Young Zionist Voices

Young radicals trashed campuses in 2024 as part of their campaign against the Jewish state. For months, the nation’s colleges and universities saw day to day life disrupted by the anti-Israel activists who harassed and attacked Jewish students, spread anti-Semitic propaganda, glorified terrorism, and assaulted police officers. 

Now, the recently published Young Zionist Voices presents the views of those on the other side of the campus divide: Jewish students and alumni steadfastly opposing the anti-Semitic “Campus Tentifada” and “classic schoolyard bully dynamics,” as Eylon Levy, a former spokesperson for the Israeli government, states in the Foreword to the book. 

The young Jewish activists featured in the book are not a monolith. They represent voices from across the political and religious spectrums within Judaism, and, as Hazony points out, many of the essays “contradict each other” in certain points. Yet their differences bring into focus what unites them: a strong Jewish identity, a burning love of Israel, and a desire to stand up to anti-Semitic bullies, all part of a mission that transcends their political and theological disagreements. 

A common theme across the stories in the collection is how pervasive and virulent anti-Semitism is on campuses. Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Harvard University student who sued his school for its atmosphere of unchecked anti-Semitism, draws parallels between the current campus climate and Kristallnacht–the massive 1938 Nazi pogrom that murdered Jews and burned their businesses, homes, and synagogues to the ground. 

Kestenbaum warns that the anti-Semitism in higher education is “how a Kristallnacht begins.” He writes: “In my time at Harvard, swastikas were drawn in undergraduate dorms, a Jewish student was spat on, an Israeli student was asked to leave class because her nationality made classmates ‘uncomfortable,’ another Israeli was assaulted at the business school, a staff member taunted me with a machete and challenged me to debate the Jewish involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, our hostage posters were defaced almost daily, and professors published antisemitic cartoons without facing discipline.”

A common refrain heard from many anti-Israel activists is that Israelis are “settler-colonialists.” They deny Jews’ historic connection to Eretz Yisrael–the land of Israel–by portraying Zionists as imperialists coming from abroad to dispossess indigenous natives. 

A University of Michigan Diversity, Equity, and inclusion (DEI) staffer named Rachel Dawson, for example, was recently fired after it was discovered she allegedly made comments that Jews–whom she apparently called “wealthy and privileged” people who “control” the university–have “no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel.”

But Bella Ingber, a New York University Psychology student, would beg to differ. 

Ingber states that Zionism and Judaism are inextricably connected. She mentions a trip to Israel in which she visited Biblical sites: “It seemed that no matter where I walked, where I looked, where I stood, the Jewish historical presence–both physical and spiritual–was there, irrefutable, supported by centuries of evidence.”

https://www.campusreform.org/article/book-review-young-zionist-voices-/27255

[TBC: History, Archeology, and most important of all, Scripture reports the presence of Israel in what is known as Israel. And, it is correctly pointed out that, “While the Romans expelled the majority of Jews in 70 CE, the Jewish people have always had a remnant in the land of Israel. A portion of the Jewish population remained in Israel throughout the years of Jewish exile while the rest settled around the world and became the Jewish diaspora. In particular, Jewish communities existed throughout much of this period in what is known as the Four Holy Cities: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed (Tzfat), and Tiberias.]