During a rally hosted by the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on October 9, one speaker called for “an end to study abroad programs in Israel, academic research citing Israeli universities, and university divestment from Israel and Israeli-supporting companies.” The speaker continued, “No more Hillel.”
These words, it was reported by the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, “were met with cheers from the crowd.”
SJP issued a statement to the newspaper that Hillel is “a fundamentally Zionist network masquerading as a Jewish campus organization.”
Hillel is a 100-year-old Jewish campus organization serving more than 180,000 students each year at more than 850 colleges and universities around the world.
Much of the organization’s programming focuses on Jewish learning, observing the Jewish holidays and Shabbat, arts and culture, and building the elements of a meaningful Jewish life.
A few days after the rally, UNC conducted its installation of its new chancellor. Demonstrators outside the academic hall where the installation took place chanted, “It is right to rebel, UNC burn in hell.”
One of the benefits of free speech is that when people say foolish things, everyone gets to see them be foolish.
Six winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry are from Israel and have made major contributions to our understanding of molecular genetics, protein chemistry, and chemical reactions.
As an academic physician, I am not going to stop citing their research, nor am I going to deny my patients the benefits of their research.
Similarly, will my colleagues in the economics department cease citing research from the three Israeli Nobel laureates in economics? I think not.
Trying to disrupt the inauguration of the university’s chancellor over the situation in Gaza is pointless.
Do UNC student activists disrupt the inauguration of campus leaders because of Iran’s attempt to get nuclear weapons?
North Korea’s threats against world peace? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Syria’s attacks on its own population?
As a chancellor, I can assure these “activists” that no president or prime minister is calling me for my advice on the conduct of their foreign policy.
When you’re a UNC student shouting that a university that has educated teachers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, senators, and a US president for more than 200 years should “burn in hell,” you’ve met the definition of “biting the hand that feeds you.”
A chilling and foolish chant
What is both chilling and foolish is the call for “No more Hillel.”
Innumerable American college students have gone to Hillels on their campus to pray at the campus synagogue, attend Passover Seders, or have a kosher meal.
Calling prayer services or eating kosher food a conspiratorial “fundamentally Zionist network” is nonsensical. Asserting that there is no right of the Jewish people to a national homeland or that Israel has no right to self-defense after the mass murders, rapes, and hostage-taking of October 7, 2023, suggests that the SJP students might benefit from more time listening to alternative points of view and less time shouting slogans.
Attempts by SJP to play the victim by asserting that they don’t hate Jews, they are “just criticizing Israeli policy,” is remarkably tone-deaf.
I have never encountered a campus demonstration by students demanding that the Roman Catholic student organization, The Newman Center, or the Southern Baptist student organization be kicked off campus because of differing opinions on abortion for pregnancy termination.
The campus must, in the view of SJP, only be made Judenrein – the Nazi term for “cleansing the area of Jews.”
Since the chanting students and faculty seem to possess neither much sense nor manners, those with both sense and manners are permitted to remind them that radicals with academic tenure and radical chic apologists for terrorism may enjoy strolling the cloistered leafy walkways of the university, but they are both practitioners of the oldest hate: antisemitism.
The writer, an MD, MA, is the chancellor/CEO at New York Medical College, a member of Touro University, where he also teaches history of medicine. This essay represents his opinion and not that of the college.