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The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition.
Or did it? Musician and musicologist Uri Schreter argues that the music heard at American Jewish weddings since the 1950s has become a tradition all its own, especially in the way Old World traditions coexist with contemporary pop. In a dissertation he is writing about the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schreter argues that American Jewish musical traditions — especially among secularized Conservative and Reform Jews — reflect events happening outside the wedding hall, including the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.
That will be the subject of a talk he’ll be giving Monday for YIVO, titled “Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City.”
Because it’s June — and because I’m busy planning a wedding for one of my kids one year from now — I wanted to speak to Schreter about Jewish weddings and how they got that way. Our Zoom conversation Wednesday touched on the indestructibility of the hora, the role of musicians as “secular clergy” and why my Ashkenazi parents danced the cha-cha-cha.
Born in Tel Aviv, Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I was struck by your research because we’re helping to plan a child’s wedding now. It’s the first wedding we’ve planned since our own, and we’re still asking the same questions, like, you’ve got to make sure the band can handle the hora and the Motown set and, I don’t know, “Uptown Funk.” Your research explores when that began — when American Jewish weddings began to combine the traditional and secular cultures.
In the period that I’m talking about, post-World War II America, this is already a fact of life for musicians. A lot of my work is based on interviews with musicians from that period, folks now in their 80s and 90s. The oldest one I have started playing professionally in 1947 or ’48. Popular American music was played at Jewish weddings as early as the 1930s, but it’s a question of proportion — how much the wedding would feature foxtrots and swing and Lindy Hop and other popular dance tunes of the day, and how much of it is going to be klezmer music.
In the postwar period, most of the [non-Orthodox] American Jewish weddings would have featured American pop. For musicians who wanted to be in what they called the “club date” business, they needed to be able to do all these things. And some “offices” — a term they used for a business that books wedding bands — would have specialists that they could call on to do a Jewish wedding.
You’re writing about a period when the Conservative movement becomes the dominant American Jewish denomination. They have one foot in tradition, and the other in modernity. What does a wedding look like in 1958 when they’re building the big suburban synagogues?
The difference is not so much denominational but between the wide spectrum of Orthodoxy and the diverse spectrum of what I describe as “secular.”
Meaning non-Orthodox — Reform, Conservative, etc.?
Right. Only in the sense that they are broadly speaking more secular than the Orthodox. And if so they are going to have, for the most part, one, maybe two sets of Jewish dance music — basically a medley of a few Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where it could be a quarter of the music or even half would be Jewish music, but this would be for families that have a much stronger degree of attachment to traditional Jewish culture, and primarily Yiddish culture.
There’s a few interrelated elements that shape this. Class is an important thing. For lower class communities in some areas, and I am talking primarily about New York, you’d have communities that are a little bit more secluded, probably speaking more Yiddish at home and hanging out more with other Jewish people from similar backgrounds. So these kinds of communities might have as much as a third or half of the music be Jewish, even though they consider themselves secular. It’s actually very similar to an Orthodox wedding, where you might also have half and half [Jewish and “American” music].
Jews in the higher socioeconomic class might, in general, be more Americanized, and want to project a more mainstream American identity. They might have as little as five minutes of Jewish music, just to mark it that they did this. Still, it’s very important for almost all of them to have those five minutes — because it’s one of the things that makes the wedding Jewish. I interviewed couples that were getting married in the ’50s, and a lot of them told me, “You need to have Jewish dance music for this to be a Jewish wedding.”
Composer and pianist Uri Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. (Nicole Loeb)
When I was growing up in the 1970s at a suburban Reform synagogue on Long Island, klezmer was never spoken about. I don’t know any parents who owned klezmer albums. Then when I got married a decade later, it was in the middle of the klezmer revival. Am I right about that? Were the ’50s and ’60s fallow periods for klezmer?
You’re definitely right. Up until the mid-1920s, you still have waves of immigration coming from Eastern Europe. So you still have new people feeding this desire for the traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people basically tried to become American, the tides shift away from traditional klezmer.
The other important thing that happens in the period that I’m looking at is both a negative rejection of klezmer and a positive attraction to other new things. Klezmer becomes associated with immigrant culture, so people who are trying to be American don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. Anything sounding Yiddish becomes associated for some people with tragedy.
At the same time, and very much related to this, there’s the rise of Israeli popular culture, and especially Israeli folk songs. A really strong symbol of this is in the summer of 1950, when the Weavers record a song called “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew Israeli song written in the 1940s which becomes a massive hit in America — it’s like number two in the Billboard charts for about 10 weeks. Israeli culture becomes this symbol of hope and the future and a new society that’s inspiring. This is all in very stark contrast to what klezmer represents for people. And a lot of the composers of Israeli folk song of its first decades had this very clearly stated ideology that they’re moving away from Ashkenazi musical traditions and Yiddish.
So the Jewish set at a wedding becomes an Israeli set.
At a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s, you might hear 10 minutes of Jewish music. The first one would be “Hava Nagila,” then they went to “Tzena, Tzena,” then they would do a song called “Artza Alinu,” which is today not very well known, and then “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” They are songs that are perceived to be Israeli folk songs, even though if you actually look at their origins, it’s a lot murkier than that. Like two of the songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that received Hebrew words in pre-state Palestine. Another probably comes from some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in 1900, but is in Hebrew and is perceived to be a representation of Israeli culture.
But even when the repertoire already represents a shift towards what’s easier to digest for American Jewry, the arrangements and the instruments and the musical ornamentation are essentially klezmer. The musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt that this is the only way that it would actually sound Jewish.
That is to say, to be “Jewish” the music had to gesture towards Ashkenazi and Yiddish, even if it were Israeli and Hebrew. As if Jews wanted to distance themselves from Eastern Europe — but only so far.
Someone like Dave Tarras or the Epstein Brothers, musicians who were really at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, were really focused on bringing it closer to Ashkenazi traditions. Ashkenazi Jewish weddings in America are not the totality of Jewish weddings in America, and Israeli music itself is made up of all these different traditions — North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek — but in effect most of the really popular songs of the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on a melody from the Sadigura Hasidic sect in Eastern Europe.
Of course, if you’re a klezmer musician you’re allergic to “Hava Nagila.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden dances the hora with his daughter Ashley at her wedding to Howard Krein in Wilmington, Delaware on June 2, 2012. (White House/David Lienemann)
You spoke earlier about Latin music, which seemed to become a Jewish thing in the 1950s and ’60s — I know a few scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin musical genres like the mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the Catskill Mountain resorts and at Jewish weddings.
Latin music is not exclusively a Jewish thing, but it’s part of American popular culture by the late 40s. But Jews are very eagerly adopting it for sure. In the Catskills, you would often have two separate bands that alternated every evening. One is a Latin band, one is a generic American band playing everything else. And part of that is American Jews wanting to become American. And how do you become American? By doing what Americans do: by appropriating “exotic” cultures, in this case Latin. This is a way of being American.
Jews and Chinese food would be another example.
And by the way, in a similar vein, it also becomes very popular to dance to Israeli folk songs. A lot of people are taking lessons. A lot of people are going to their Jewish Y to learn Israeli folk dance.
I’ve been to Jewish weddings where the “Jewish set” feels very perfunctory — you know, dance a hora or two long enough to lift the couple on chairs and then let’s get to the Motown. Or the Black Eyed Peas because they were smart enough to include the words “Mazel Tov!” in the lyrics to “I Gotta Feeling.”
So that’s why we always hear that song! I will say though, even when the Jewish music appears superficial, it does have this deeper layer of meaning. It’s very interesting how, despite all these changes, and despite the secularization process of American Jewish weddings, the music still connects people to their Jewishness. These pieces of music are so meshed with other religious components. Of course, most people see this as secular. But a lot of people connect to their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish food, certain Jewish customs that are easier to accommodate in your secular lifestyle, and the music specifically has this kind of flexibility, this fluidity between the sacred and the profane.
That’s beautiful. It sort of makes the musicians secular clergy.
It’s interesting that you say that. In his history of klezmer, Walter Zev Feldman refers to the klezmer — the word itself means “musician” — as a kind of a liminal character, an interstitial character between the secular and the mundane. The music is not liturgical, but when the klezmer or the band is playing, it is an interval woven with all these other religious components and things that have ritual meaning.
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Canadian Intel Reveals Gaza War Motivated At Least 7 Lone-Wolf Terror Plots in 2025
Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)’s newly published annual report documents how aspiring domestic terrorists have felt justified to plan attacks in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“The threat of a domestic lone-actor attack in Canada increased significantly since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the CSIS report said in a section on religion-motivated crime. “In 2025, at least seven of CSIS’s priority investigations involving mobilization to violence have been assessed as motivated by this conflict in whole or in part.”
CSIS Director Dan Rogers offered examples in the report’s introduction, writing that “we achieved a number of counterterrorism successes that led to law enforcement action, including the arrests of Hide & Stalk members in Québec, and of a minor who intended to violently target Jewish people and police in Montréal.”
The report further described how the war in Gaza “has also fueled violent extremist organization narratives and has the potential to inspire a new generation of extremists. The conflict will likely continue to motivate some extremists in the near term, but understanding the true impact of the conflict will only be clear over time.”
Antisemitism appears in Canada in many forms today, with the report noting continued incidents of vandalism, graffiti, online propaganda, overt racist statements, and bomb threats. The document also said that, since 2014, there has been one attack against a Jewish institution and five plans stopped, including an incident in August 2025 involving a minor in Montreal.
Earlier this year, three shootings targeted Jewish institutions in less than a week in Toronto.
Other terrorist crimes from last year spotlighted in the report included a man in Winnipeg charged in March for offenses motivated by “nihilistic violent extremism,” and a woman in Montreal who pleaded guilty in July to providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That month, law enforcement arrested four members of Hide & Stalk, a far-right conspiracist militia driven by an “accelerationist” ideology which seeks to speed up societal collapse.
In September, the neo-Nazi propagandist Patrick Gordon MacDonald, known by the alias “Dark Foreigner,” received a 10-year prison sentence on three terrorism offenses. The report described how “his objective was to inspire others to engage in violence through his graphic designs and videos he produced in support of Atomwaffen Division (AWD).”
Founded in 2015 by neo-Nazi Brandon Russell — who now serves a 20-year prison sentence after a conviction last year for plotting attacks on electrical substations in Baltimore — AWD draws inspiration from James Mason, a former member of the American Nazi Party (ANP) and leader of the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), who wrote an essay collection titled SIEGE which advocated for a white American ethno-state. The group has often blended with Salafi and Jihadist terrorists, “citing their culture of martyrdom and insurgency as inspiration for their tactics and propaganda.”
Another terrorism conviction in Canada came in October when Matthew Althorpe pleaded guilty for his involvement in the Terrorgram Collective, a neo-Nazi Telegram channel. CSIS explained that “the violent tenets of Terrorgram’s content and manifestos have inspired at least three violent attacks in Slovakia, Brazil, and Türkey, two plots to attack critical infrastructure in the United States, and the attempted assassination of a foreign government official in Australia.”
While a variety of ideologies can inspire terrorist attacks in Canada, the perpetrators fit a familiar pattern, with 93 percent being male and the average age being 34, findings consistent since 2022. However, the report noted increases in both youth and those over 48.
The Canadian government also designated numerous organizations as terrorist organizations. In February, newly proscribed groups included seven transnational criminal organizations reclassified as terrorist entities: Cártel del Golfo, Cártel de Sinaloa, La Familia Michoacana, Cárteles Unidos, La Mara Salvatrucha, Tren de Aragua, and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Later in the year Canada added Lawrence Bishnoi Gang, 764, Maniac Murder Cult, Terrorgram Collective, and the ISIS-aligned Islamic State-Mozambique.
The report explained how foreign governments engage in espionage in Canada. Tactics range from agents cultivating friendships with targets to manipulate them to using blackmail and launching cyber-attacks to compromise digital devices. “In 2025, the main perpetrators of foreign interference and espionage against Canada remained the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Pakistan,” the report stated.
Canada joined 13 other countries in July 2025, issuing a statement condemning “the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty.”
The report described the concept of transnational repression as “when foreign governments, or those acting on their behalf, reach beyond their borders to harass, threaten or harm individuals or groups to advance their interests or to silence criticism and dissent.” Methods employed include physical violence, threatening overseas relatives, lawfare, cyberbullying, online defamation, extortion, and community ostracism.
CSIS named Handala Hack Team as among Iran’s henchmen. The group “doxed several Iran International-linked journalists, including a Canadian resident,” the report said. “The Canadian’s photos, provincial driver’s license, permanent resident card, and Iranian passport details were released on the internet and social media platforms. The hacktivist group reproached the Canadian for, among other things, their promotion of 2SLGBTQIA+ issues in Iran.”
The doxxing resulted in death threats and the harassment of family members in Iran. CSIS warned that Iran may use proxies to go after dissidents, sometimes relying on transnational organized crime networks.
Hostile governments may also seek to plant disinformation, false narratives deliberately spread as “part of broader information operations aimed at manipulating audiences.”
One of the report’s most alarming findings was the degree to which extremist groups with differing ideologies draw inspiration from one another. CSIS described finding “an overlap in content, aesthetics, conspiracy theories and grievance narratives, including those that are anti-liberal, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, antisemitic, and Islamophobic … On occasion, similar violent content is consumed, including gore sites, jihadi beheading videos, and attack manuals.”
CSIS warned that “violent extremists with these different ideologies are increasingly finding common causes. They find inspiration and motivation in the events and trends that polarize society or cause them to lose hope for the future. They easily access and amplify content online that radicalizes them and reinforces their view that violence is justified to achieve their extremist goals.”
The report named Islamic State as the most significant threat to Western interests, with CSIS analysts warning the terrorist group “will continue to attempt to influence supporters — particularly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — to plan attacks on targets related to world events, and enable them to do so, while Al Qaeda will continue efforts to reconstitute itself in permissive territories, including through the rise of the Islamic State in Somalia and increased Al-Shabaab terrorism activities in North Africa.”
A recent example of the trend of cross-ideological alliances appeared late last month in Mali, where Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM,) an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group, joined with Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg rebel separatist militia, in a shared effort to overthrow the military junta which has ruled the African nation since Aug. 18, 2020. The coordinated attacks resulted in the killing of Defense Minister Sadio Camara and the seizure of Kidal, a key town in Mali’s eastern region.
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A best-selling novelist identified a minor character as Israeli. Some fans are canceling their orders.
(JTA) — A bestselling author is facing a flurry of anger from fans after advance copies of her upcoming novel identified a character as Israeli — a move that her critics say advances “normalization” of a country they oppose.
Rebecca “R. F.” Kuang, the Chinese-American author of the 2023 satirical novel “Yellowface” and “The Poppy War” trilogy, is set to publish her seventh novel, “Taipei Story,” in September. The advance version, an excerpt of which was leaked on social media on Sunday, includes a short scene involving an Israeli musician.
The musician, a successful pianist whose performance ignites a near-religious fervor for a character in the story, is not named, and the text identifies him as “a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.”
That was enough to trigger some readers and potential readers who said Kuang was whitewashing Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza — even as she has previously expressed support for the movement to boycott Israel.
“RF kuang had 190+ countries to choose from to write about a character’s nationality and she still chose to write about the one who’s actively committing gen0cide against Palestinians for years,” user alltoowellreads wrote on X, in one representative comment that has been shared nearly 1,000 times that used an online version of the word “genocide” meant to evade censors.
Others railed against the excerpt on Threads, where there is a thriving community of people discussing books. Some readers said they even canceled their preorders of the book.
Kuang and her publicists did not respond to requests for comment, and she has disabled comments on her recent Instagram posts, where she has not addressed the criticism.
The backlash to Kuang’s inclusion of the Israeli character reflects a trend in the literary world, in which even minor mentions of Israel or Israelis are enough to land authors on boycott lists.
The trend predates the most recent war in Gaza: Casey McQuiston, the author of the 2019 romance novel “Red, White, and Royal Blue,” initially included a scene where the U.S. president jokes that an ambassador “said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologize.” In 2021, McQuiston said they would remove the reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in future printings of the book.
But the trend has intensified after Oct. 7 thrust Israel into the center stage of cultural conversations. An online list titled “Is your fav author a Zionist???” that went viral in 2024 urged boycotts against authors for whom the crowd-sourced answer was yes.
Some authors landed on the list without ever commenting publicly about Israel or Gaza. Gabrielle Zevin, for example, was included in part because her 2024 hit novel about Jewish video game designers, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” received backlash for its inclusion of an Israeli character even though he was presented unfavorably. (Zevin also drew criticism for having spoken at a Hadassah event in February 2023.)
Kuang’s silence on the dustup has left some readers to speculate about why she chose to identify the pianist as Israeli in “Taipei Story,” a work of literary fiction about a young Chinese-American woman on an intensive summer language program in Taiwan.
Kuang, whose work largely deals with the Asian diaspora from an anti-colonial perspective, has historically supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. In December, she withdrew from an appearance at a literature festival in Dubai, citing a call from the BDS movement.
That record had led some of her fans to argue that the Israeli character may have been included to subtly critique Israel. Others speculated without evidence that Kuang could have been paid to mention Israel in the book, while others simply expressed bafflement or anger at her choice to mention a state they believe is a colonial enterprise.
“Making your books sm about colonization but normalizing israel is insane to me idk im very disappointed,” wrote one X user who garnered 1 million views with the sentiment. (“Sm” is internet shorthand for “so much.”)
For Jews who have been keeping a close eye on trends in publishing since Oct. 7, the response to the Kuang excerpt has been worrying, even if its ultimate impact remains unclear. Meg Keene, a writer who argues that data shows a sidelining of Jewish content in new book deals, summarized the brouhaha with a deflated tweet: “This is where we are now.”
Even some Jews who do not identify as Zionists say they see something worrying in the backlash to the Kuang excerpt.
“The people canceling a preorder over [a] single mention of an Israeli pianist being booked at a concert hall in R.F. Kuang’s new book lack so much f–king nuance. There’s literally no mention of Zionism yet y’all can’t seem to differentiate,” wrote a Jewish threads user who goes by Axis of Anarchy.
After experiencing some blowback, she followed up: “Also stop with this ‘y’all’ business about normalizing Israel. This is exactly the problem and I have been very vocal on calling Zionists out on their s–t so goodness forbid, I point out when y’all are taking your s–t too far.”
Though Kuang has closed most of her recent Instagram posts to comments, her readers continue to comment on older ones that are still open, asking the author about her choice to include an Israeli character.
Some books bloggers argue that the immediate call to boycott Kuang’s latest book is akin to censorship — and distracting from literary analysis.
“Reactionary outrage like this only acts as a form of censorship, because it discourages analysis,” wrote a user who goes by emily.isliterate, accompanying a widely viewed video on the episode. “From what I can read, I think Kuang (in very few words) manages to criticize the way people treat musicians from certain places over others (namely colonizer states). Maybe people stopped reading after the word Israel or they simply can’t garner subtext and theme, but either way, I think the entire situation is troublesome.”
The post A best-selling novelist identified a minor character as Israeli. Some fans are canceling their orders. appeared first on The Forward.
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University of Michigan in Row Over Professor’s Endorsement of ‘Pro-Palestinian Student Activists’
The University of Michigan Union. Photo: Dominick Sokotoff/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a house divided after a professor used his commencement speech to praise pro-Hamas activists, dozens of whom participated in a destructive wave of protests that scarred Jewish students and prompted the intervention of the federal government.
“Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,” university faculty Senate chair Derek Peterson, whose governance position makes him one of the powerful people on campus, said on Saturday.
Hours later, university president Domenico Grasso denounced the remarks for having “deviated” from what Peterson had submitted for review before taking the stage. Expressing regret that Peterson had caused “pain … on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment,” he stated that the Senate chair’s expressed views do not represent the institution’s, and, moreover, violated its commitment to neutrality on divisive political issues.
“Commencement is a time of celebration, recognition, and unity,” Grasso continued. “The chair’s remarks were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal political expression. Introducing such commentary in this setting was inappropriate and did not align with the purpose of the occasion. In the coming weeks, I will work with university leadership to review and refine future commencement programming.”
The matter did not end there. Grasso’s statement rankled the school’s anti-Israel element, and within just over a day some 1,000 professors signed a petition demanding that Grasso retract his commentary and apologize not to any Jewish students who were outraged by the speech but rather to Peterson, whom they thanked “for his care and insight.” Firing off a litany of anti-Israel accusations confected by the Jewish state’s enemies, the petition concluded by turning the table: Grasso, it charged, had violated the university’s commitment to institutional neutrality.
“We can only conclude that there is nothing neutral about the institution’s supposed commitment to institutional neutrality,” the petition stated. “The institution’s supposed principles on diversity of thought and freedom of expression cease to operate when a faculty member expresses a ‘forbidden’ view.”
Peterson responded to this outpouring of support on campus by doubling down.
“It should not be controversial to have one’s ‘heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza,’ which is what I credited activists with doing,” Peterson told The Michigan Daily. “Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue, and it is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.”
For several years, spanning before and after Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination.
Committed by the “pro-Palestinian student activists” whom Peterson extolled, they included spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism. In another incident, a Cornell University student threatened to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall.
Professors, while operating largely behind the curtain, assumed roles as purveyors of anti-Jewish content too. At Harvard University, a “Faculty for Palestine” group shared an antisemitic political cartoon which named Jews and Israel as enemies Black and Brown people. At Cornell, a professor said Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, in which the group murdered children and pets while raping both women and men, as “exhilarating.”
On Tuesday, Alyza Lewin president of US affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), told The Algemeiner that “the activists Derek Peterson endorsed are the same students responsible for normalizing a campus climate that equates with evil those who recognize Jewish peoplehood and the Jews’ ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.”
Lewin represents most of the Jewish community and its allies, many of whom have said in recent days that Peterson’s choosing commencement to proclaim solidarity with such a controversial and extremist political movement is indicative of a deeper problem in higher education.
“Protests on campus have repeatedly crossed the line: encampments, disrupted ceremonies, demonstrations at officials’ homes, clashes with police,” Nikki Haley, who previously served as governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The First Amendment must be protected, but it doesn’t absolve any one of consequences. Universities have deep culture problems they must address. If they don’t, they should face repercussions.”
Meanwhile, Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said the “graduation is about more than commencement; it’s about campus culture.”
He continued, “Ensuring that moments like this and the broader campus environment reflect the university’s highest values require clear, consistent leadership from the university’s president and the Board of Regents, and I urge them to lead.”
Commencement speeches are a coveted theater for anti-Zionist activists searching for notoriety ahead of their transition to the real world. More often than not, the performances make them infamous, not least because pulling off the act requires deceiving the professors and administrators who approved their being conferred the high honor of addressing the graduating class.
Last year, New York University withheld the diploma of a Gallatin School of Individualized Study student who “lied” to the administration about the content of his commencement speech to conceal its claim that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a falsehood parroted by both jihadist terrorist organizations and neo-Nazis. New York University promptly denounced the student.
Days later at George Washington University, one of its students, Cecilia Culver, not only uttered the same claim but added that her school’s hands are stained with “blood.”
George Washington University noted that Culver had been “dishonest” too and banned her from campus. The university also stripped Culver of her status as a “distinguished scholar.” Culver, whose misstep cost her a job Ernest & Young, is now suing the university for “defamation” and “retaliatory suppression of her protected expression.” The suit adds that her “professional reputation in the economics and policy community in Washington, D.C. and beyond … cannot be remedied.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.