The Orange and the Olive

queer, progressive, and weirdly shomer shabbos: in Israel-Palestine

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Swarthmore Hillel declares itself the first-ever Open Hillel in a beautiful resolution

As you know if you saw my Open Letter to Eric Fingerhut a while back, I'm a big supporter of more openness and inclusion in our Hillel communities and Jewish communities in general.  So I was thrilled to see Swarthmore Hillel declare itself the first-ever "Open Hillel" this weekend, in a unanimous vote by the Hillel student board.

The Open Hillel campaign began last January, when students launched a petition asking Hillel International to change its restrictive "standards of partnership" that prevent campus Hillels from co-sponsoring with Palestinian student groups or including certain Jewish groups under their umbrella.  The Open Hillel campaign calls for inclusion, free discourse on Israel-Palestine, and an end to political litmus tests so that Hillel can be a space that nourishes Jewish student life in all its vibrancy and diversity.

These values could not be more beautifully represented than in this new Swarthmore Hillel policy:

Unanimously adopted by Swarthmore Hillel Student Board, December 8, 2013 Whereas Hillel International prohibits partnering with, hosting, or housing anyone who (a) denies the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders, (b) delegitimizes, demonizes, or applies a double standard to Israel, (c) supports boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel; And whereas this policy has resulted in the barring of speakers from organizations such as Breaking the Silence and the Israeli Knesset from speaking at Hillels without censorship, and has resulted in Jewish Voice for Peace not being welcome under the Hillel umbrella; And whereas this policy runs counter to the values espoused by our namesake, Rabbi Hillel, who was famed for encouraging debate in contrast with Rabbi Shammai; And whereas Hillel, while purporting to support all Jewish Campus Life, presents a monolithic face pertaining to Zionism that does not accurately reflect the diverse opinions of young American Jews; And whereas Hillel’s statement that Israel is a core element of Jewish life and a gateway to Jewish identification for students does not allow space for others who perceive it as irrelevant to their Judaism; And whereas Hillel International’s Israel guidelines privilege only one perspective on Zionism, and make others unwelcome; And whereas the goals of fostering a diverse community and supporting all Jewish life on campus cannot be met when Hillel International’s guidelines are in place; Therefore be it resolved that Swarthmore Hillel declares itself to be an Open Hillel; an organization that supports Jewish life in all its forms; an organization that is a religious and cultural group whose purpose is not to advocate for one single political view, but rather to open up space that encourages dialogue within the diverse and pluralistic Jewish student body and the larger community at Swarthmore; an organization that will host and partner with any speaker at the discretion of the board, regardless of Hillel International’s Israel guidelines; and an organization that will always strive to be in keeping with the values of open debate and discourse espoused by Rabbi Hillel.

This is exactly what Hillel should be: "an organization that supports Jewish life in all its forms; an organization that is a religious and cultural group whose purpose is not to advocate for one single political view, but rather to open up space that encourages dialogue within the diverse and pluralistic Jewish student body and the larger community."  Thank you so much to the Swarthmore students who are willing to stand up for these values.

Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut has since responded, telling the Swarthmore students that their resolution is "not acceptable" and threatening them with disaffiliation.  Show the him that you support Swarthmore Hillel's stand, by signing the petition here: http://swatpetition.openhillel.org/

And if you haven't already, sign the Open Hillel petition here: http://www.openhillel.org/petition.php and join the call for all of Hillel International to follow in Swarthmore's footsteps and become an Open Hillel.

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A kippah at the Western Wall

I am at the Western Wall.  It is a Saturday evening, just before the end of Shabbat, and it is growing dark.  I'm here because I want to experience Judaism in Israel -- not just to experience the conflict, the occupation, the racial dynamics, but to see what it's like to practice my religion in the only Jewish state in the world.  I'd gone to Shabbat services earlier in the day, but they felt basically the same as Shabbat services in America -- enjoyable, but not unique.  The Western Wall, though, is a Jewish space that exists nowhere else in the world.  If there is a place to experience what is special about being Jewish in Israel, it seems, it is here.

The women's side of the wall is crowded, as always, and I weave my way past women with covered hair and long skirts to reach the wall.  Once I'm there, though, I know that there are so many other women trying to reach the wall that I quickly walk away to make room for them.  Besides, I'm not sure that being able to touch the wall is exactly what I'm looking for.

As I make my way back, I come across a group of women singing niggunim, wordless melodies.  This is something I love -- singing Jewish music with others.  I hover nearby, and one of the women motions me to join, so I pull up a chair.  The women are dressed modestly enough to be Orthodox, but not all in black and white, like most of the ultra-Orthodox women nearby.  The songs are beautiful, and I join in, learning the tunes as I go along.

A middle-aged women comes up behind me.  She is Israeli, but speaks in slightly accented English.  "What kind of group is this?" she asks.  "Reform?  Conservative?"

The group's leader, sitting next to me, turns to answer.  "Chabad," she says.

The woman frowns.  "At Chabad, they put kippot on women?"

I realize, uncomfortably, that she is talking about me.  I always wear a kippah when I'm at services, or when I'm in a Jewish space on Shabbat.  It's a way, for me, of setting apart holy time and space, of continuing this tradition of my ancestors to remind myself that I am part of something greater.  It's also a declaration of my devotion to egalitarianism in Judaism -- a rejection of strictly defined gender roles, and an assertion that being male does not make you more Jewish.

It was for this reason, of course, that the women objected to my wearing a kippah.

"Not everyone here is from Chabad," the leader replies.

"But you sit with her, she wears a kippah, people will think you let women wear kippot."

"Everyone is welcome here," the leader insists.

This goes on for a minute, the middle-aged woman berating the leader for her implicit support of kippah-wearing women, the leader repeating that Chabad welcomes everyone, no matter where they come from, and asking if she would like to join us in our singing.  I sit there uncomfortably, not sure what to do.  The woman isn't talking to me, and I don't want to further disrupt the singing.  I'm not even sure what I would say to her -- at least the leader is in a position of authority to contradict her.  At the same time, they're clearly talking about me, and I am sitting right there, feeling increasingly out of place.

Finally, I turn around.  "I'm not part of Chabad," I say.

The middle-aged woman looks annoyed that I think I have any right to participate in this conversation.  "I know that," she says.  Then she seems to grudgingly acknowledge that she is better off discussing my kippah with me than with the (much more respectable) Chabad woman next to me.  "What stream of Judaism are you?"

I pause, not sure what to say.  I was raised Reform, but I'm more observant than that now; I'm probably closest to Reconstructionist in ideology, but I've never actually been part of a Reconstructionist community.  I love the flexibility of not being tied to a particular denomination, and my favorite services are usually at independent minyanim.

The woman gets impatient.  "Reform?  Conservative?"

"I don't know, anything egalitarian," I say, finally.

The woman frowns, as if the word "egalitarian" pains her.  "You're a rebel," she says.

"I'm not a rebel," I protest.  I want to express that wearing a kippah is a perfectly legitimate thing for a woman to do -- not "rebellious" -- but I feel like I've instead just validated her idea that there's something wrong with being a rebel.

"You are a rebel," she replies, with certainty, as if judging me to be an entirely lost soul, intent on wrecking destruction wherever I go.  "I come from a very traditional background.  You're a rebel."

I try to protest again, but she ignores me.  "You're not safe here, walking around like that," she tells me darkly.  "We're traditional here."

At this point, the Chabad leader interjects with another assertion that everyone is welcome here.  She invites the woman, again, to join the singing.  The woman declines and leaves.

The Chabad leader turns to me.  "Are you okay?" she asks.

"Yes," I say.  This is just sexism, right?  Sexism happens all the time.  Why was I so bad at defending myself?

She puts her arm around my shoulder.  "Don't worry, I don't think you're a rebel," she says.  I don't feel reassured.  How do I express that there's nothing wrong with rebellion, if what you're rebelling against is a patriarchal institution?  The Chabad leader, for all her kindness, seems more intent on trying to fit me into her worldview than in actually accepting mine as equally valid.

The Chabad woman continues to talk to me, inviting me to Shabbat at her house back in America.  I give her my name so she can contact me on facebook after Shabbat, knowing that my name is common enough that she probably won't actually find me.  She's being nice to me, but I don't want to go to Shabbat at her house in America.  I've always avoided Chabad in America, because they actively try to recruit people to a branch of Judaism that denies women equal participation and condemns gay relationships.  Yet in Israel, it seems, Chabad is one of my best options -- they won't support my egalitarianism or queerness, but at least they firmly believe in welcoming everyone, unlike the woman who had just left.  It's ironic, and more than a little disconcerting, to have my kippah-wearing defended by people who don't even believe that I should be wearing a kippah.

But what really strikes me about this experience is the last thing the woman said -- that I'm not safe here, wearing a kippah.  I can't even count the number of times someone has told me that Israel is the only place in the world where it's safe to be Jewish, our only refuge in a world full of enemies.  Yet here, apparently, it is not safe for me to wear a kippah.

In the end, I think, this is what frazzled me so much, what made me so unable to defend myself against this woman's censure.  I'm accustomed to sexism; I've experienced it before and I'm used to arguing against it.  But, as a friend later pointed out to me, this wasn't just sexism: it was religious persecution.  This woman wanted to exclude me, told me that I was unsafe, because of the way in which I express and practice my religion.  Religious persecution is not something I've ever faced before; it's not something I'm used to defending against.  I don't know how to come up with snappy responses justifying my religion.

We finish singing and make havdalah, and I leave the Western Wall and walk away on my own.  In America, I often walk down the street wearing a kippah, and I have never once been harassed for it, never once felt unsafe.  As I walk back through the Old City that night, I feel frazzled, scared.  I know that I could take off my kippah and feel safer, but I don't want to give in.  So I don't -- I keep my kippah on until I get out of the city, stubbornly expressing my religion despite the judgment I know I'm receiving.  But as I walk away from the Western Wall, I feel more and more as if there is no place for me to be Jewish, here in the Jewish state.

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Goodbye, Israel.  (Sunset over Haifa.)

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The Bahai'i gardens, Haifa.

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Ramallah during Ramadan.  Top: a view over the city.  Middle: cooking a delicious iftar meal.  Bottom: the central square of Ramallah, lit up with lights.

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Photos of me and my friend in front of the Dome of the Rock, and inside.  The last picture is taken beneath the rock on which the Dome was built.  My friend was kind enough to take me up during the Ramadan nighttime prayer, even though I am not Muslim.

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The Dome of the Rock, nighttime prayer during Ramadan.

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On kids, authority, and independence (plus adorable videos of my kids singing bad pop songs)

During staff training week for Project Harmony, the camp's directors warned us that Israeli kids are not used to being disciplined and listening to authority in the way that American kids are.  They warned us that it would be difficult to get them to be quiet, listen to instructions, or not disrupt an activity whenever they felt like it.  After three weeks of camp, I can definitely see the truth to this -- it is hard to get these kids to do something they don't want to do.  Even my ten-year-olds expect to be given a large amount of independence -- to be allowed to choose who they want to work with in an activity, what game they're going to play, or where in the school they're going to roam.  The rules here are much more lax than they would be at an American summer camp (we don't have to walk the kids to the bathroom or water fountain, and they'd probably go crazy if we tried to), and even so, the kids often chafe at their enforcement.

While their unwillingness to listen to authority may be annoying when I'm trying to give instructions or teach English, though, it has its upsides.  When the kids are allowed to work on their own projects that interest them, they are remarkably capable of organizing and designing things themselves.  This week, our English lesson centered around pop songs.  Most of the kids at camp are obsessed with the band One Direction, so I brought in the lyrics for their song "What Makes You Beautiful," and we went over them together.  Some of the kids immediately decided that they wanted to perform the song, and began organizing themselves to decide who would sing which lines, what dance moves they would do, and so on.  Other kids rebelled, declaring that they hated One Direction -- but, after a bit of encouragement from me and my co-counselors (to redirect their energy away from drawing insulting cartoons of One Direction members), decided to prepare a performance of "Call Me Maybe" instead.  (I was briefly impressed by their dislike of One Direction and their good taste in music, but my hopes were dashed.  Oh well.)  They, too, organized the performance entirely by themselves, choreographing the entire song.

Going over the lyrics to "Call Me Maybe."

You can see the results here and here -- I'm so impressed with them!  There's no way I would have been able to choreograph a song when I was ten -- I remember that when I used to go to camp, the counselors would always prepare songs or skits for us to perform, rather than us preparing them ourselves.  But at the talent show for the parents next week, my kids will perform these songs and dances that they arranged themselves.  They might have terrible taste in pop music, but they are so awesome, and I'm so proud of them.

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And the other half of my kids, performing "What Makes You Beautiful."

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My kids at Project Harmony performing "Call Me Maybe," with a dance they choreographed themselves.

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The Old City of Jerusalem at night, during Ramadan.

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Yerushalayim Shel Zahav: Jerusalem near sunset, just before havdalah.

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"Od lo avda tikvateinu" -- "still, we have not lost our hope".  A quote from HaTikvah, the Israeli national anthem, written in graffiti on the separation wall in Bethlehem, atop a mural depicting the violence of the occupation.

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well said. i am really only comfortable talking with other jews in jewish spaces about things that israel does, the good and the bad, and my hillel was great for this.

Thank you!  I hope that Hillel will continue to be a place for open dialogue for all Jewish students and students interested in Jewish life.  If you like my open letter, please reblog/share it, so that this message can be widely heard!

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An Open Letter to Eric Fingerhut, the new President of Hillel International

Context: Eric Fingerhut was recently chosen as the new President and CEO of Hillel International, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.  In a recent statement, he said:

“In college campuses, our great spaces, students are wanting to hear various sides of different issues, but all of it, within Hillel, would be within the context of a love of Israel, an unequivocal support of Israel. And so any students and organizations who subscribe to that will be welcome, those who don’t are not. It’s that simple.”

The following is a letter I sent to Mr. Fingerhut today, asking him to consider who he is excluding from Hillel and the harm such a policy will do to the Jewish community on campus.  Please share this letter widely, so that the leadership of Hillel will see how important it is that all students who seek Jewish involvement be welcome in Hillel.  And if you support fully inclusive Hillel communities that do not discriminate based on political views on Israel, please sign the Open Hillel petition and ask Hillel International to change its current exclusionary policies.

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Dear Mr. Fingerhut,

For the past four years, Harvard Hillel has been the center of my college life.  If you ever stopped by the building on a Friday night, you would, without fail, find me there, songleading at Reform services and eating Shabbat dinner.  If you stopped by on a weekday night, chances are you’d find me there as well — perhaps leading a rehearsal for Shani, the Jewish a cappella group, chairing a meeting of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, or hosting an event with BAGELS, the Jewish queer group.  If you came at the beginning of the year, you’d find me working as a freshman week volunteer to get incoming students excited about Hillel.  If you came a bit later, you’d find me running High Holiday services attended by hundreds of people, conducting concerts of Jewish music at local nursing homes, or leading a Passover Seder using a haggadah that my friends and I designed ourselves.

What’s more, I’m one of those success stories that Hillel leadership loves.  I was raised Jewish, but was never strongly involved in Jewish community or religious life growing up.  If not for Hillel, I would probably have drifted away from Judaism entirely during college.  But instead, I became deeply invested in a way that I never had been before.  I now cannot imagine living my life without being part of a Jewish community.

Yet according to you, I am not welcome in Hillel.

Like many other young American Jews, I do not “unequivocally support” Israel.  I cannot unequivocally support Israel because Israel does not unequivocally support my values: a belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings and the obligation to work towards justice, dignity, and freedom for all.  This is not to say that these values are absent in Israeli society — to the contrary, many Israelis are working hard to realize these goals, and I have been honored to work with and support them, particularly while living in Jerusalem this summer.  Nevertheless, the government of Israel maintains policies that systematically strip a large portion of the population under its rule of their basic human rights.  Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories are denied equal access to resources, equal protection under the law, and the right to vote in the government that controls their lives.  Their homes are regularly invaded by Israeli soldiers or demolished by order of the Israeli government, and their freedom of movement is sharply curtailed.  Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, by contrast, are granted all the rights of Israeli citizens that their Palestinian neighbors are denied.  As a Jew, I feel it is my obligation to unequivocally oppose Israel when it enforces such injustice — not to unequivocally support Israel.

Thus, by your rules, no matter how important Judaism is to me, no matter how much I value being part of a Jewish community, I am not welcome in Hillel.  All the time and effort and energy I have put into Hillel — running High Holiday services two years in a row, leading three Hillel-affiliated groups plus a minyan, coming to Shabbat services and dinner at Hillel every single Friday night I've been on campus for four years, volunteering at Hillel freshman week every year, organizing more Hillel events than I can count — is irrelevant, because I value equality for all people more highly than I value Jewish nationalism.

As you begin your tenure as President and CEO of Hillel International, I hope you will reconsider your words.  Don’t turn Hillel into a place where young Jews like me are unwelcome, our contributions tossed away, our voices unheard.  Support Hillel, instead, as a place where the future of Judaism can grow and flourish — as a diverse, pluralistic, and inclusive community that welcomes all students who seek a Jewish life on campus. Sincerely, Emily Harvard College Class of 2013 Former Co-Chair, Harvard Hillel Reform Minyan Former Chair, Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance Former Music Director, Shani A Cappella, Harvard’s Jewish a cappella group Former President, BAGELS, Harvard’s Jewish queer organization

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Memorials to terrorists in Israel-Palestine.  Top: the grave of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein outside Hebron, covered in rocks placed there to honor his memory.  Bottom: a monument to a martyr from a Palestinian terrorist organization, in Nablus.

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Fascinating poll recently done on the opinions of Israelis and Palestinians on the peace process:

The majority of Israelis (68%) and Palestinians (69%) view the chances for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state next to Israel in the next five years as low or non-existent. A majority of Israelis (62%) supports a two-state solution while 33% oppose it. Among the Palestinians, 53% support and 46% oppose the two-state solution. 51% of Israelis think that the two-state solution is bound to fail because of settlements.  58% of Palestinians think that the two-state solution is no longer viable. At the same time, a majority of Israelis (63%) and Palestinians (69%) oppose the one state solution in which Arabs and Jews enjoy equality; while 32% of Israelis and 30% of Palestinians support this solution.

So, a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution, but a majority also believe it's no longer viable.  Only about a third of both Israelis and Palestinians support a binational one-state solution, even though that's where we appear to be headed (if everyone is ever given equal rights).

Also, neither side trusts the other:

Among Israelis, 50% are worried and 49% are not worried that they or their family may be harmed by Arabs in their daily life, this is similar to our June 2012 findings. Among Palestinians, 74% are worried that they or a member of their family could be hurt by Israel in their daily life or that their land would be confiscated or home demolished. In June 2012, perception of worry among Palestinians was identical.

The level of perceived threat on both sides regarding the aspirations of the other side in the long run is very high. 57% of Palestinians think that Israel’s goals are to extend its borders to cover all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and expel its Arab citizens, and 25% think the goals are to annex the West Bank while denying political rights to the Palestinians. The modal category among Israelis is that the Palestinian aspirations in the long run are to conquer the State of Israel and destroy much of the Jewish population in Israel (37%); 17% think the goals of the Palestinians are to conquer the State of Israel. Only 17% of the Palestinians think Israel’s aspirations in the long run are to withdraw from part or all of the territories occupied in 1967; and 36% of Israelis think the aspirations of the Palestinians are to regain some or all of the territories conquered in 1967.