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So many amazing travel and service opportunities are available through the BC's Alt Break Program! Check out all your options here and apply today!

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Dear President Abbas - A letter from Joshua Lavine

                                             Dear President Abbas,

I was in the audience on Monday evening when you spoke at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. I must admit that the news of your appearance sent shockwaves through the Cooper Union and New York University Jewish student community (the two schools are in close proximity to each other). Some called for students to protest your appearance, while others thought it best to attend and hear what you had to say. As a student, I believe nothing in the world can be accomplished without speaking and listening.

“I come today to pledge to create the new peaceful State of Palestine. I come here to ask you to rethink Palestine,” you said at the beginning of your speech. You said that ISIS and Al Qaeda are not faithful Muslims and that you want to end discrimination against women in the Arab world. These are excellent points and I am sure that most would agree with you.

You then began to discuss the Palestinians’ relationship with Israel. You said, “My people in Gaza live under siege by Israel.” President Abbas, your people in Gaza are not living under siege by Israel. They are living under siege by Hamas, a terrorist organization which shares similar ideology with ISIS, who you previously said are not faithful Muslims. Can you please explain why the organization, with which you formed a unity government in June, authorized the reckless kidnapping (which led to the murder) of three innocent Israeli teenagers 10 days later? The Israeli army withdrew from Gaza unilaterally in 2005. There is an Israeli military presence on the border with Gaza (there are military presences on many international borders) because Hamas is an internationally recognized terrorist organization, which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

This past summer, Hamas launched thousands of rockets into Israel (and some into the Gaza Strip which failed to reach Israel). In response, Israel bombed parts of the Gaza Strip where Hamas was storing rockets and where terrorists were hiding but took extreme caution to limit civilian casualties. Some of these locations included United Nations schools and civilian houses. Who dares to store rockets in schools and intentionally involve civilians in war? Hamas does. President Abbas, I urge you to tackle Hamas. If you took on Hamas and eliminated their terror inducing devices, then the quality of life for the people in the Gaza Strip (not to mention many Israelis) would improve dramatically. Since the method of condemning Israel does not seem to be working, maybe you should try condemning Hamas instead.

At this critical juncture in the history of the Israeli and Palestinian people, I believe, as you mentioned, that the seeds of peace have been planted. No example demonstrates this notion more than the fact that there were minimal visible protests against your visit outside of Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Jews and Muslims alike sat with other students and residents of New York City to hear what you had to say because they believe in peace.

President Abbas, you were a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was an internationally recognized terrorist group. But, as you mentioned in your conclusion, “We have all made mistakes.” Please make no more mistakes. It is not worth another family’s pain to see their loved ones suffer on either side. You mentioned the Eighth Commandment, which prohibits stealing. While there are elements for the Israeli government to improve upon, I call on you to not steal an opportunity from your people to have peace.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins on Wednesday night. Jews all over the world, including within Israel, will be looking inward to try to better themselves in an effort to better the world. President Abbas, look inward at your own people and ask how, as a group, you can better yourselves. Israelis and Palestinians can achieve incredible heights when they work together. I hope you can work with Israel to build a strong future and strive towards a peaceful co-existence so that the world can rethink the relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

My best wishes on your quest to ensure peace in the Middle East.

Sincerely,

Joshua Z. Lavine

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Welcome Week Advice: Kate Blumenthal, '17

First all of welcome to New York City. For me coming from Texas, I had no idea what to expect about coming to NYU. I mean I knew was moving to a much bigger city, I knew there was Broadway, lots of people and a whole lot of honking taxis but I never realized how much I could take in, in this wonderful city. In terms of advice for welcome week. I would just say take it easy and have some fun. Go to events, make some new friends but don't feel too much pressure. It took me a good chunk of my first semester to fully embrace the magic this school/city has to offer. You're not about to just go to a new school, you're about to take on the concrete jungle as well. Take this week to explore the city, learn about the different opportunities NYU has to offer and meet a new person or two. Have a good time and just be happy! --Kate Blumenthal

Kate Blumenthal is a sophomore studying Hotel & Tourism Management. She is on the board of TorchPac, Kesher, Hotel Sales & Marketing International (HSMAI), a sister of Pi Beta Phi and a proud member of Shabband.

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Welcome Week Advice: Sol Adler, '15

Welcome Week is one of the best weeks a Freshman will ever have at NYU because you are living in a new place and you have no classes until after Labor Day. It is a great time to get out of your shell – to explore! When walking around NYU, explore all of the buildings to find your favorite lounge area, dining hall and study area. In addition, get to know people you see, whether it is your roommate, future classmate or even another Freshman you met while at a Welcome Week event. These can and will be your friends for the next four years. When and if you get the chance to venture off campus, be sure to do a little exploration of New York City too. After the Reality show at Madison Square Garden, maybe take a walk to Times Square and explore there or take a Subway to another part of New York City. Most importantly, HAVE FUN! It’s the beginning of perhaps the best four years you will ever have! When you come to the Bronfman Center on Move-in Sunday or any other day, look for me and say hi! I look forward to meeting you!

--Sol

Sol Adler is a senior at NYU Steinhardt studying Global Public Health and Nutrition. He is the former President and Treasurer of NYU Hillel and has been on multiple Alternative Break trips with the Bronfman Center including ones to Estonia & Latvia, India and Oklahoma City. He is currently the Jewish Life Liaison Coordinator and is a member of the Bronfman Center Philanthropy Fellowship. 

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Welcome Week Advice: Zak Kukoff, '17

Welcome Week can be an incredible (and incredibly overwhelming) time -- between adjusting to New York and experiencing all that NYU has to offer, it's easy to feel lost in a sea of activities and new friends. Don't get whiplash! While it's great to make new friends and try out new things, keep a healthy perspective and don't push yourself too hard in your first week at school. Everyone -- and everything -- will still be there if you decide to get a good night's sleep one day. Try to explore and find people or groups that interest you instead of making new best friends. And obviously don't forget to stop by the Bronfman Center -- you can find me at TorchPAC or the Indie Minyan!

--Zak

Zak is a sophomore at NYU Gallatin concentrating in Behavioral Economics. He is a BCEI intern and on the boards of the Indie Minyan, Gallatin Business Club, and TorchPAC, where he also serves as Vice President.

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Shira & Brooks looking smart during a discussion at Hillel Institute!

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Zak & Erica pose for a picture in between sessions at the Hillel Institute!

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Bronfman students break down into independent groups at Hillel Institute!

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Brainstorming new ways for outreach!

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Bronfman students work through creative ways to conduct engagement on campus!

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Hillel Institute selfie! NYU Bronfman students and staff are here in St. Louis for leadership and campus Jewish life training!

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Reflections on my most recent trip to Israel with the UJA Shapiro Family Fellowship

On June 30, 2014, I sat down to write a version of the following article in hopes of getting it published in HaAretz. I thought I had something to add to the conversation about asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. I told myself I would wait until the next day to complete it and then the angle changed as the dead bodies of three young Israelis kidnapped by Hamas were found. And then Muhamed Abu Khdeir was found burned to death. And then Operation Protective Edge was launched. So I deemed the topic less relevant.

But I decided to dig this up again now because it highlights an ugly reality of Israeli society: That there are important, pressing issues going on in this country and plenty of Israelis trying to fight for them but that inevitably, “the conflict” trumps all. And perhaps it should. But we have to figure out a way for these domestic issues (low wages, increased housing costs, asylum seekers, education) to be at the forefront even while the battle between Palestinian freedom and Israeli security creates the ultimate bottleneck.

As I sit here in the guesthouse of a kibbutz outside of Jerusalem reflecting on the past 36 hours, I am overwhelmed with emotion. Confusion. Grief. Anger. I’m conflicted. As a Shapiro Family Fellow, I’ve been traveling throughout Israel since last Wednesday in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of some of the complexities of Israeli society. When the news broke that the bodies of Eyal Yifrach z”l, Naftali Fraenkel z”l, and Gilad Shaar z”l had been found, we were leaving a dinner in the home of Camla, an Arab Israeli woman who owns her own catering business. I was on the bus, wishing there would be wifi in the Druze village we were staying in that night when Jeremy, our educational director, let us know the worst had happened and these three boys were not returning home to their families alive. We were shocked and unsure how to deal, wondering what the appropriate reaction would be given that we were here, sharing in a significant national moment.

Our program began last Wednesday in the holy city of Tel Aviv, a place I fell deeply in love with five years ago; a place which continues to have my heart. The White City has a reputation for being flippant, notoriously sexy, narcissistic and is perceived to be the unserious bubble holding Israel together. But I know better than that - its layers aren’t as ancient but they are just as hard as Jerusalem’s. After spending a semester at NYU Tel Aviv my junior year, I was looking for ways to get back to my beloved beach town and was accepted onto an alternative break trip through the NYU Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life and the Joint to work with the African asylum seekers in South Tel Aviv. I fell hard for this community and became an advocate for their cause. As Jews, a nation senselessly persecuted throughout the whole of time, I felt that we had an opportunity to behave in the opposite way of our oppressors. Now that we have Jewish self determination, we can change the narrative of suffering for others. We can do for these refugees what our enemies would not do for us: employ Jewish values to show compassion towards human beings who are being systematically persecuted in their home countries as we once were in ours. The Shapiro Fellows visited South Tel Aviv last Thursday to hear from Dowid, an Eritrean asylum seeker who walked into Israel through the Sinai only after multiple attempts to seek asylum in other countries. His story is one of survival and dread; little hope remains as his status in Israel is still impermanent. He was a doctor in Eritrea but this is not what matters. He is a human being who is quite literally stuck in an impossible situation. He works but because he has no visa, there is no record of this work anywhere. He cannot sign for his own apartment although because he is savvy and friendly, was able to find a willing Israeli friend to act as a guarantor. There are an estimated 50,000 African migrants currently living in Israel. Most are asylum seekers from Eritrea although about 8,000 are victims of human trafficking from Sudan. “You can count on one hand the amount who have received ‘REFUGEE’ status,” according to Member of Knesset, Moshe Mizrahi, with whom I had the great pleasure of meeting on Sunday. Why does it matter? Because according to international law, an individual given refugee status can live and work in a country until it is deemed safe to return to his or her home country. Currently, there is no process in place for asylum seekers to attempt to make their case. As a security measure, Israel built a wall on its southern border with Egypt and as such has managed to reduce the number of African migrants coming into the country to nearly zero. I asked Mr. Mizrahi if the process could now be quicker and easier since it’s just a matter of absorbing the current migrants, not letting anyone else in. He is not hopeful that it will happen yet. He created a proposal outlining what that process could look like including definitions, deadlines, and responsibilities of the state which did not pass, however, because his party (Labor) is not part of Netanyahu’s coalition. Mizrahi hopes that Yesh Atid may have more luck in getting the proposal to pass as they are part of the government. Even if it doesn’t pass, though, he tells me he will keep trying.

I have spent all of the past two days delving deep into “The Conflict” with three of my peers and the educational director of the Shapiro Family Fellowship. We’ve learned that lately, Gaza shoots rockets into Israel almost daily, there is a palpable Hezbollah threat in southern Lebanon on our northern border, a civil war in Syria, three million Palestinians living in our midst, and the capture of three innocent boys in the West Bank yet the Israeli government seems to think that these refugees are the threat to the Jewishness of the state of Israel. As Mizrahi says emphatically, “These 50,000 are the threat?” It’s mad. The attitude from Dowid is different than that of the migrants I worked with four years ago. The lack of action on the part of the Israeli government - either to deport these people or grant them a status which will allow them to productively partake in society - has made him hard and unhopeful where there was once gratitude and optimism. In our meeting on June 29, Moshe said to me, “You can’t separate this issue from the Palestinian issue because that is the issue that sits on the head of Israeli society. All these problems are connected. We’ve become very nationalist and if there was peace, we wouldn’t behave this way.” I think what he’s suggesting is poignant: that if Israelis didn’t live in a pressure cooker, they wouldn’t be treating Eritrean refugees as subhuman. Moreover, this issue would get the attention it deserves both in the government and in society. The morning we met, thousands of asylum seekers walked from Cholot, a prison-like structure in the south for asylum seekers, to the Egyptian border in protest. Not even a week after, rockets from Gaza stole their thunder.

And that’s where I stopped. Because those rockets are a more pressing issue than these 50,000. Because Operation Protective Edge is more urgent and the security of Israelis more important. I challenge us to think about the impossible decision Israel is faced with when it has to prioritize one human over another, security over what we Americans consider basic rights. What drives a society to that? And then remember that it isn’t black and white. And that if you aren’t willing to start a conversation, to try to understand all sides, you will be unable to fathom a solution. I want to thank the Shapiro Family Fellowship for challenging my peers and me to understand all of the many sides of Israel, even the ugly ones. That the good doesn’t come without the bad and that both come at a high price. That to understand, appreciate, love, and feel ownership of this place as my home is impossible until I strip it naked, look at where it came from, all it had to endure to become what it is now, and where it will go. I have to ask questions, to raise my voice, to provoke in order to understand not just Israel’s place in the world but also my place in relation to it. I am so grateful for the opportunity to become even cozier with this at once warm and thorny place and to the new friends I’ve made as a result. I’m confident that we’ll use this experience and the Jewish values it highlights to influence the world.

-Rebekah Thornhill

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Zak and Ruth reppin' Bronfman at the Saban Leadership Seminar!

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http://www.pardes.org.il The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies brings together men and women of all backgrounds to study classic Jewish texts and current Je...

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Bronfman students and staff "graduate" from Pardes, Jerusalem!

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Bronfman students and staff "graduate" from Pardes in Jerusalem!

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Let's Get The Facts Straight: There Are No Straight Facts

For a person who generally has no lack of opinions or words, I have found myself unable to express my thoughts or respond to the current situation in Israel. I’m confused, appalled, shocked, saddened, angered and cannot completely understand where or whom these feelings and conflictions are stemming from. I see the hundreds of deaths in Gaza, and am saddened by their deaths as I would be if they were any other human being. At the same time I feel such anger that the sole responsibility for their deaths is placed on Israel. I feel such anger against Hamas for seeking the destruction of Israel and recklessly endangering its citizens; anger towards Israel for much of how the government has dealt with people in Gaza and the West Bank in the past; and an anger that people seem to think that everything in this situation is clear and able to be simplified to oppressor versus oppressed. I want to be clear now that the conflict is not clear, and probably never will be. This is of course, just my opinion. Some of us as a society take whatever we hear as fact, some of us struggle with all of the bombardment of information we hear, trying to make sense of it all, and some of us continually only hear what we want to hear. Given all of this, I think we need to take a step back and see whose voices are being heard, excluded, validated, and invalidated. From my perspective, not enough voices are being validated or listened to, and too many vice versa. I can only speak from my experience, as a liberal gay American Jewish male, looking at the world with so many privileges, and also having the experience of someone without many. Recently in the U.S. there has been a lot of discussion and movement towards the concepts of privilege and space; privilege being the special rights and advantages certain traits endow people, and space noting when to acknowledge that privilege and/or the lack of someone else’s. For example, it is not my space, in my opinion, to force my opinions about abortion on anyone else because I am coming from a place of male privilege in that conversation. It is my place to listen to others who don’t have the privilege about reproductive rights that as a male I do, and it is important that I acknowledge that. It is my place, however, to say my feelings about marriage equality, given that is an issue that affects me, and an area where I lack privilege and the conversation is dominated by those whose sexuality allows them more of a say. Why is this idea of privilege and space not afforded to Jews or Israelis, though? Many people think it is their space to say everything they want for and against Israel. It is always their right, just as it is my right to talk about abortion, reproductive rights and affirmative action, but I would disagree that it is always their space, and I think this needs to be addressed. There are a few groups directly or closely affected by the current conflict, such as; Jews, Israelis, Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians. These groups are rarely afforded space in the world to express their narratives, and the current situation is no different. I have trouble accepting that it is the place of an American, unrelated to the conflict, to have an equally heard voice as an Israeli or Palestinian experiencing the conflict firsthand. Although I am in Israel now, and am Jewish, I think even I may be treading this line here as still somewhat of an outsider. Though of course there is an ally argument to be made, that people are using their privilege to speak on behalf of others without it, I would not agree that this is what’s happening, as I will talk about later. I have increasingly heard the argument that people feel so entitled to rage about their feelings on the conflict because many countries have a financial part in the conflict, so therefore as its citizens and taxpayers, they have a right to speak up for or against what its government is supporting. I agree wholeheartedly. However, what I would say to this specific argument is: your government’s financials may give you the space to speak because of your wallet; but for these groups, we are speaking from a place much deeper than any wallet; from our hearts, faith and history to our people and the land. Taxpaying dollars cannot buy or pay for this voice, and thinking so invalidates thousands of years of conflict and persecution of so many groups of people; Jews and Muslims alike. In my experience as a Jew, I have often felt invalidated, and my narrative told to be wrong. When I say anything in support of Israel, I am labeled as having blind faith or being brainwashed. Many times though, these words are coming from people, as I’ve mentioned, who are speaking because their tax dollars and freedoms give them the right to speak. I’ve found they often treat Jews who preach against Israel to be heroes who have gone against the status quo; almost like they have seen the light. This heavily implies that other Jews are only seeing darkness; that our narrative is dark. So it is easy to see why I, only speaking for myself, would not like this constant metaphor of praising Jews who have “seen the light” or “woken up.” If only it were so easy for the millions of people from across faiths that think of Israel as home. Money or no money, we love our land, history and people. Our voices aren’t heard enough, and when they are, they are constantly labeled as biased, Israel-Sympathizers, Muslim-Sympathizers, terrorists, bigoted, arrogant, etc… But, what space does anyone who speaks from their wallet have to call us that? Though I am sure they are speaking from their hearts and values, do our unprivileged hearts and values matter less? For many Jews and Palestinians, we consider Israel or Palestine our homes, and our ancestors’ homes. The land and conflict touch us more deeply than I think people have been willing to acknowledge. I think many people have a hard time coming to terms with the notion that they simply cannot understand every single conflict or perspective in the world. We each come from a unique narrative, that is much harder to grasp than just reading numbers. I am not fighting over foreign policy, tax dollars, or comparing who faces the most oppression. I’m fighting over the home of my people for thousands of years, and the home of the Palestinians for thousands of years as well. This situation touches others and I deeper than I think I can describe, but let us try to tell others, instead of them trying to tell us about our own conflict. Speaking of Jews specifically, as a population I know more about, we historically have been silenced, murdered, forcefully converted, forced from our homes, and this all continues to happen today. We are a group without privilege in most parts of the world, and even in those where it seems like we do, we tend to be“privilege-passing,” so microaggressions towards us don’t seem like microaggressions at all. As with any group that lacks privilege, it is important that those with privilege acknowledge that and the space in which they are making and taking. Thinking that Jewish, Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian voices are as equally weighted with “liberal” activists elsewhere seems just another way of oppressing us, and it is sad to me that many people aren’t seeing it; a textbook case of subtle aggressions towards a group of people not being seen by the aggressors. Let us speak. And Please Listen

-Jordan Star -