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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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Four Plead Guilty in 2024 Assault of Pro-Israel Attendees at North Carolina Library Event
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Screenshot: buncombecounty.org.
In 2024, two Jewish residents and an 80-year-old senior citizen were beaten and dragged out of a public event in North Carolina which celebrated Hamas and was organized by an anarchist bookfair. Now, almost two years later, four people have pleaded guilty in relation to those attacks at the West Asheville Library.
On Tuesday, three individuals entered a guilty plea for simple assault in Buncombe Superior Court, while a fourth pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer.
According to a local news report, “All four persons were placed on supervised probation for one year. As conditions of their probation, each must complete 30 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims, and refrain from posting about the event on social media.”
One of the Jewish victims, David Moritz, was in the courtroom during the proceedings and told me, “I am happy we got some measure of justice.”
Another person beaten that day in 2024 was Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart. Campbell was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.
Now, two shocking security camera videos have been shared which capture some of the violent assaults against the three pro-Israel attendees. Moritz told me it was this video evidence which led to the guilty pleas.
In one video, Campbell is seen on his knees with masked radicals all around him, while Moritz is being attacked.
In another video, Moritz — the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors — is seen being violently pushed out of the public library while he tries to defend himself and return to help his friends being assaulted in the building.
Moritz informed me that there were further violent aspects of the assault, which involved victims being struck multiple times, taking place in areas of the library that were not under video surveillance.
He conveyed that there were numerous additional individuals who assaulted them at the library who remain unidentified. He expressed gratitude for the diligent efforts of the local police and district attorney’s office and hopes that law enforcement will continue to pursue further suspects.
Moritz is extremely appreciative of the assistance that he and the two other victims received from StandWithUs, a prominent organization that fights antisemitism and educates about Israel. StandWithUs provided the three victims with pro bono legal support throughout the entire process and helped in identifying a suspect.
Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, told me that her organization is “tremendously proud of the victims for working tirelessly to help identify their attackers, despite the fact that many of the attackers wore masks to conceal their identities.” Lerman said she is “thrilled” they worked together to help identify the attackers so they could “bring them to justice.”
“We need to give a lot of credit to the police department and the prosecutor. They really came through,” she added.
“The victims were fearless and persistent,” Lerman continued. “One of them was in his 80s and it did not stop him from fighting back. In this day and age, a lot of people — including Jews — feel fearful. The victims in this case are wonderful role models.”
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
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How Moses Created an Enduring Model of Great Leadership
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Socrates is supposed to have said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” And he didn’t just toss out this aphorism to sound clever — he literally lived it.
One day, in ancient Athens, a group of young aristocrats gathered around Socrates, who cut a strange figure standing barefoot in the bustling marketplace. Merchants were shouting prices, craftsmen were hammering bronze, and locals bustled from stall to stall in search of what they needed to buy. And in the middle of all this noise stood Socrates, asking questions.
One confident young man, eager to show off his intellect, stepped forward to challenge him. Socrates asked him a simple question: “Tell me, what is courage?” The young man gave a polished answer — something about bravery in battle.
Socrates nodded thoughtfully. Then he asked another question. “But what about the courage of someone who endures hardship? Is that courage, too?”
The young man paused for a moment, then adjusted his answer. Socrates asked another question. And then another. Each time the young man tried to refine what he had already said.
Within a few minutes, the initially confident student who started out with such bravado suddenly realized something uncomfortable: The more he tried to define courage, the less certain he became that he understood it at all.
Socrates smiled. He had not humiliated the young man. Nor had he delivered a lecture explaining the answer. Instead, he had done something far more powerful: He had made the student think. For Socrates, teaching was never about pouring knowledge into passive listeners. It was about awakening curiosity, provoking reflection, and guiding his students to discover the truth for themselves.
Incredibly, Socrates left behind no books at all. His ideas survive entirely through the students he inspired — most famously, Plato, whose own student, Aristotle, would go on to tutor Alexander the Great.
This concept was not unique to Socrates; a similar pattern appears in the history of medicine. Hippocrates is remembered as the father of medical practice; his name is associated with the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical pledge physicians have taken for centuries.
But Hippocrates’ greatest achievement was not a single medical breakthrough, but the creation of a teaching tradition. His true legacy was a lineage of physicians who refined and expanded his ideas.
Hippocrates understood that medical advances would not come from one brilliant doctor, but from generations of practitioners who shared their knowledge with those who followed.
Centuries after Hippocrates, the same philosophy reappeared in the career of one of the founders of modern medical education, the great Canadian physician William Osler. In the 19th century, much medical training still took place in lecture halls, where students memorized facts from textbooks.
Osler believed that this approach fundamentally misunderstood how doctors are made. “Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom,” he insisted. At Johns Hopkins he transformed medical education by bringing students directly into hospitals to observe patients, diagnose illnesses, and learn from real cases. His influence spread through the countless physicians he trained, many of whom went on to become leaders in medicine themselves.
This tradition of multiplying knowledge, rather than hoarding it, also lies quietly at the heart of Parshat Vayakhel. After the trauma of the Golden Calf, the Jewish people are given the opportunity to rebuild their spiritual life through the construction of the Mishkan. It is an enormous national project — architecturally complex, artistically demanding, and seemingly beyond the scope of a recently liberated nation of former slaves.
One might therefore assume that Moses, the towering leader who brought them out of Egypt and delivered the Torah at Sinai, would oversee every detail of the project. But that is not what happens. Instead, Moses steps back and appoints a master craftsman, Betzalel, to lead the work.
Alongside him is Oholiav, and together they assemble a team of skilled artisans described by the Torah as people whose hearts were filled with wisdom and whose spirits were inspired to contribute. Curiously, Moses does not micromanage the process. Instead, he empowers others to build.
It is a remarkable moment. The leader of the Jewish people — the man through whom God speaks — understands that the Mishkan will never become a national spiritual center if it is simply the project of one man. It must become the creation of an entire people.
And so, Moses does something that many leaders struggle to do: He lets others lead. Because the ultimate leaders understand that their true legacy is not what they build with their own hands, but what they inspire others to build with theirs.
Moses’ greatest achievement here may not have been the Mishkan itself, but rather the establishment of a model of leadership that nurtures a new generation of leaders and builders. This same model would guide Jewish history at one of its most fragile moments.
When the Romans stood on the brink of destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, it seemed as if the spiritual center of Jewish life might disappear forever. The Temple had stood at the heart of Jewish religious life for centuries. Without it, the future looked bleak.
At that moment of crisis, the leader of Jerusalem’s beleaguered community, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, understood something essential. The survival of Judaism would not depend on rebuilding stones and walls once they were gone. It would depend on building the next generation of Jewish leaders.
With this in mind, he had himself smuggled out of the besieged city and asked the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to establish a new center of learning in Yavneh. Vespasian agreed, and after the destruction, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai began teaching a remarkable group of students.
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot records their names and their individual strengths with unusual care: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, Rabbi Yose HaKohen, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, and Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. Each possessed a different temperament and intellectual strength, and each would go on to shape the next generation of Jewish scholarship.
Like Moses, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had his eye on the future. He set about creating the scholars who would carry Judaism forward after the Temple was gone — and after he himself was gone. From Socrates in Athens, to Hippocrates in the early days of medicine, to William Osler in the hospitals of modern universities, the pattern repeats itself across history: The greatest mentors do not simply teach. They create teachers.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of Moses’ leadership in Parshat Vayakhel. His example — like that of Socrates, Hippocrates, and Osler — shows that the measure of great leaders is not in what they build alone, but how they empower and inspire future generations to build and lead.
Moshe did not merely build a sanctuary in the wilderness. He created a model of leadership that empowered others to build alongside him. Which is why, for posterity, he is not known as King Moses or Priest Moses — but Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher.
Because the greatest leaders do not leave behind monuments. They leave behind people who know how to build them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Apartheid Week Exposed: Combating a Vicious Anti-Israel Lie on Campus
An “Apartheid Wall” erected by Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Photo: X/Twitter
On a sundrenched corner of coastline, a light breeze dances across the blue waves. But what seems pleasant at the surface, ideal even, is hardly the full story. To the side, a metal sign reads: “Under Section 37 of the Durban Beach by-laws, this bathing area is reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group.” The city is Durban, the third-most populous city in South Africa, and this scene was commonplace under its erstwhile apartheid regime. “Apartheid,” Afrikaans for “separateness,” was a brutal system of legally enforced racial segregation that dominated Africa’s southernmost nation until being finally abolished in 1994.
But what does this faraway land have in common with Israel? According to the anti-Zionist movement, a heck of a lot. To compare this former regime to the anti-Zionists’ warped version of the Jewish State, they even hold an annual ritual of “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) in protest of the latter’s continued existence. This canard is being legitimized at the very top, with California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom recently going so far as to assert that many observers are “appropriately” describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” What was once a fringe preserve of college radicals is now being increasingly indulged by the mainstream.
In reality, aside from those sunny beach fronts, Israel has precisely nothing in common with the racist regime that stained South African society for far too long. Under Israeli law, racial discrimination is illegal, and previous surveys suggest that 80 percent of Arab citizens prefer living there than anywhere else. Arab-focused political parties are elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and people of all backgrounds hold prominent roles across all sectors. Israeli Christians, the majority of whom are Arab, are an upwardly mobile minority over-represented across law and computer science subjects.
Such facts would not have been simply unlikely in apartheid South Africa, but completely out of the question. Non-white South Africans could not even legally sip coffee in the same cafe as their Caucasian compatriots, never mind hope to seek employment or excellence in the same fields or pursue friendship or relationships.
When confronted, Israel’s detractors dismiss these facts, which disprove their apartheid slur, as “strawman” arguments, and move to claim instead that military courts, checkpoints, building restrictions, administrative detention, or alleged “Jewish-only roads” are evidence of “apartheid.”
The allegations are false — Israelis of all religions share the same roads — or at best specious. Where residents under the Palestinian Authority are prevented from roads used by Israeli Jews and Arabs, it relates to jurisdiction and security responsibility, not race or religion. During the Second Intifada, roads were repeatedly used for ambushes, drive-by shootings, and roadside bomb attacks targeting Israeli civilians: Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or otherwise. Security restrictions were introduced to separate civilian traffic from known attack corridors, which significantly reduced the frequency of attacks. Checkpoints and military courts, too, arise from an unresolved territorial conflict and ongoing security concerns, not a policy of racialized segregation.
This organized intellectual assault on Israel’s existence is nothing new. “Apartheid Week” was launched in 2005 and has been an outlet for misinformation and lies ever since. While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aids it brands itself as “grassroots,” it enjoys swathes of establishment backing. NGO Monitor has exposed how various governments, the European Union, and anti-Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund routinely help pay for and publicize groups responsible for such campaigns on campus and beyond. It is therefore up to the rest of us to put up a veritable opposition to their tempting babble.
Naturally, there will always be a core of hardline activists unwilling to interrogate their own prejudices, but plenty of ordinary students have simply never heard another side to the story. Many young people also feel intense social pressure to accept flawed anti-Zionist talking points. Giving such students the space to hear a new perspective can help them interrogate and form their views in a more constructive environment. This is what the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)’s sixth annual “Apartheid Week Exposed” campaign, and our work all year-round, seeks to encourage at this critical juncture.
This week, our campus program will partner with “Israel-is” to host a campus speaking and tabling tour across Florida and California. The program will feature two speakers with firsthand perspectives on the Middle East. In Florida we will host Neriya Kfir, an Israeli Oct. 7 survivor and former IDF soldier, and Padideh Daneshzad-Moghaddam, an Iranian speaker who grew up under the Islamic Republic and will share insights into her life in her home country and the aspirations many Iranians have for freedom. Then in the Golden State, Staff Sergeant Dean Cohen and Farriba, an activist born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, will take the reins.
We have already, and will continue, to hold similar educational events with students across the US and around the world. We are also providing students with helpful myth-busters on Israel and the Middle East, offering them the factual grounding to help them navigate what may feel like a lonely university experience.
We seek to elevate voices that you are not likely to hear on campus. IAW and its allies routinely celebrate the tyrannical theocrats responsible for massacring peaceful protestors, abusing women, and organizing terror around the world, atrocities they both bizarrely celebrate and continue to deny. IAW activists seemingly place little value on any human life deemed to get in the way of their anti-Israel aims. This year, and in previous ones, various campus groups are using IAW to rally for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison. In 2004, he was convicted on five counts of murder for the deaths of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk.
Students in America and beyond — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — deserve a better future. One in which constructive dialogue replaces name-calling and intimidation. Administrators, for their part, should also make clear that the university does not endorse the claims made during these partisan campaigns and should enforce standards of conduct when activism crosses into harassment or violence. It is certainly a big ask, but we can only hope for such a change if we help to build it.