Hillel is a tragedy and a disgrace. But it’s the tragedy and disgrace of the American Jewish establishment which has nearly run out of time to make a final choice between Judaism, the Jewish people and the left.
By Daniel Greenfield
While Jewish students are terrorized on campus, Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut took on another mission.
“The Hillel family will watch out for our Muslim brothers and sisters on campus,” the failed Democratic pol declared. And he added, “As we hope they will watch out for us.”
There is as much hope of campus hate groups like the Muslim Students’ Association, which has a long history of terrorizing Jews on campus, doing that as there was for Fingerhut in his 2004 Ohio Senate bid which he lost with one of the worst showings by a Democratic Senate candidate in the state. But after taking Ohio Democrats down with him, Fingerhut moved on to tanking Hillel.
In his address to the Hillel International General Assembly, Fingerhut seemed to think the big campus crisis was for Muslims, not Jews. “We will stand by our brothers of the Muslim faith,” he bloviated.
But Fingerhut was only trying to outdo the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt who had won approval from no less a Jewish civil rights figure than J.K. Rowling for declaring at what was supposed to be an event to tackle anti-Semitism, “The day they create a registry for Muslims is the day that I register as a Muslim.”
Fighting actual anti-Semitism isn’t cool. Just ask anyone trying to bring attention to Keith Ellison’s long history of anti-Semitism and association with anti-Semitic groups as he crawls on to head the DNC. Defending Muslims against an imaginary threat however is as hip and trendy as a Williamsburg bar.
There up on stage was Eboo Patel, as one of Hillel’s partners, who had bragged of encouraging Hillel to talk to the MSA. Patel had appeared at Islamic Society of North America events, which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas, and celebrated the election of Ingrid Mattson to head the Islamist group by declaring, “I’m proud to have her elected as my president.” Mattson had denounced Israeli “brutality” and defended Sami Al-Arian, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
It only got worse from there.
Hillel had silenced pro-Israel columnist Caroline Glick, yet it provided a platform for anti-Israel activist Jill Jacobs and widely promoted her anti-Israel pressure group, T’ruah, featuring it on its social media feed. Jacobs has campaigned against efforts to fight BDS and attacked Jewish charities helping Jews in ’67 Israel.
Jill Jacobs had even signed a letter calling for “constructive engagement” with a Hamas government even after Hamas had broadcast the threat, “My message to the loathed Jews: There is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere. We are a nation that drinks blood. We know that there is no better blood than the blood of Jews.”
Despite that both the ADL and Hillel gave her a prominent forum. Hillel’s own guidelines are supposed to bar opponents of Israel. And yet they were as neglected at the GA as they are on many campuses.
Also given a forum was Stosh Cotler, a former sex club dancer turned anti-Israel activist who had called for prosecuting Israeli soldiers for war crimes before she paired up with Soros’ son on Bend the Arc PAC.
Hillel International chose to promote Cotler, like T’ruah, on its social media feed. If Hillel doesn’t live by its own guidelines at its General Assembly, why expect any more from it on college campuses?
But that fit with the theme of the event which, despite the motto, had nothing to do with Israel or the Jewish people, but centered on social justice. Fingerhut echoed the same tired Trump alarmism. Peering at his notes to make sure he didn’t leave any political victimhoods out, he warned that students on campus would have to deal with “Islamophobia”, “Homophobia”, “Mockery of the differently abled” and “oppression of non-white cultures and non-white peoples”.
Fingerhut conceded that Hillel had been meant to support Jewish students and combat anti-Semitism, but he insisted that, “Fortunately we have not needed to focus on safety for many years.”
This would come as news to the Jewish students who were being harassed and intimidated on campus. But the perpetrators are allies of the social justice movement at the core of Hillel’s General Assembly.
Fingerhut instead warned about some sort of phantom “nationalist” movement coming to campus. And he didn’t mean the Arab nationalists who led the way in harassing Jews on college campuses. Besides it wasn’t about them. “Our obligation… is to pursue justice for all people, not just the Jewish community on campus.”
“We must never stand by when we see injustice on campus,” Fingerhut insisted. Unless it is against Jews. Sometimes at the hands of Fingerhut’s own organization. “We could not name all faiths,” he quipped, but he then proceeded to offer a special shout-out to Muslims.
“We cannot fail to mention specifically our brothers and sisters from the Muslim community.”
Or the Illegal aliens and the rest of the left’s favorite victims. Unlike the Jewish students struggling with Muslim and left-wing anti-Semitism on campus, they are part of the left’s big victimhood tent.
Fingerhut talked about Jewish continuity, but the younger leadership of the anti-Israel movement is full of Hillel veterans. The Hillel International General Assembly just showcased the situation at many campus Hillels where anti-Israel groups such as Kesher Enoshi thrive. But Hillel’s problem is also structural. The focus on a hard left agenda of identity politics alienates most pro-Israel students and leaves behind those who struggle to reconcile their support for the left’s entire ideological baggage train while leaving the Israel car at the station.
Meanwhile they end up hearing from speakers who encourage them to turn on Israel.
The outcome can hardly be surprising.
The ADL and Hillel are uncomfortable discussing campus anti-Semitism when it comes from its Islamic allies. Instead they would rather climb into the left’s cozy coalition fighting for Muslims and the whole laundry list of social justice identities while pushing the plight of Jews to the back of the bus.
Hillel International’s General Assembly embodied the hollowness of the liberal Jewish establishment in its visible hunger to be part of the progressive consensus, its desperate need to be seen connecting with younger audiences and its incompetent efforts to tap into online technologies and trends.
That hollowness made it all too easy for the anti-Israel left to hijack so much of the establishment. Despite the semi-random interjections of Biblical verses, the liberal Jewish establishment doesn’t really believe in anything. Its leaders reflexively follow the ideological pied pipers of the left. They have no convictions or allegiances that won’t be discarded at a moment’s notice when the piper blows his tune.
And Hillel, like the ADL and many other establishment groups, is hoping that Trump’s victory will allow it to abandon Israel and head as hard to the left as it can without too many protests from its donors.
Hillel is a tragedy and a disgrace. But it’s the tragedy and disgrace of the American Jewish establishment which has nearly run out of time to make a final choice between Judaism, the Jewish people and the left.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
what yamit82 wrote. Here is are phobias for neo-Hillel to fight: http://www.blifaloo.com/info/phobias.php
I have stopped a while ago my contributions to Hillel.
Sounds like Hillel has been so corrupted that the national camp should be creating an alternative in the same way the ZOA has become an alternative to ADL. They could call the new fraternity, “Akiva.”
yamit82 Said:
Jewish values have been corrupted into self annihilation..
yamit82 Said:
Sad but true.
bernard ross Said:
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha
As Yamit intimates…..regarding the question posed in the last paragraph……it’s too late.
Most of the American Jewish population has already made that choice and it is invariably a choice not supporting Judaism and the Jewish People. This is a long term process going on now for many decades and progressively getting worse.\
According to the American Jewish Identity Survey 2001,and latest Pew surveys, out of approximately 5.5 million American adults who are either Jewish by religion or of Jewish parentage and/or upbringing, nearly 1.4 million say they are members of a non-Jewish religion.
We are not talking here about secularism, not about Jews who opt out of going to synagogue in favor of a baseball game or the movies, but rather in favor of church. Since the vast majority of American Jews are of Ashkenazic descent, this means that 25% of the descendants of European Jews who resisted the blandishments and threats of Christianity for some sixty generations, often at the cost of their lives, are now voluntary apostates.
American Jews have been occupied for five decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). The study also discovered that, due to an ongoing intermarriage rate in excess of 70%, of all children under the age of 12 with Jewish parentage in the United States, less than half have two Jewish parents. Of the more than half with a gentile parent, (according to other surveys) only a quarter thereof will be raised as Jews. Of these, only a small minority will marry other Jews, as it will be almost impossible for an intermarried Jew, however sincere, to convince his or her child to do what he or she failed to do, namely: marry a fellow Jew.
If so, no wonder the Catholics are winning. They don’t strive to inculcate in their children a love for Catholic culture. They don’t try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day nor spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with God and soul and afterlife. We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and lithographs of the Western Wall. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice one’s life – nor the love of one’s life.
Against Christianity we have pitted not Judaism, but Judaica.
History shows that substitutes for halachic Judaism have a shelf life of four generations or less. Reform Judaism’s founder Moses Mendelssohn had nine grandchildren; eight of them were baptized as Christians. Zionist founder Theodore Herzl’s children were not only not Zionists, they were not Jews. How many of the grandchildren of the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz married under a chupah? How many of his great-grandchildren know what a chupah is?
To perpetuate Jewish culture, outside of museums and university courses, at the very least you need Jews. But Jews, as all the population surveys prove, are rapidly disappearing. The first step in the multi-million-dollar enterprise of passing Jewish culture on to the next generation is to ensure that there will be a next generation.
The American Exile will end, whether by Assimilation or Antisemitism — more likely, by a combination of both. If the Jewish people are to have a Future, it will only be found in Israel. American Jews can either be a part of that Future, or they can simply disappear over time. The process seems to be accelerating and Hillel is failing to stem the tide they are now part of the problem.
muslim despise these type of Jews, they consider them to be of low character and disloyal to their own even though they use them and smile up in their faces. They cant imagine even their own head choppers doing such things. They think the Jews will sell their own mothers for tuppence.
I believe its a case of follow the money… that the leadership of these orgs are being financed by those who determine their agenda… like soros, muslim orgs, christian replacement theology churches. These so called fake Jewish fronts should be sued for misrepresentation and soliticing donations under false pretenses. I think there are many Jews who dont know that enemies of Jews finance and direct them, I dont think its a matter of perspective.
who are the sick creatures in that school in Ithaca who allowed american children to be subject to this despicable and damaging behavior. They should all be fired. The big noise ADL should sue the school and get them all fired including the principal. Same for Hillel and the other supposedly Jewish orgs. This is an anti BDS state too.