Photo by David Holzel
The boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement on college campuses threatens not Israel but the lives of American Jewish students and the integrity of the university, according to the CEO of Hillel International.
In an interview last week, Eric Fingerhut repeatedly drove home his belief that the BDS movement is “at its heart an anti-Semitic movement.” But he skirted questions about the controversies that have dogged him since he took the job as Hillel’s leader nearly two years ago.
The academic year just ending was a challenging one, he said. “We saw a significant rise in both the number and sophistication of anti-Israel activities on campus. All the BDS referendums that went for a full vote were defeated. Not a single one passed.”
For Hillel to effectively respond to this “wave of anti-Israel activity on campus” meant that Hillel had to build coalitions with other campus groups, something it wasn’t necessarily prepared to do, he acknowledged.
“When these initial waves began earlier this year, perhaps we weren’t as organized as we should have been with other pro-Israel organizations. I think we’ve improved that. Coalitions take time to build.”
Noting a recent WJW cover story (“This campus is not on fire,”) about campus attitudes on Israel which reported that BDS is an isolated phenomenon on campuses, and not a widespread epidemic, Fingerhut said that the colleges affected are “not an insignificant number. I would think it would be wrong to dismiss it as an unimportant issue. I think it’s necessary to acknowledge that there was a significant increase this year. And there’s likely to be a significant increase next year.
“And so some Hillel directors who might not have experienced it may find that they experience it in the future. And our job is to be proactive.”
Fingerhut is spending his political capital on holding the line on a movement that questions Israel’s right to exist and threatens its continued existence, at least rhetorically. Asked what would happen if he failed, Fingerhut said it wouldn’t be Israel that would suffer, but Jewish students and the universities they attend.
“It’s not as if some student resolution passes Israel is going to fall into the Mediterranean,” he said. But because young Jews are the future of the Jewish community, “their ability to organize is an indicator of our future capacity to do that as a Jewish people.”
Jews should enlist the university community in rejecting BDS because “they’re not just attacking the Jewish community. They’re attacking the university’s academic integrity.”
In March, Fingerhut canceled an appearance before university students at J Street’s national conference in Washington. The reason: Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was speaking elsewhere at the conference. Erekat has made inflammatory statements about Israel, but despite Erekat being an acceptable interlocutor to the Israelis, Fingerhut bowed out. He suggested he would compromise Hillel’s opposition to BDS if he appeared at the same conference as Erekat.
In response, the students walked to Hillel International headquarters and stuck Post-it notes on the building’s front windows criticizing Fingerhut for cancelling on him.
Why would the head of a Jewish campus organization give up an opportunity to speak to 1,000 Jewish students — attracting unflattering headlines in the process?
Asked if large donors to Hillel had pressured him to withdraw from the conference, Fingerhut did not respond directly. He said that Israel is a Jewish value and that he speaks to J Street students regularly.
Fingerhut’s tenure at Hillel has been marked by the rise of the Open Hillel movement in protest of Hillel’s guidelines about which positions on Israel are acceptable in the organization’s activities. In 2013, Swarthmore Hillel declared itself an Open Hillel, not bound by the Israel guidelines. In March, Swarthmore Hillel, which is governed by a student board and has no donors to answer to, seceded from Hillel entirely.
But the strangest in this series of events concerned Danny Blinderman, a staffer at the American Jewish Committee’s Boston office and an Open Hillel member. Last November, Blinderman contacted his Open Hillel colleagues about an internal AJC conference call about Israel on campus in which Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut was to take part.
In a series of emails they discussed the possibility of Blinderman recording the call and passing the information to Open Hillel. The story was leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, an online publication, and Blinderman was fired.
Asked if he knew who leaked the story, Fingerhut said, “I have no idea.”
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I would like to know how widespread the BDS movement really is. At the law firm in northern Virginia where I am a shareholder, when we have a candidate for a position as an associate or law clerk, I do a Google check to see if the person was involved in BDS or other anti-Israel activity while in school (obviously, if yes, the application would get a thumbs down from me). We have yet to come across one, although there may be an element of “self-selection”. Nevertheless, even if BDS was as statistically significant as the American Nazi Party, their ideological fellow-travelers, we would owe it to our students to be as supportive as possible in their fight. On the flip side of the coin, we should encourage our students to be strong against those who seek to harass or intimidate. They will learn that there are times when you have to go toe-to-toe with those who are trying to push the envelope – they may as well learn that lesson now.