Pressure on American Jewish Kids to Betray Israel

It’s very hard for a teen or other young adult to stand up for their values if their peer group is hostile to them. Unfortunately, this is exactly the predicament of many Jewish youth, particularly on Ivy League and other elite campuses.

The ADL reported (prior to the Oct 7 Gaza War) that:

[A] radical activist movement places opposition to Israel and/or Zionism as … a prerequisite for full acceptance in the campus community.

Even Jewish students attempting to participate in a sexual assault survivors group were excluded unless they would be willing to publicly betray their support for Israel. The overall message has been clear: to get the interpersonal and institutional support a student expects and often psychologically needs, they need to change their beliefs and fit in.

“Woke” is the new religion replacing Judaism in some circles

The result has been a sad trend towards young Jews “converting” to woke-ism and abandoning the beliefs and loyalties they were raised with, particularly support for the survival of the worldwide Jewish community, and survival of Israel.

The ADL further reports:

[A]ntisemitic vilification of Zionism and ostracization of Zionists has emerged as a common phenomenon within some campus spaces. […] The trend of targeting Jewish students who publicly express support for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state animated much of the worst anti-Israel activity during the 2021–2022 academic year.

Physical threat vs psychological threat

Most antisemitic incidents today are, thankfully, not physical (although some are). More common are veiled or vague threats, such as this effort to provide the locations of vulnerable groups who have not denounced Israel. The next year’s ADL report (still before the Gaza War) documents:

The Mapping Project is a website that contains an interactive map pinpointing the locations of many Boston-area Jewish communal and other organizations, including elementary schools, that the anonymous creators believe are responsible for the “colonization of Palestine” and other perceived “harms,” among which they include Zionism.

Giving a literal map to any terrorist or violent groups who wish to attack Jews has no practical purpose other than to threaten and silence Jews. Why else would anti-Jewish groups want to know where Jewish elementary schools are?

But for a young person in particular, the threat of social ostracism is the most relevant and intense. Being an outcast, or being thrown out of groups or criticized, is difficult for anyone, and doubly so for a person who is both young, and is in a new social environment where they are trying to make friends and fit in.

Jew washing

Another result has been widespread “Jew-washing” where anti-Israel and even antisemitic groups and actors include some of these quasi-converted young Jews in their protests and events, to distract from the reality of the functionally antisemitic beliefs they are advocating and supporting.

As I wrote recently, anti-Israel activists generally claim to be merely “anti-Zionist” and many actually have no particular hatred of Jews. However, the overall project they are involved in, and the ideas they are promoting, are antisemitic making the overall effort harmful to Jews worldwide, and particularly dangerous to Jews in Israel.

This Jew-washing includes holding Passover ceremonies and highlighting Jewish involvement in the protests and activism. These same Jew-washers then almost invariably turn around and demand that Islamist forces take over Israel “from the river to the sea” to form a “one state” solution which will predictably kill, displace or otherwise harm 7 million Jews in Israel.

The pro-Jewish window dressing is false, and Jewish youth involvement in these protests that endanger millions of Jews are shameful.

Some honest moral feeling

Of course some Jews are simply caught up in the same misinformation and academic critical theory ideas as other young people. It’s impossible to tell, for any one Jewish child or teen, what factors led them to an anti-Zionist stance.

But we do know that, collectively, young people do feel social pressures more intensely than mature adults, and we know those pressures are on campuses. We have also seen how the anti-Zionist activist movements have exploded primarily on certain, highly-selective college campuses such as Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Berkley and others, showing the social contagion aspect of anti-Israel activism.

The clear indication is that the small number of anti-Israel Jewish students, who are breaking with the broader Jewish community, have been pressured to do so to at least some extent. We will never know the exact amount, but we do know these Jewish kids don’t have the option of being fully accepted without betraying their own values, or the values of their community.

It is shameful to force Jewish families to send their children to such hostile and distorting environments in order to obtain a top quality education.

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