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Jewish schools to colleges: Don’t recruit our students unless you can guarantee their safety
(JTA) — Any college or university that wants to recruit students from two Modern Orthodox schools in New Jersey will now have to prove it can keep Jewish students safe, according to announcements from the schools.
Torah Academy of Bergen County, a boys school in Teaneck, and Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls, located just blocks away, each told families on Friday that they were enacting new requirements for colleges that seek to meet with students on campus, a regular component of the college search process.
A third school in the area told families on Monday that it was “reevaluating our relationships with college admissions officers” but had not yet settled on any policy changes.
The announcements offer a concrete indication that antisemitic incidents on U.S. campuses following Hamas’ attack on Israel Oct. 7 and Israel’s military response could affect how some Jewish students decide where to go to college.
The incidents are unfolding at precisely the time that high school seniors must complete their college applications, and they add to a preexisting sense of unease among some U.S. Jews about the status of Jewish students on college campuses.
“We feel strongly that we cannot continue to invite college representatives to speak to our students as they have in the past,” TABC head of school Rabbi Shlomo Stochel and associate principal Rabbi Steven Finkelstein wrote in an email outlining new requirements for on-campus recruitment. “Your son’s physical and emotional welfare is too important to us.”
Going forward, the TABC and Ma’ayanot administrators wrote, recruiters and college representatives must now bring “a statement from their university leadership detailing their plans to protect and maintain the safety and security of our graduates on their campuses as Jews.”
The announcement comes in the wake of multiple antisemitic incidents on college campuses nationwide, including an eruption of violence at a pro-Palestinian rally at Tulane University; a situation where Jewish students were barricaded inside a library at Cooper Union during a pro-Palestinian protest; and most recently, where death threats were made against Jewish students at Cornell Sunday evening, specifically targeting the kosher dining hall.
Colleges and universities have also drawn criticism over their public statements about the violence in Israel, with prominent Jewish donors in a few cases vowing to cut off institutions that they said insufficiently condemned Hamas or allowed antisemitic sentiment to flourish.
The climate has so alarmed the Biden administration that the U.S. Education Department has given itself two weeks to create and present a plan to combat the wartime spike in campus antisemitism.
The goal of high schools’ policy change is to increase pressure on the universities to act, the TABC letter says.
“It is our hope that our collective stance in prioritizing the safety of our students will compel universities to address the severity of the current situation,” it says. “Those who cannot or will not accede to our valid and just request will not be welcome here.”
The moment coincides with when high school seniors must make decisions about where to apply to college. Many universities use Nov. 1 — Wednesday — as an early decision deadline, meaning that students who apply by that date and are accepted are obligated to attend.
The New Jersey schools chose to send the emails ahead of that deadline, according to Rabbi Josh Kahn, the rosh yeshiva of TABC. Almost all of the school’s graduates head to Israel for a year and then to Yeshiva University, the Modern Orthodox flagship in Manhattan, though others enroll at other colleges with large Jewish populations including New York University and the University of Maryland.
Kahn said his school isn’t trying to close its doors to college recruiters.
“Our goal actually really is for our students to be able to go to college. The entire Jewish community’s goal is that our students should be able to go to the university campus and feel safe. That’s all we want,” he said. “We’re not looking to not allow colleges on to recruit from our campus. So we would like to do everything we can to help colleges ensure that our students will be safe.”
Ma’ayanot said that in addition to asking college representatives to provide assurances about students’ safety, it would also work with its own students to factor the campus climate about Israel into their post-graduation plans.
“We are working to educate our students about the Israel climate on various campuses,” said the school’s letter, signed by four administrators including Head of School CB Neugroschl. “Just as a thriving observant Jewish community is a vital factor, it is crucial to make sure that a college is a safe place for Jewish and pro-Israel students. It is our hope that our collective efforts will help students make wise and informed choices about their future.”
Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah, the North American network for Jewish day schools, said the school’s demands are appropriate.
“Safety for Jewish college students is paramount, and colleges should be able to demonstrate how they would enable students to live a full and active Jewish life on their campus, without fear or threat,” Bernstein said. “Jewish day school alumni are proud leaders in Hillel and other programs on campus, in support of positive Jewish living and Israel. We expect college administrations to ensure that is true not only at a time of war, but in years to come for future students.”
Other Orthodox high schools in a broader network are still discussing how to approach the college admissions process, according to Kahn, who said a meeting is planned on the topic.
Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, Modern Orthodox schools also in Bergen County, told families on Monday that they were rethinking admissions practices as application deadlines neared.
Head of School Eliezer Rubin said in a letter to families he believed that “universities have allowed a toxic ideology to fester, and that ideology manifests as raging, aggressive and overt anti-Semitism.” He named four schools — Cornell, Cooper Union, Tulane and Columbia — where recent incidents had induced fear for students’ safety.
“They believe that they could take our families for granted. … We need to dissuade them from the notion that they are entitled to our children by mere virtue of the fact that they are prestigious institutions,” Eliezer Rubin wrote. “The privilege is for these universities to educate our students, not the other way around. It is just that: a privilege. Not a right.”
Rubin concluded, “Put simply: If a university cannot keep our students safe, we cannot in good conscience send them there.”
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The post Jewish schools to colleges: Don’t recruit our students unless you can guarantee their safety appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The ‘Right of Return’ Isn’t a Right — It’s a Means to Attack Israel
Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank. Photo: Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini.
In the wake of the October 7th massacre and the war Hamas launched from Gaza, one might expect that Western democracies would take a moment to reassess their assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. Instead, countries like Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Canada are rushing to unilaterally “recognize” a Palestinian Arab state — a move they claim is a step toward peace.
But there is a fatal contradiction at the core of this effort, one that goes almost entirely unexamined: the Palestinian demand for a “right of return.” It is this demand — not settlements, not borders, not Jerusalem — that has repeatedly scuttled any possibility of a negotiated peace.
That’s because this so-called “right” is not a call for compromise. It is a weaponized fantasy, one designed to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state through a back-door diplomatic conquest. It is not about coexistence — it is about replacement. And in backing a Palestinian “state” whose leadership still strenuously clings to this demand, Western governments are not promoting peace. They are underwriting the continuation of war by other means.
In the obsessive international discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, “right of return” has become a sort of incantation. Palestinian officials brand it a moral imperative. NGOs declare it a human right. And diplomats in Brussels and Ottawa parrot it as a required ingredient for peace.
But this “right of return” is not about justice or reconciliation. It is not even about return. It is a carefully constructed euphemism for demographic warfare — a strategy to undo what conventional warfare failed to accomplish between 1947 and 1973.
It’s the idea that the Jewish State — the only one among the 195 nations on Earth — should agree to import millions of hostile foreign nationals, the descendants of refugees from a war started by five Arab armies and multiple Arab militias trying to destroy it. All while the actual Arab nations that initiated the war continue to hold most of these “refugees” in permanent limbo, denied citizenship and rights in their countries for more than 75 years.
This is not a peace plan. It’s the slow-motion implementation of the PLO’s 1964 charter, which never contemplated statehood beside Israel — but rather statehood instead of Israel.
The phrase “right of return” originates in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in 1948 at the tail end of the first Arab war to annihilate Israel. That resolution was non-binding, conditional, and explicitly stated that refugees must “wish to live at peace with their neighbors” to be considered for return.
It was intended for individual refugees, not for their descendants, and certainly not as a vehicle to reverse Israel’s existence.
But for decades, Palestinian leaders have mutated this non-binding suggestion into an inherited, irrevocable, and universal “right” — not just for those displaced by a war the Arab League started in 1948, but for their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, most of whom have never seen Israel, never lived in Israel, and whose ancestors often fled at the behest of Arab leaders who promised Israel would soon be destroyed.
Their goal isn’t to return to homes that no longer exist. It is to settle in sovereign Israel, in places like Haifa, Jaffa, and Ashkelon — not Ramallah or Gaza — to end Israel’s Jewish majority and destroy the Jewish state from within.
Those who advocate for this demographic conquest often argue: “But Israel has a Law of Return. Why shouldn’t Palestinians?”
The comparison is not only false — it’s intentionally deceptive.
Israel’s Law of Return enables Jews, members of an indigenous people who were exiled, persecuted, and nearly annihilated over the course of two millennia, to return to their ancestral homeland.
Critically, Israel’s Law of Return does not seek to displace anyone. It does not call for Jews to “return” to Baghdad, Sana’a, or Warsaw. It does not challenge another state’s sovereignty. It merely provides a refuge and a home within Israel’s own borders.
The Palestinian “right of return” is the opposite: a demand that millions of non-citizens — people who are not from the State of Israel — be granted entry, not into a future Palestinian state, but into Israel itself.
The Palestinian “right of return” is often framed as if it conforms to international norms. But no such norm exists. Many countries, including Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, have “right of return” laws — granting citizenship or immigration priority to descendants of former citizens or ethnic diasporas.
But all these programs apply to descendants returning to the current sovereign state. No Greek descendant has the “right to return” to Smyrna, now called Izmir in Turkey. No Italian has the right to “return” to Istria or Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Slovenia. And no German refugee from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) has the right to “return” and alter Russian demographics.
Only in the case of Israel is a concocted “right” weaponized to try and erase a sovereign country altogether.
Modern history is replete with population transfers: Hindus and Muslims displaced during the Partition of India; Greeks and Turks exchanged en masse after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, etc.
The descendants of these refugees do not claim a right to “return.” No international body insists that they should. And no one pretends that peace or even justice requires it.
So why is the world still entertaining the delusion that five generations of Palestinians — most born in Syria, Lebanon, or Jordan or North America or Brazil– must be able to “return” to Tel Aviv?
Palestinian leaders, from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to Mahmoud Abbas, have always viewed Israel as a temporary aberration, not a neighbor. Abbas has declared repeatedly: “I will never recognize the Jewishness of the State of Israel.”
This fantasy of return is how war that Haj Amin el-Husseini’s violent rejectionism lost in 1948 is kept alive in diplomatic lobbies and UN chambers.
That’s why Palestinian leaders rejected Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000 and Ehud Olmert’s in 2008. Both offered a contiguous Palestinian state in nearly all the so-called “West Bank” and Gaza. Both offered shared control of Jerusalem. And both were answered with “no”–because they required Palestinian leaders to give up the “right” to flood Israel with millions of non-citizens.
There is no “right” to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed (a state created because of a defensive war that they won).
Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed “right of return” there will be no two-state solution — because the refusal to abandon this made-up “right” means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.
Pretending otherwise is not peacemaking. It’s dangerous enabling, designed to ensure the conflict never ends.
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Palestinian Official Blames Israel for All Deaths in the October 7 Massacre
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
The Palestinian Authority (PA) alternates between justifying Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and atrocities, and blaming Israel for them.
The latest to blame Israel is Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub who, speaking in English in South Africa, said:
The Israeli government is the only one responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7.
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
His solution is for Israel to release all 15,000 Palestinian terrorist prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7.
Rajoub adds the horrific lie that the Palestinian prisoner “hostages,” who include many mass murderers, were “arrested by the Israelis without doing anything.”
He then adds one more horrific lie:
We don’t support killing kids, women, or kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine.
As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented, the PA “policy and doctrine” is in fact to murder women and children, to kidnap, and to glorify the killers.
The PA rewards all terrorists in prison, even mass murderers like Abdallah Barghouti — who is serving 67 life sentences for being involved in the murder of 68 men, women and children. The PA has named five schools after mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 12 children and 25 adults after kidnapping them by hijacking a bus.
The PA glorifies all suicide bombers who murdered women and children as “Martyrs,” meaning that they died for Allah. The PA fundamentally supports murdering women and children, and this is their policy.
Regarding kidnapping, Rajoub himself praised the Oct. 7 murders and rapes of women and children and the kidnapping of hundreds of hostages as “epic” and “heroic”:
Rajoub: “What happened on October 7 was an earthquake, an unprecedented incident, and a war of defense full of epics and acts of heroism that the Palestinian people has been waging for 75 years.” [emphasis added]
[Al-Anba, Kuwaiti news website, Nov. 26, 2023]
As PMW repeatedly stresses, the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist entity in every way – except international designation.
The following is a longer excerpt of the statement cited above:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “What happened on Oct. 7, [2023] was a reaction to the systematic Israeli crimes. Now, sure that we don’t support killing kids, women, kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine. But he who is responsible for that is he who tried to sustain the occupation [i.e., Israel], he who continues his crimes and atrocities against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government is the only responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7 …
I think that we have 15,000 hostages [sic., terrorist prisoners] arrested by the Israelis without doing anything …
The issue of the prisoners, whether it’s those who are in Hamas or in Israel, should be closed by releasing everybody for everybody.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
The author is the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.
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The Torah Works Because It’s Perfectly Balanced
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
If you’ve ever had the urge to buy something new — a trinket, a bauble, a book, or any kind of decorative object — you’ve probably found yourself channeling the mantra of Japanese “organizing consultant” Marie Kondo: hold each item in your hand and ask if it “sparks joy.” If it doesn’t, the modern rule is simple — don’t buy it, and if you’ve got it: don’t keep it.
As the 21st century rolls on, this form of minimalism has become more than a trend – it’s become a movement. Entire YouTube channels are devoted to “decluttering,” and there’s a peculiar satisfaction in watching people toss out 27 coffee mugs they never use or transform a chaotic closet into a Zen-like display of perfectly folded shirts.
But this obsession with minimalism isn’t new. History is full of people who discovered that less is more. Take the Shakers — an eccentric 18th-century religious sect founded by “Mother” Ann Lee and her followers in England — so austere that they even broke away from the Quakers for being too worldly. They built an entire society based around radical simplicity.
To them, unnecessary ornamentation wasn’t just bad taste, it was spiritually hazardous. Their furniture was stripped-down and functional to the point of purity — elegant straight lines, no frills, nothing but purpose. Remarkably, more than two centuries later, Shaker chairs and tables still look modern, the kind of furniture pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a sleek New York City loft.
There’s a story told about a Shaker community in New Hampshire: an uninitiated visitor was admiring the bare wooden meeting house and asked why it was so plain. The Shaker elder, almost incredulous, replied, “Because if God wanted it fancy, He’d have made it fancy.”
And it wasn’t just about buildings or furniture. The Shakers’ daily lives were a kind of spiritual decluttering. No decorative clothing. No frivolous conversation. One Shaker diary even records a “brother” being gently corrected for carving an extra flourish into a chair spindle. “Beauty,” the elder told him, “is obedience.” In other words, remove what is unnecessary, and holiness will emerge.
Fast forward to today, and that same principle has found its way to Hollywood — albeit, stripped of any religious context. Professional organizer Janelle Cohen, who has decluttered the homes of celebrities like Jordyn Woods and Jay Shetty, insists that true order isn’t about squeezing more in, but rather it’s about editing it all down until only the essentials remain.
She even has her A-list clients go through every single item seasonally, “editing” their closets so that what’s left is only what they actually use and love. “When Jordyn opens her closet,” Cohen says, “it excites her. It feels manageable.”
One of Cohen’s golden rules is what she calls “prime real estate.” The items you use and cherish most should always be within reach; everything else should either be pushed to the margins — or removed entirely. It’s not about austerity for its own sake. It’s about creating a space where what truly matters is visible, accessible, and central.
Contrast that with the opposite impulse: the baroque churches of 17th-century Europe, gilded to the point of sensory overload. Or Victorian drawing rooms so jammed with doilies and in-your-face taxidermy that you could barely find the furniture. Or today’s “feature-rich” software apps, so overloaded with functions that you practically need a tutorial just to locate the “save” button.
Human history, when you boil it down, is really a tug-of-war between the impulse to add and the discipline to take away. Which is why it’s striking that in Parashat Va’etchanan, Moshe delivers what might be the ultimate minimalist manifesto (Deut. 4:2): “Do not add to this thing, and do not subtract from it.”
We can understand why subtracting from the core aspects of Torah is a bad thing, but why would adding to it be wrong? Rashi offers a sharp answer: adding to the Torah doesn’t elevate it, he says, it distorts it. He gives the example of the Arba Minim on Sukkot.
If you decide that four species are good, so five must be better, you’ve not “enhanced” the mitzvah — you’ve corrupted it. What begins as extra piety becomes a counterfeit commandment.
The Ramban takes it further. He warns that human additions blur the boundaries of what God actually commanded. When people can no longer tell the difference between divine law and human invention, the authenticity of the Torah itself is weakened. In other words, spiritual “clutter” is just as dangerous as spiritual neglect.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains it beautifully. He says that “adding” is a kind of hidden arrogance: it implies that God’s blueprint is incomplete, that our personal tweaks are needed to perfect it. But, as Rav Hirsch reminds us, the Torah isn’t a rough draft — it’s a finished masterpiece.
Our job isn’t to rewrite the Torah, it’s to live it. Which is why Moshe warns against both subtraction and addition. One hollows out the Torah, the other smothers it under layers of well-meaning excess. Both, in the end, take us further away from the elegant, balanced simplicity of God’s design.
In the tech world, there’s a term called “feature creep.” It’s what happened to the web browser Netscape Navigator in the 1990s. Once the undisputed leader, Netscape kept piling on new features — “just one more” toolbar, “just one more” plug‑in — until it became too slow, too clunky, and practically unusable. Users abandoned Netscape in droves, competitors took over, and the once dominant browser was pushed to the margins… and eventually, into oblivion.
In the restaurant world, chefs dread what’s known as “menu bloat.” Gordon Ramsay has made a career out of exposing it on Kitchen Nightmares. Time and again, he walks into failing restaurants where the menu reads like a novel — dozens of dishes spanning every cuisine imaginable. “You can’t possibly cook all of this food well,” he tells them.
And he’s right. When one struggling Italian restaurant in New York slashed its sprawling menu down to a handful of core dishes, something remarkable happened: the food got better, the kitchen ran smoothly, and the customers came back. As Ramsay put it, “Stop trying to be everything — just be excellent at what matters.”
Moshe is making the same point in this week’s parsha. “Do not add to this thing” isn’t solely a legal warning — it’s also a spiritual safeguard. When we start piling on “extras,” we risk smothering the beauty and dulling the clarity of the Torah beneath well‑intentioned but distracting clutter.
Like Ramsay’s pared‑down menu, the Torah works because it’s perfectly balanced. Nothing is missing, and nothing needs “just one more” ingredient. Our job is not to improve the Torah, but to serve it up the way it was given — simple, precise, and flawless. Because ultimately, minimalism doesn’t mean less — it means no more and no less than what’s right.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.