A Very Narrow Bridge: The Open Hillel Debate

“We have drawn that line. We are unwavering.”
“That line” is the one between Zionist and anti-Zionist groups, and the man drawing it is Eric Fingerhut. Fingerhut is the president of Hillel International, an organization that oversees Jewish centers of campus life for hundreds of colleges in the world.
Now, Fingerhut has threatened to expel Swarthmore Hillel because of a unanimous vote by its board to invite speakers and guests regardless of their stances on Zionism and Israel. The international organization views this “Open Hillel” policy as a threat to Jewish identity. But Swarthmore Hillel’s supporters, among them liberal policy junkies and Orthodox Jews alike, see Fingerhut’s line as a threat to free speech and open debate—which, for many, might as well be a threat to Jewish identity.
For those involved, it is hard to be anything but impassioned. But the sentiments of opponents of Open Hillel indicate an even larger problem, one that is sensitive and difficult to grapple with, but one too important not to confront.
“The Hatred is Inescapable”
Modern secular Zionism began with Moses Hess, a German Jewish philosopher who, in 1861, published Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question. History told Hess that the hatred of Jews was inescapable, only to be solved by the creation of a Jewish state.
But Hess’s work went without notice. Rome and Jerusalem had come too soon: German Jews were trying to assimilate, to be seen more as Jewish Germans. It was not until 1894, when the Dreyfus Affair shocked European Jews and re-situated persecution into contemporary Jewish memory, that Zionism gained some traction. Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, published Der Judenstat in 1896, undoubtedly in response to the framed conviction of the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus.
To Herzl, “the plight of the Jews,” an exhaustive memory of expulsion and persecution, was a propelling force for the creation of a state that recognized the Jews as a distinct people. This was a direct criticism of the assimilation he witnessed by German Jews: Attempts at assimilation had historically failed the Jews and the Dreyfus Affair was Exhibit A. Herzl argued that the Jewish people should return to Palestine, “our unforgettable historic homeland.” Through World War I, Jewish migrations to Israel, aliyot, trickled onwards.
Then came a period of history that occupies human memory, without exaggeration, as the greatest evil of all time. The Holocaust, Ha’Shoah, exterminated two-thirds of the nine million Jews in Europe in the most institutionally deliberate act of mass violence in history.
Shortly thereafter, in 1948, Israel was granted independence with the end of the British Mandate. The Holocaust did what neither Herzl nor Hess could achieve: Jews from Europe arrived en masse. The Declaration of the State of Israel reads, “The Nazi Holocaust, which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe, proved anew the urgency of the reestablishment of the Jewish State.” In this way, the Israeli state would be defined by trauma.
The Legacy of the Holocaust
The Holocaust exacerbated an existential paranoia soon to be inherited by future generations of its victims. Less than a decade after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which had threatened the very existence of the Israeli state, scholar Ronald Aronson expressed his conflicting sentiments: as a Marxist, he condemned Israel’s oppressive actions towards Palestinians, but as a Jew, he was “awakened by a fear and panic I had never before known.” Despite his pacifism, Aronson treated Israeli charities with uncharacteristic generosity. These funds, he noted, “could not in wartime be anything but help for one of the belligerents.”
Indeed, threats by surrounding Arab states—in 1967, Arab leaders threatened to annihilate Israel, plunging the Middle East into the Six Day War—gave good reason for the young state’s existential crisis. The threats were easy reminders of the Shoah, and led to the regrettable tradition of, as Aronson put it, “seeing the Palestinian terrorists as Nazis.”

Evoking the Holocaust to justify political decisions has given Israel a very particular and risky monopoly on moral property. That is, actions and opinions motivated by realpolitik could be justified via moral imperative. In the Six Day War, Israel seized Judea and Samaria, disputed territories now known collectively as the Golan Heights and the West Bank. For some Israelis, this land was a Biblical entitlement, but for the Israeli state it also characterized an existential safety net in response to the Holocaust. Both these reasons are legitimate, yet neither would have categorically put the goals of the state ahead of Palestinian livelihood had the memory of the Holocaust not been evoked.
In a 1992 interview published in Chronicles of Dissent, Noam Chomsky acknowledges this, saying that the Holocaust “is very consciously manipulated.” An opponent of the occupation, Chomsky recalls a rather overt example of this, in which Wolf Blitzer, at the time a Washington correspondent to the Jerusalem Post, reported that a Holocaust memorial meeting in Washington was a huge success because, “Nobody mentioned arms sales to the Arabs but all the Congressmen understood that that was the hidden message. So we got it across.”
This moral property also explains why—despite the fact that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law—Palestinian real estate is scant while support for the settlements is robust. Yet for Palestinians, Zionism is not the story of a people’s rescue. Far from it, it is the story of a people’s exile and uprooting.
Upon reflection, this is the ultimate irony: the story of the Palestinians is not unlike the story of so many exiled Jewish communities of the past. The famous saying goes, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and the Jews were expelled from Spain.” It is easier to list the institutions that haven’t expelled, exterminated, or pillaged Jewish communities than it is to even begin listing the institutions that have. Why, then, have Israeli policies preferred further settlements, rather than identifying in Palestinians a common humanity?
The metaphysical mindset of the Jewish community, especially post-Holocaust, is characterized by a constant wariness of persecution and expulsion. But the resulting paranoia that catalyzes this legacy into one of victimhood leads Israeli policymakers to justify belligerence against the nation-less Palestinians, rather than sympathy with them.
“This Will Never Happen to Me Again”
I fear for the potential legacy of the Holocaust for three reasons.
First, by evoking the Holocaust in political consciousness, the Israeli political state established a moral high ground whose double standard ultimately undermines human rights. Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard and the founder of McGill’s graduate program in Jewish studies, stated in Commentary magazine in 1988 that “Palestinian Arabs are people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.”
Its racist tone may be shocking here, but it did not diminish a prolific career. (Wisse’s statement rings ironic, for anti-Semitic pamphlets dating back to the founding of Lutheranism evoked a similar sentiment.) Yet Noam Chomsky was antagonized as being “agnostic” towards the Holocaust following his much milder statements in the aforementioned interview. A lower standard exists for the kind of rhetoric surrounding discourse on “Palestinian Arabs,” while a much higher sensitivity applies to rhetoric surrounding Zionism.
Second, evoking the Holocaust for the sake of advancing Israeli interests cheapens and flattens the Holocaust in historical memory. Such has been the case with attitudes towards the Boycott Divest Sanction movement, a pro-Palestinian group boycotting Israel until it withdraws from the illegal settlements. In 2011 Stanford Hillel released an anti-BDS statement reading, “[BDS] resonates for members of the Jewish community with the memory of anti-Jewish boycotts such as the Nuremberg Laws.”
But the comparison is misled. The Holocaust is an unequivocal evil. There were clear engineers of this evil (the Nazis). There were clear victims (Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents). Perhaps no one can completely fathom this evil without having lived it. However, the founding of the Israeli state, and its contentious aftermath, does not share this same morally absolute space. In a recent visit to Harvard, Avraham Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset, noted, “It’s disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust. We are not the victims this time. In 1938, did we have an entire defense force? Did we have political power over our enemies?”
Wielding the memory of persecution to justify goals that lie within a moral grey area diminishes the precise magnitude of the Shoah while turning the light forever green on morally ambiguous policies in the name of the Holocaust’s victims.
To illustrate the moral grey area: The number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank in 2012 grew by 15,000, at the expense of Palestinian homes. Even if Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad had been exaggerating when he said in 2012 “violent attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property, mosques, and farmland had increased by 150%,” the statement reveals the reality of Palestinian victimhood. Like so many Jewish shtetls of the past, Palestinian homes were pillaged.
Equating Palestinian resistance in the West Bank settlements—more often motivated by the desire to preserve a home rather than by anti-Semitism—with Nazi attempts to extinguish an entire people is at best using an axe to cut an apple. And it often comes at the expense of the Palestinians.
Professor Yehuda Elkana, former President of the Central European University and Holocaust survivor, wrote, “Two people emerged from Auschwitz: a minority that claims, ‘This will never happen again,’ and a frightened majority that claims, ‘This will never happen to me again.’”

Third, and most dangerous, is that inappropriately evoking the Holocaust means conflating the difference between those merely critical of Israeli policies or the Zionist idea, and genuine anti-Semites. A 2014 New York Times piece reported on the popularization of a hand gesture, the quenelle, in France by performer Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. The quenelle resembles an upside-down Nazi salute, and fans have been pictured making the sign next to French synagogues and Holocaust memorials. M’Bala M’Bala remarks that the quenelle is symbolic resistance of “the system,” what he believes to be Jewish rulers who cloak themselves in the memory of the Holocaust.
In chilling symmetry, M’Bala M’Bala, like Chomsky, remarks on what he sees as a monopoly on the status of “victim.” But while Chomsky and Burg’s criticisms of how Israel handles the memory of trauma are meant to improve the anatomy of Israeli politics and Jewish identity, M’Bala M’Bala’s criticism is designed to ostracize an entire people. Misplaced evocations of the Holocaust by pro-Zionist rhetoric provide fuel for very real anti-Semitism. What’s more, conflations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism allow anti-Semites to cloak themselves as anti-Zionists. And that’s exactly what M’Bala M’Bala does. Fear and paranoia, the unfortunate companions to the Holocaust’s legacy, are too easily manipulated as more fuel for anti-Semitism in popular culture.
The Cost of Free Speech
The Open Hillel debate occurring in colleges across the country echoes what the political climate in Israel has been for decades now. Those against Open Hillel have posited that modern Jewish identity is contingent upon Israel, and therefore that any anti-Israeli sentiment is dangerous to Jewish existence. A pro-Israel Harvard student once told me, “To me, there is no difference between Jews sitting around a table with members of the BDS movement and Jews sitting with Nazis in 1930s Berlin to establish the most efficient implementation of the Nuremberg Laws.” And recent New Republic piece reported that editor of Commentary John Podhoretz branded Swarthmore Hillel as anti-Semitic for being willing to host anti-Zionist speakers.
Such sentiments by opponents of Open Hillel rhyme with the paranoia held by many Israeli policymakers. Alan Dershowitz, renowned law professor at Harvard, said to the New York Times, “I don’t think this is a free-speech issue. The people who want divestment and boycotts have plenty of opportunity to speak on campus. The question is a branding one. You can see why Hillel does not want its brand to be diluted.”
But Hillel is not Neiman Marcus, and pro-Israeli policy is not Christian Louboutin. Branding provides Hillel with a condition that contradicts its claims to diversity: “Only if you support Israel can we host you.” Again, it evokes the kind of high ground towards Israeli policy that, this time, supersedes even the legacy of free speech: For Hillel, the axe has cut out prominent Jewish voices like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.
And the line has only been inching farther from inclusion. In January 2014 Jewish author David Harris-Gershon was barred from speaking at the University of California-Santa Barbara Hillel because the Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Evan Goodman, found a political post in which Harris-Gershon acknowledges that the pro-Palestinian BDS movement is one legitimate form of non-violent protest.
Harris-Gershon was barred from speaking at Hillel. Harris-Gershon does not subscribe to the BDS movement. Harris-Gershon is a supporter of the pro-Israeli two-state solution.
We should never forget the Holocaust. Its memory will, and should, continue to touch Israeli policy. But we need to be careful about how. Rather than fearfully wielding its memory as political strategy—rather than precariously making Jewish identity contingent upon its fearful trauma—let us universalize its lessons. Especially because neither side is innocent, it is time to acknowledge each other’s histories. In memory of the Holocaust we must justify peace, not violence. We must not draw lines, but erase them. A first step could be Open Hillel.
Certainly the way forward will not be easy, it never was. Reb Nachman of Breslov fathered words now sung into Jewish folk: “Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar m’od. V’ha’icar lo lefached klal.”
“All the world is a very narrow bridge. But ha’icar”—the main thing—“is not to fear at all.”
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, Le Monde