue.

I can't say that the situation is bright in the future, but you have a lot of people, especially amongst Jewish Americans, that have been very outspoken for the reality in Israel. More, much more than they were before October 7th. It's an entirely different environment amongst American Jews in these universities.

And I think that there's an understanding that we need to fight. Moreover, I actually said it earlier today, there's actually been a little bit more of a tendency to identify with Israeli culture amongst Jewish spaces in a lot of the Jewish spaces within universities, like within Hillel, within Chabad.

And I think it's important that we continue to empower Israeli voices on these campuses. I know it's very difficult. It's challenging, but we have to push through with dialogue.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Lehmann: So I want to, unfortunately, time is up, but I want to thank all of you and thank our panelists very much for this conversation.

And thank you for your attention and questions. And I think the final plenary is going to happen at four. So here we go.