REPORT How the Israel Lobby Captured Hillel [View all]

[azurnoir]

Hillel International used to be a welcoming campus organization for Jews of all persuasions. Not anymore.

“My sense going into college was that Hillel was a center for Jewish campus life,” Wolfsun told me of the organization that oversees a network of Jewish campus centers across the United States and abroad. Wolfsun joined the Swarthmore branch of Hillel during his freshman year and served on its board for three years. (He resigned recently to focus on “job applications and senior-year wrap-up things” but remains involved in the organization.) “I expected it to be a pluralistic, open, inclusive space to explore Jewish identities and learn and grow.”

He doesn’t think so anymore. In 2010, Hillel International, the parent organization of campus Hillels, developed an explicit policy, officially named the “Standards of Partnership,” that prohibits hosting or co-partnering with individuals or organizations deemed anti-Israel or in support of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). Wolfsun and his colleagues at Swarthmore wanted to host a wider range of events and speakers than Hillel’s guidelines allow, and in December 2013, they declared their Hillel “open,” in rejection of Hillel International’s restrictions. In January 2015, the Swarthmore students began organizing an event featuring civil rights activists now involved in Palestinian solidarity activism who support BDS.

When Hillel International got wind of the program, the organization insisted that the program not proceed under its name. Liliana Rodriguez, then an associate dean at Swarthmore College, received a letter from Hillel’s lawyer that threatened legal action against the college if the program went ahead as planned. If the students or speakers “intend for this program to be a discussion in which the speakers present or proselytize their known anti-Israel and Pro BDS agenda, this would cross the clear line for programs that violate Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership and could be reason for Hillel International to seek to protect its guidelines, name and reputation,” Hillel’s lawyer wrote.

Swarthmore’s Jewish students were not the only ones to face intervention from Hillel in recent years, either directly or by local Hillel directors. Harvard University students had to relocate an event scheduled to take place at their Hillel when their rabbi nixed it on the grounds that the event was co-sponsored by a pro-BDS Palestinian solidarity group. The same civil rights speakers who caused the Swarthmore maelstrom were blocked from speaking at Oberlin College in Ohio by the local Hillel director. Then they were blocked from speaking at Muhlenberg College’s Hillel by the Hillel rabbi because the event violated the Standards of Partnership. Caroline Dorn, the student president of Muhlenberg’s Hillel at the time, resigned in protest. “I can’t be a representative of Hillel International, an organization that I feel is limiting free speech on our campus and prohibiting academic integrity,” Dorn wrote in an op-ed in the college’s newspaper.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/23/how-the-israel-lobby-captured-hillel-international-college-campus/