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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
The post Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State first appeared on Algemeiner.comhttps://www.algemeiner.com/.
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Child Pregnancies Surge in Gaza Amid Reports of Hamas Fighters Demanding Sex From ‘Wives of Martyrs’ for Food
Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
The sexual depravity that Hamas proudly broadcast to the world during its Oct. 7, 2023, rampage across southern Israel has now show up in Gaza, with video testimonies emerging of pervasive abuse, coercion for food, and an increase in both child marriages and child pregnancies.
In a new bombshell report, the Daily Mail presented findings from both the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) into rising child marriages and an anonymous journalist at Jusoor News who filmed Gaza residents reporting on the exploitation of women.
According to the UNFPA, while pre-war numbers of child brides fell to 11 percent in 2022, a decrease from 26 percent in 2009, marriage records from 2025 showed that at least 400 girls between 14 and 16 had become wives. This number likely only counts a fraction of the total as many such religious ceremonies to theologically justify child abuse go unreported.
Nestor Owomuhangi, whose official title is “UNFPA Representative to Palestine,” explained that war and collapsing humanitarian conditions had exacerbated this regression.
“We are witnessing the dismantling of a generation’s future,” Owomuhangi said.
Multiple men told Jusoor News they had seen or heard of Hamas members abusing women, with one reporting that a Hamas charity organization had blackmailed his neighbor and sought to become her pimp. “They wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher, or 100 shekels,” he said.
Exchange rates on Monday placed 100 shekels as equal to $33.48.
A fighter in Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, confirmed the sex crimes, saying that Hamas members took advantage of the “wives of martyrs” in a tent in the Gharabli area in Deir al-Balah. He was told to say nothing but chose to tear down the tent, declaring, “We told them it was an insult to our honor and dignity.”
Another anonymous man in Gaza said “we were contacted by the wife of a friend. She had asked a Qassam Brigades commander to help her, but he took advantage of her. His behavior is disgraceful. We investigated the matter and found her in a tent in the Gharabli area where a bunch of Qassam members were taking advantage of her.”
He also reported that “we informed the leadership, but we were told we had to keep silent about it.”
An unnamed woman said she had experienced sexual harassment from a man at a Hamas charity who appeared religious when she sought help. “I asked him how he could talk to me like that. And he should be ashamed,” she said. “I told him I would expose him. He said, ‘You cannot expose me; I am the government here.’”
One anonymous elderly woman said that “one charity in Gaza is unfortunately the biggest perpetrator. From its chairman all the way down to its doorman, it’s being done by all their employees and members, as though it’s an organization set up for sexual harassment, psychological abuse, and harassing young women.”
Reports of rising sexual abuse against girls and widows come as Hamas continues to resist pressure to disarm in accordance with the US-backed ceasefire and peace plan for Gaza.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that two Hamas officials had said the Palestinian terrorist group planned to surrender thousands of automatic rifles and small weapons which belonged to Gaza police and other internal security organizations. However, this would not entail full disarmament, which according to the peace plan is a key prerequisite for beginning major reconstruction of Gaza and for Israel, whose military currently controls 53 percent of the enclave, to further withdraw its force.
According to several reports, Hamas recently rejected the Board of Peace’s eight-month phased plan for the terrorist group to disarm. US President Donald Trump proposed the Board of Peace in September to oversee his plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, subsequently saying it would address other conflicts.
Meanwhile, Hamas is further tightening its grip on the nearly half of Gazan territory it still controls, where the vast majority of the population lives.
Since the initial ceasefire took effect in October, Hamas has imposed a brutal crackdown, sparking clashes with rival militias as it seeks to eliminate any opposition.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) — an Israel-based research institute — released a report last month explaining how the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran had disrupted the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which required Hamas to disarm in order for Israeli troops to withdraw.
Earlier this month, Hamas demanded that the Israel Defense Forces exit first before giving up weapons.
ITIC’s analysts warned that this delay could enable Hamas — which still controls approximately 47 percent of Gaza — to rearm. The Islamist terrorists are reportedly smuggling in guns from Egypt and creating weapons internally.
In late March, Turkey reaffirmed its longstanding support for Hamas when the terrorist group’s senior negotiator Khalil Al-Khaya and its political bureau delegation met with Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın. Kalın had also met with senior Hamas leaders in Istanbul the previous week.
According to the Middle East Monitor, the Hamas delegation “expressed its appreciation to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Turkey’s efforts to achieve peace in Gaza.”
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Boy George Defends Eurovision Appearance Despite Israel Controversy, Expresses Solidarity With ‘Jewish Friends’
Boy George singing at The SSE Arena Wembley, Dec. 14, 2016. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
British music legend Boy George said he will not turn his back on his Jewish friends in response to those criticizing his scheduled appearance at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, amid controversy surrounding Israel’s participation in the annual competition.
“I played in Israel. I got a letter from [Pink Floyd co-founder] Roger Waters telling me not to go to Israel and I went, because I’ve got a lot of fans in Israel,” the 1980s music icon told Sky News. “Plus, in the UK, I have a lot of Jewish friends — and I know them to be beautiful, good, kind, smart, loving people. So expecting me to turn against my friends is a lunacy, and it’s not going to happen.”
He also told the Daily Mail on Sunday, outside the annual London Eurovision Party: “I have many, many Jewish friends that I’ve had since I was 15 or 16 years old. Are people asking me as a principled human being to turn my back on my Jewish friends? It’s not going to happen; it’s never going to happen.”
Boy George explained that from the start of his career, he has been wearing a Star of David. “Go back and look at pictures of Culture Club,” he added, referring to his band. “I am so affiliated with Jewish people. I am not necessarily affiliated with Israel. I don’t really have an opinion on that. But the job of music is to unite people.”
Boy George and Italian artist Senhit will represent San Marino in the Eurovision this year with their song “Superstar.” The competition will start next month and take place in Vienna, Austria. Boy George and more than 1,000 other members of the entertainment industry signed an open letter recently that expressed support for Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.
Late last year, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Slovenia announced they were pulling out of the 2026 Eurovision after its organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, approved Israel’s participation in the contest.
Boy George’s late mother was from Ireland. When asked how he feels participating in the Eurovision this year after Ireland withdrew from the competition, he replied: “Ireland is my mother’s home country. I hope they’re not too angry. But if they are, that’s out of my control.”
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Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree
When the House Education and Workforce Committee released its report on campus antisemitism last month, I learned about it from a news alert on my phone. That surprised me. The college at which I teach Jewish studies — Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts school in Bronxville, New York — is named in the report as one of five schools the committee investigated for failures to address antisemitism. Yet I never encountered anyone involved with this investigation.
I teach Jewish and non-Jewish students — bright, inquisitive young people eager to learn about Jewish history, Jewish thought and Jewish identity. I have worked with Jewish student groups. I am, professionally and personally, someone whose entire working life is oriented around Jewish life on this campus.
If this investigation was as thorough as Congress would have us believe, I probably should have heard about it at some point before it was released — or even, just possibly, been asked some questions as part of it.
That silence is not incidental. It is the heart of everything that is wrong with this report, which insists that Jewish students on campuses like mine are living under siege. The committee’s account of my institution was assembled without consulting, as far as I can tell, the faculty members best positioned to speak to Jewish life on campus or the range of Jewish students whose experiences directly contradict the report’s conclusions. What was assembled instead appears to be a file of curated incidents, selected to support a predetermined conclusion.
To be clear, antisemitism on campus is a serious problem. It takes forms both crude and subtle — casual conflations of Jewish identity with Israel, occasional slurs and social pressure on Jewish students to renounce affiliations or loyalties with Jewish groups seen as friendly to Israel. My own students have come to me with these issues, which are deeply troubling, and which campuses have yet to come up with clearly effective strategies for combatting.
But what the Education and Workforce Committee has produced is not a serious accounting of antisemitism. It is a political document dressed in the language of civil rights enforcement. It is yet more evidence that, when it comes to the federal government’s efforts against antisemitism, Jews are being spoken over, not spoken for.
Overlooked Jewish diversity
At Sarah Lawrence, I teach Jewish students who are passionate Zionists. I also teach Jewish students who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace, participate in pro-Palestinian organizing, and have complicated, evolving relationships to Israel shaped by family history, religious tradition and their own moral reasoning.
I teach students who grew up in Orthodox communities, students who grew up entirely secular, students for whom Jewishness is a daily religious practice and students for whom it is primarily an ancestral identity activated by encounters with bigotry. I teach Israeli students who came to Sarah Lawrence specifically because American higher education offered them an open intellectual environment that they value.
What these students seem to agree on — despite their many political differences — is that they do not recognize the picture of campus life being painted by this committee.
They broadly do not experience their Jewish identity as something requiring constant protection from their classmates. What many of them do experience, and what they have told me plainly, is profound discomfort at having their identity conscripted into political arguments they did not choose.
The committee’s report is such a conscription. It tells Jewish students what they are supposed to feel. It tells them who their enemies are. And it erases, wholesale, the significant portion of the Jewish campus community whose views on Israel, Palestinian rights, and the politics of campus speech do not fit the narrative the committee has advanced.
This is not how you protect Jewish students. This is how you exploit them.
The IHRA problem
The report specifically criticizes Sarah Lawrence for not adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, in a case study of this kind of overreach. As the single faculty member at Sarah Lawrence wholly committed to Jewish studies — making my scholarly expertise the most directly relevant to this question of anyone on my campus — I want to be unequivocal. The Jerusalem Declaration, which we have adopted instead of the IHRA definition, is the better tool.
The Jerusalem Declaration’s core definition of antisemitism — developed by an international group of scholars working in Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies — explains that antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence that targets Jews as Jews. It is accompanied by 15 detailed guidelines for understanding antisemitism, drawn up because the field recognized that context and nuance are not optional when identifying and addressing hatred.
This is how scholars in my discipline are trained to think, and it is the approach our students deserve.
The IHRA definition, by contrast, was drafted primarily as a data-collection instrument for European monitoring organizations. Kenneth Stern, the definition’s lead drafter, has said repeatedly that it was never intended to become part of disciplinary codes. He has even testified before Congress against legislation that would enshrine the IHRA definition as enforceable policy on campuses. Stern writes that the definition “was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.”
When the person who wrote the definition is sounding the alarm about how it is being used, perhaps Congress should listen.
The specific problem with the IHRA definition, as scholars in my field have documented extensively, is that seven of its 11 illustrative examples involve the state of Israel with language broad enough to characterize legitimate forms of political speech and academic inquiry about Israel as antisemitic.
I know from my own work that the chilling effect of IHRA on academic freedom is not theoretical.
One of the definition’s most contested illustrative examples declares that it may be antisemitic to draw comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis. I regularly teach the Israeli Orthodox scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most important Jewish and Israeli thinkers of the 20th century, who warned persistently after the 1967 Six-Day War that the logic of military rule over another people would corrupt Israeli institutions and dehumanize both the occupied and the occupiers. He used the term “Judeo-Nazis” to describe what he feared that Israel risked becoming.
If Sarah Lawrence operated under the IHRA definition, my students would not have the opportunity to debate Leibowitz’s findings. Nevermind that he was eulogized by Israeli President Ezer Weizman as one of the greatest figures in the intellectual life of the Jewish people; his concern about his own country’s direction would make teaching him taboo, in turn making my students’ education in the full landscape of Jewish thought less complete.
I also couldn’t teach them about former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s 2026 claim that the ideology of Jewish supremacy now dominant in the Israeli government resembles Nazi racial theory. Or how Yair Golan, the former IDF deputy chief of staff and current leader of the Democrats party in the Knesset, has drawn parallels between trends in Israeli society and the processes that preceded the Holocaust in Europe.
These are Israeli patriots, soldiers, and statesmen engaging in exactly the kind of morally serious, historically grounded reckoning that higher education is supposed to teach students to undertake. Under the IHRA definition, my students would never have the chance to learn from them — or decide, for themselves, what they think about these arguments.
The committee’s report does not reckon with this kind of potential cost. Instead, it flatly recommends that every college across the United States adopt the IHRA definition. Conspicuously, it does not point to a single incident at any institution in its report that the IHRA definition would identify as antisemitic but the Jerusalem Declaration would not. If the committee believes IHRA is necessary rather than merely ideologically preferred, it should be able to demonstrate a gap — a real case in which alternate definitions of antisemitism failed.
The risks of chilling free speech
The absence of any such example is not a minor oversight. It speaks to the report’s failure to contend with the actual lived experience of students on campus.
In talking with students who have experienced antisemitism on my campus — American and Israeli alike — I have found they are not concerned by whether the school will adopt the IHRA definition.
They are not asking for less protection. They are asking for the right kind. What some of them have told me — and I take this seriously — is that they would find it chilling if political speech and classroom debate about Israel and Palestine were suddenly rendered even more risky.
The broader agenda behind this report is not difficult to see. Campus antisemitism is a genuine problem that has, since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, been manipulated by the American right as part of a sustained effort to delegitimize universities.
Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought.
Honest intellectual engagement with Jewish experience means studying the history of persecution and survival; the philosophy of identity and belonging; the ethics of memory; and the complexity of diaspora and national identity. These are not safe or comfortable subjects. They require exactly the kind of open, contested, sometimes painful intellectual environment that the House Committee professes to be protecting while actually working to undermine.
Sarah Lawrence is not a perfect institution. No college or university is. But it is one where Jewish life is visible, valued and genuinely diverse. My Jewish students learn by arguing with each other, challenging each other, and engaging across lines of political disagreement. The truth about Jewish life is almost always more complicated than people with clear-cut political aims would have us believe. That complexity is not a problem to be managed or a weakness to be exploited. It is at the very center of what a liberal arts education is supposed to be about.
The post Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree appeared first on The Forward.