Coalition for Jewish Values, representing more than 2,500 traditional Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, condemned the representative bodies of all three major non-Orthodox “denominations” for participating in a statement opposing the steps being taken by the Trump administration to confront the wave of antisemitic campus protests. That statement, issued by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), took precisely the wrong approach to both suspensions of government funding and deportation of foreign nationals participating in antisemitic incitement.
That the leftist JCPA would issue such a statement is sadly unsurprising, but, shockingly, it was joined by the rabbinic arms of all three deviationist movements in American Judaism: Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly, representing Conservative Judaism, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. With this move, America’s progressive Jewish denominations placed their ideological commitment to left-wing politics above the safety and dignity of Jewish students.
Due to the college environment tolerated, and even encouraged, at many of America’s leading universities, Jewish students are choosing to go elsewhere. Columbia’s campus was so openly hostile that Rabbi Elie Buechler, the director of the Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus at Columbia, told Jewish students at one point to return home for their own safety. These schools are no less racist than Bob Jones University was in the 1970s when it lost its tax exemption yet the “progressive” rabbis claim that it will weaken “free academic inquiry” to withhold funding while Jews are being actively excluded from research. It is hard to imagine a more anti-Jewish position.
Similarly, the Trump administration is deporting foreign nationals who have misused their visas to incite hatred against Jews and support for Hamas, a designated foreign terror organization in the United States. It first targeted Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian activist who served as spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organization that rendered Columbia’s environment so toxic to Jews.
There is nothing undemocratic about saying that antisemitic incitement and bigotry are against America’s national interest. But to these rabbis the rights of Jewish students to learn and study takes a backseat to Khalil’s nonexistent “right” to spread antisemitic bigotry and hate on campus.
These left-wing groups have abandoned the very community they claim to represent. CJV calls upon those misled by these movements to find, instead, congregations where traditional Jewish values and the right of Jewish students to safety and security are strongly upheld.
