Major U.S. Jewish groups lie to their constituents and believe that Jewish lives are more valuable than those of Palestinians, Israeli soldiers terrorize Palestinian students and the Jewish state is guilty of genocide and of killing children intentionally. Those were some of the claims that were made at the Conference on the Jewish Left, the second iteration of the event, which was held at Boston University on Feb. 28.
The Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Jewish Cultural Endowment at Boston University—which is listed on the private university’s site under the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies but which BU says is an “independent program,” whose board, “makes decisions separately from the Elie Wiesel Center”—and the Krupp Family Foundation, which supports “social and racial justice,” were listed as the main sponsors.
Other sponsors included the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, BU Diversity and Inclusion and Wellesley College’s Jewish Studies Program. JNS sought comments from all of the sponsors and from the Israeli consulate general in Boston and the American Jewish Committee’s New England office.
David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, told JNS that Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine invited him last year “to address blatant and persistent antisemitism there in particular and on campus in general.”
“You can mention that, and say what is happening in the BU campus is a betrayal of the ideals of a fine university, a threat—implicit or blatant—to Jewish students and a twisted perversion of the historical record and Israel’s actions,” Wolpe told JNS. (JNS sought comment from Boston University.)
The only sponsor of the event who responded to JNS was Warren S. Goldstein, executive director of the Center for Critical Research on Religion, which he said was “proud” to support the event.
The conference “brought progressive Jews together at a time when freedom of speech has been under attack by some on the right,” Goldstein told JNS. “As a conference, it brings those with various viewpoints together to encourage debate and discussion.”
Goldstein said that “J Street is hardly ‘hard left,’” since the group supports “a two-state solution, which is quite mainstream.”
“Regarding the question of genocide, it depends on how one defines it,” Goldstein said, referring JNS to a definition on the website of the United Nations.
“On the intentionality of killing women and children in Gaza, intention is hard to establish especially in a large organization like the IDF,” he said. “But no one denies that tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children were killed by the IDF. The question is whether this could have been avoided.”
‘Raised us on a lie’
At the event at Boston University, Simone Zimmerman, a co-founder of the anti-Israel group IfNotNow, told attendees that the Jewish community “raised us on a lie.”
Mainstream Jewish groups “believe that Jewish lives are inherently more worthy than Palestinian lives, that Jews deserve an ethno-state that comes at a direct cost to Palestinians,” she added. “In order to defend the indefensible, they’ve built an entire industry of denial, diversion and diffusion, with the cost of Zionism on its Palestinian victims.”
Jeremy Menchik, associate professor of international relations and political science at Boston University and director of its Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, directed the conference. He said that the event, which organizers said drew 800 people in person and online, took place when “foundational principles of justice and democracy are under attack.”
In his opening remarks, Menchik said that 65 schools were represented at the event, including Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa. He also said Columbia University, where it is “not an easy place to be a progressive,” was represented.
The anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, and J Street, which describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy,” also participated in the event.
Zimmerman, the IfNotNow co-founder, delivered a keynote titled “Nakba denial and the future of American Judaism.” (“Nakba” is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe,” which some anti-Israel people use to describe the founding of the Jewish state.)
Growing up in what she called a “tight knit” Los Angeles Jewish community, Zimmerman, a board member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Action, said that Zionism “was a fact of my existence, a core pillar of my identity.” But as a student at University of California, Berkeley, she interacted with Palestinian students and heard of the “terror” they experienced.
Her experiences “shattered something in me irreparably, something that can never and should never be repaired by Zionism,” she told attendees. “This has propelled me on a journey of witnessing the Palestinian reality.”
She referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a genocide and said the Jewish state aimed “to erase the past, present and future of Palestinian life on that land.”
Omer Bartov, dean’s professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, gave a keynote address on “Israel’s war in Gaza and the question of genocide.”
“There are obviously some armed Hamas and other Palestinian fighters in Gaza who can, every once in a while, come out from the debris or from tunnels and fire a rocket at a group of soldiers or at a tank,” he told attendees.
“If they’re lucky, they may kill or wound a few of them, but there is no real organized resistance,” he added. “Hamas is operating in Gaza, but it no longer has the ability for organized resistance, and therefore it isn’t actually a war.” He told attendees that the Jewish state aims to carry out “ethnic cleansing.”