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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Sources: Two Students Speak Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Claire: Hello, and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Claire Suffrin, senior editor at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and editor of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.

I’m here to share two very special essays from Sources while Identity/Crisis is on hiatus for August. Last fall, the Hartman Institute invited college students to share what it’s like to be Jewish on campus in our first-ever college writing challenge. Today, you’ll hear two of the winning essays, each one read by its author.

Around the world. Students, faculty, and staff at universities and colleges are preparing for the 2024-2025 academic year. If, and, perhaps, when, anti-Zionism and antisemitism reappear on campus this fall, we will need to respond with nuance, with commitment to our core values, and in support of our student leaders. That makes these pieces especially important at this moment.

The first essay we’re going to play for you is by Princeton University senior Stephen Bartell. Stephen rejects the claim that the Hamas-Israel war must be understood in black-and-white terms, a claim he heard all too often at protests on his campus. I especially like the way he uses short anecdotes to remind us that when two people are prepared to really listen to understand one another, it is possible to engage across difference. Here is Stephen Bartell with his essay, “Celebrating Simultaneous Truths”:

Stephen: When news of the October 7 terrorist attack first reached my campus, it brought with it a cloud of fear, anxiety, and grief that hung over the traditionally unbridled joy of Simchat Torah, scheduled for that night. As a leader of Koach, Princeton’s Conservative minyan, I was faced with a challenging decision: Should we push forward with our plans for a high-spirited, uplifting set of hakafot despite the tragedy that had just struck Israel? Or should we postpone our plans to instead reflect, process, and comfort one another? In the face of this horrific attack on the Jewish people, it felt like we needed to choose between celebration and joy or grief and fear.

In the end, we chose neither option. Or, more accurately, we chose both, and allowed our joy and grief to coexist. Many in the room danced with tragedy on their minds, knowing full well that Jewish communities in Israel would be too struck by mourning and pain to do the same anytime soon. Others did not yet understand what made this Simchat Torah different from any other—or simply preferred not to think about it. Nonetheless, each student who joined us for Simchat Torah brought with them the full extent of what was on their mind—be that joy, sorrow, or simply confusion—with no need to compromise on the complexity of what they were feeling.

In the weeks and months that followed, however, it became increasingly challenging to hold this complexity. As the initial attack on October 7 became a longer war—one which continues to shatter communities across both Israel and Gaza—I have felt deeply conflicted between my support for the State of Israel and my broader concerns about violence, injustice, and the loss of any human life. Worse yet, many voices around me, including close friends and family, have suggested that my values are in irresolvable contradiction. When I’ve expressed deep concern for the loss of innocent Gazan lives or pushed back against the one-to-one equation of pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for Hamas, my Jewish loved ones have remarked with condescension that I’ve been brainwashed or somehow lost touch with my Jewish values. Conversely, when I’ve argued that calls for Israel’s erasure are rooted in an unreasonable, often antisemitic double standard or explained that I cannot in good conscience support activists calling to “globalize the intifada,” my progressive-minded peers have dismissed my lack of solidarity as a sign of complicity or a faulty moral compass. My failure to fall fully in line with either side of the debate has often felt alienating and isolating.

In the spring, my inner turmoil took on physical form as both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian student protests, frequently framed as diametrically opposed forces, emerged on my campus. Over six months into the war, the demonstrations culminated in a peaceful pro-Palestinian encampment on my campus’s central lawn. In response, pro-Israel counter-protesters set themselves up on an adjacent lawn, Israeli flags and hostage posters in hand. Each time I approached the scene, my complicated, constantly evolving thoughts about the war were flattened into a binary decision: Which side do I stand on? I can either care about Israeli lives or Gazan lives but not both. I can pray for the return of Israeli hostages or advocate for the safety and self-determination of displaced Palestinians, but these values sit on opposite patches of greenery. Although, at their core, both sets of protesters were advocating for the safety of innocent people in Gaza—one group calling for justice for Palestinians and the other demanding the return of hostages—each seemed convinced that they had nothing in common. I often walked by these demonstrations without engaging with either side, out of fear of the message it might send to the other.

Contemplating why I found myself so at odds with the “us vs. them” framework that dominates the Israel-Palestine conversation, I realized that it clashes with both identities that I hold closest to my heart: Jew and math nerd. As a Jew, I take immense pride in our religion’s tradition of passionate yet loving disagreement which I’ve been lucky enough to find at the heart of Princeton’s Jewish community. Whether it’s a late-night debate with my Jewish roommates, a whispered discussion with Jewish friends in the library, or a raucous conversation across a Shabbat dinner table, Princeton’s Jewish community embodies the phrase, “two Jews, three opinions.” My on-campus experiences have reinforced that there is something inherently Jewish about rejecting oversimplified binary choices. Likewise, my time as a math major has emphasized the importance of discourse and open-mindedness. In particular, I’ve learned that the beauty of mathematics is not in seeking out solutions but instead in falling in love with problems. When tackling an open question, one correct proof is merely the first step in the meandering process of understanding what makes the question worth studying, an invitation to explore the problem from a new angle. Similarly, the discovery that a mathematical statement is false is an opportunity to refine the statement into something deserving of further exploration. Mathematics is built on the ongoing exercise of discovery, discussion, and collaboration, which requires a flexibility to try out new approaches and a willingness to internalize the ideas of others.

The reductive “us vs. them” mentality that bubbled to the surface of Israel-Palestine activism on my campus and on others forces students to abandon their complicated, multifaceted worldviews for something one-dimensional. It strengthens echo chambers, imposes false dichotomies, and strikes down nuance. Most importantly, it is antithetical to the loving discourse that makes Jewish communities like mine so meaningful, and it runs contrary to the collaborative problem-solving at the heart of academic institutions.

It is also exactly in this mindset and its incompatibility with my Jewish and academic experiences at Princeton that I see a meaningful path forward. In the face of a war that threatens to erect unnecessary binary choices, Jewish students on college campuses should be empowered to do what they do best: introduce a third opinion. We need to celebrate simultaneous non-contradictory truths, even when some may frame them as mutually exclusive. We need to do so loudly and proudly.

Over the past months, I found power in my ability to uphold simultaneous truths. Unknowingly, I did so for the first time on Simchat Torah by acknowledging that we do not need to choose between living joyous Jewish lives and creating space to process Jewish tragedy. Likewise, I’ve learned that my connection to Israel, my prayers for its security and longevity, and my appreciation of its culture and history do not contradict my criticism of its government and military’s actions, my concern for innocent Gazan lives, and my hope for a lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike. My liberal Zionist convictions and commitments are not undermined by my calls for Israel to act morally as it defends itself. My assertion that all human lives should be protected is not contradicted by my hope that the hostages held in Gaza are returned home immediately. As a college student, as a math nerd, and most importantly, as a Jew, I find my power in refusing to be boxed in by oversimplified, combative ways of thinking.

In my experience, celebrating and protecting simultaneous truths means I must be especially intentional about my language, often in ways I haven’t considered in the past. What does it mean to me that I am pro-Israel? Pro-Palestinian? Zionist? At times, it feels like identifying with any one of these labels does an injustice to my wide range of opinions on Israel, its government, and the current war in Gaza. Rather than abandoning these labels altogether, though, when I talk with my friends about the ongoing war and when I find myself faced with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian advocacy efforts that feel irreconcilable, I have the responsibility of defining in detail what those labels mean to me. In doing so, I help to create spaces that highlight the many ways that people can support Israel and help other Jewish students avoid feeling forced into reductive and isolating binary choices.

Importantly, the recognition of simultaneous truths also requires that I approach the ways that other people define their identities with generosity, empathy, and open-mindedness. I say this as someone who’s been on the receiving end of the alternative. One day this spring, while I was walking past my campus’s pro-Palestinian encampment, I stopped to wave to a close friend who was involved in the protest. Almost immediately, I was approached by a Jewish community member standing amid the pro-Israel counter-protest, who snapped at me and asked why I would bother engaging with “such an unemployable jihadist.” As I started to explain that I was Jewish and a Zionist, she interrupted and called me “a traitor and a pawn of a Jew.” She asked aggressively, “Do you not care about the hostages?” to which I responded by telling her about my friend Omer Neutra, who was taken hostage in October and who I think about often. She proclaimed that I should “be ashamed of myself for turning my back on him” before I wished her a good day and continued on my way to the library. In that interaction, this community member, as well-intentioned as she might have been, imposed her understanding of being a Jew and a Zionist on me and, in doing so, hindered my ability to hold complexity. Instead, I know that when I disagree with someone’s words or actions, I have a responsibility to ask what their identity means to them before I make my own conclusions. By acknowledging that people interpret and engage with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian advocacy differently, we open the door to meaningful dialogue that can be rooted in a desire for mutual understanding rather than a competition to persuade others or pigeonhole their perspective.

Another challenging yet essential truth we should acknowledge is that the breakdown of empathy is often not one person or group’s intention or fault. I’ve heard Jewish students accuse their peers of antisemitism by saying, “Some of my classmates won’t talk to me anymore because they know that I’m Jewish.” I believe that this outlook, though understandable, often misrepresents how walls are built between people who find themselves on opposite sides of advocacy. Just a few weeks ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop when a classmate from my freshman dorm who is involved in Princeton’s pro-Palestinian protests walked through the front door. We hadn’t spoken in quite some time—mostly, I thought, because we no longer live near one another. We exchanged glances and instinctively, I smiled and waved at her. She seemed caught off guard and confused. She waved back, walked towards me, and we chatted briefly. As she turned to get in line for coffee, she said, “I’m so glad we can talk again. I didn’t know if you would want me to say hi to you anymore.” I was glad, too. In celebrating my own simultaneous truths and those of others, I need to push myself to extend empathy and compassion even when I fear it may not be reciprocated, lest we all become convinced that ideological misalignments should keep us from maintaining compassionate, humanizing avenues of communication.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is endlessly complicated, and there are undeniably complex disagreements at its core. That said, we don’t stand a chance of identifying those divisions or advocating for what we believe in if we get caught up with false dichotomies. Instead, college campuses serve as the perfect environment to recognize and celebrate simultaneous truths, to unite around ideas that bridge ideological divides, and to maintain open-minded lines of communication even when we passionately disagree. In doing so, we each gain a great power: the power to define what we believe on our own terms, to build communities around mutual understanding and empathy, and to create thoughtful dialogue that challenges us in the spirit of a Jewish tradition we can all be proud of.

Claire: Our second essay is by undergraduate theater major Lilah Peck. Lilah takes us into the Bayit, a Jewish housing co-op at UCLA, where she joined 18 other students in negotiating what it means to build a pluralistic Jewish home, on the campus of a large, diverse public university. Living there helped her to understand the tensions within herself and within the Jewish community. It also strengthened her commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.

I hope that, like me you’ll find it to be a refreshingly honest assessment of what it’s like to live Jewishly in North America. Here is Lilah Peck, reading her essay, “Building a Bayit: Holding the Particular and Personal with the Universal and Communal”:

Lilah: When I chose to live at the UCLA Bayit, a Jewish co-op that houses nineteen Jewish students of various religious backgrounds and different nationalities, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. I knew there would be two kitchen sinks, one large dining table, and eighteen other personalities committed to creating a pluralist Jewish home. I hoped there would be late-night schmoozing and friends to walk with me to Hillel on Shabbat. I never could have anticipated how central and significant this Jewish home would ultimately become to me. In this time of war, we have held our fear and grief separately and together. We know that our experiences and our views, like our Jewish practices, are perhaps just as distinct as they are shared. My Bayit community, with our singing zemirot by the backyard fire, our spontaneous sufganiyot-making one night of Channukah, and our Kabbalat Shabbat harmonizing, has brought me tremendous comfort and joy, but loving and learning from this shared community has also pushed me to examine what it means to have a core identity, especially when that identity contains contradictory elements.

A core identity, by my definition, is shaped by commitments that are central to your life. These commitments might be affirmed by actions or expressed as ideologies. A person can have multiple core commitments, and there may be conflict within or between them. They might include things you have actively chosen or things you’ve inherited through family or culture. Either way, these commitments are a central part of who you are. When you have multiple core commitments, you might have conflict within your sense of self, but these commitments nonetheless remain essential.

For years, and most significantly since spending my gap year in seminary, I have had a clear sense of my many core commitments. Halakhah, Jewish law, is one: it is central to my life, even though I struggle with it. Most of the time I’m not entirely sure how to define my relationship with halakhah or what I might want this relationship to be in the future. But this dissonance and uncertainty does not negate its significance and primacy in my life and identity. Being a theatre-maker and artist is a core commitment for me as well. Campus performances and rehearsals frequently happen on Shabbat, and I am often unable to participate because of my commitment to halakhah. I try to reconcile these dueling components of my identity by finding ways to honor my values of creating art and taking a day to rest from all creation. When I neglect one of these cores, I don’t feel fully myself. I must find ways to embrace both.

My love and hope for the land of Israel is another one of my core commitments. This commitment was cultivated through my time living in Jerusalem, my relationship with my family living there, and my inherited sense of connection with it as a Jewish spiritual center. This core is also continuously and excruciatingly challenged: by governments that don’t align with my values, by components of Israeli militarism that feel far from my love for the land of Israel, and by campus protests that force me to consider how close or far we are from creating peace. Over the past few years, I’ve struggled with how to hold something so foundational that is simultaneously so uncomfortable. What does it mean to orient myself around something that is so fundamentally complex?

When I moved into the Bayit, I realized that my core commitments must also contend with the new community I found there. Do I care if someone cooks food without a hekhsher in our kitchen? How do I feel about the Bayit hosting a party for Yom Haatzmaut? Answering these questions meant considering, and perhaps reconsidering, my own boundaries and priorities. Particularly after the Israel-Hamas war began, I started asking myself: how can I understand my ideas in relationship with the Bayit community if I don’t have complete clarity in my own convictions? Moreover, how can I expect this community to represent me, and how can I represent it, when balancing my core commitments is a matter of constant deliberation?

I often eat Shabbat dinner at Chabad, where I have a few ways of introducing myself. The first— “Hi, I am Lilah Peck” —is the most particular. It prioritizes my individuality over my relationship with the Bayit and what it stands for. It allows me to express my uniqueness but neglects my community, its influence on me, and its importance to me. The second, —“Hi, I am Lilah Peck the Bayitnik” —defines me as part of a larger group. I give up my individuality and allow my community to define me, or, at the very least, to represent me.

As campus politics around Israel roared in the background this past year, the stakes of how to introduce myself felt particularly high. I felt compelled to stand with my Jewish community, but I did not want to neglect the nuances of my own opinions. My third option— “Hi, I am Lilah Peck, and I live at the Bayit” —is choosing both the particular and the collective. This, to me, is the most compelling, but it is also the most difficult.

Choosing both necessitates an understanding of myself and, more challengingly, a reconciliation of the distinctions between me and my community’s pluralism, which contains beliefs beyond my own. I could find frustration with the distinctions between my community and me. I could think, “I’m not represented here. The Bayit, my home, doesn’t represent me.” Instead, I view the diversity of my community with more optimism: I live in a space that holds complexity, and I am invited and encouraged to bring my own distinct self to that complexity. I am an advocate for my personal opinions in this melting pot. I am my own representative. Sometimes, perhaps even frequently, someone makes a statement or expresses an opinion at the dining table that I don’t agree with; I can feel upset, frustrated by not being unified with my other Bayitniks, and maybe even question whether my misalignment with this individual reflects a greater misalignment between me and the Bayit. I can think about leaving. Or I can feel inspired to articulate my own ideas, compelled to explore where my ideas diverge from theirs, and encouraged to find or make, if not a shared understanding, at least a shared sense that being in community is the higher priority.

When I told my non-Jewish friends that I had chosen to live at the Jewish co-op instead of in the campus dorms, they marveled not only at my choice to cook for myself and live with older students but also at my decision to separate myself from my peers so distinctly. I had chosen the particular, and it surprised them. Within the grander world of UCLA, the Bayit is a particular experience, a Jewish one in contrast to a universal, secular one. While I was sad to create distance from many of my non-Jewish friends, I was prepared to embrace this experience.

Over the last months, I realized that while the Bayit represents particularism to the world outside of it, within its walls it embraces a certain sort of universalism. By choosing to live in the Bayit, all nineteen of us have opted to put our shared commitment to Judaism over our individual preferences for a certain way of practicing Judaism. By living here, we highlight what makes us different from the outside world, and we create a community around the things we share. This relationship is meaningful, but it is not without its challenges. Our house meetings are not without disputes. Can we put a motion-sensing light outside the front door even if it will illuminate on Shabbat, creating a halakhic challenge for our shomer Shabbat Bayitniks? We want to reduce our use of disposable utensils, but we need these utensils for Bayitniks who bring in non-kosher food and can’t eat it with our kosher utensils. How do we synthesize our environmental and pluralist values? Finding answers that honor everyone is not easy, but we seek unity through conversation. We put understanding over convenience, especially recently, as these conversations have become even more complex.

An Israeli flag hangs above our dining table—its presence predates almost all of the current Bayitniks. After October 7, we discussed if it was appropriate to have this flag in our shared, public space. One Bayitnik sees the flag as a religious emblem, not a political symbol, while another feels uncomfortable inviting friends over because of its political implications. One Bayitnik feels the flag signals that here they can speak openly about their support for Israel, that this is a space where “Zionist” is a welcome word, which, as campus becomes increasingly hostile, is unlike many other UCLA spaces. However, other Bayitniks feel uncomfortable eating at the dining table beneath the flag. One Bayitnik mentioned our kashrut policy, which is that we must adhere to the kashrut standards of the most observant Bayitnik. Even if only one person is far stricter than the others, to ensure everyone feels comfortable and included, their practices are our standard. If there is only one Bayitnik who feels there should not be a flag in our common space, their comfort should take precedence. With this, we concluded that the decision should not be about us as individuals, or each of our particular feelings about the flag and what it represents, but how we as a Bayit can best maintain our commitment to pluralism. We put time and energy into these conversations, because this community, built on a spirit of shared respect and accommodation, is our highest priority.

The Bayit is a model for pluralism and tolerance, not only in a co-op, but in any Jewish community, and even in a college.

In our model, the symbiosis of personal and communal commitments is essential. Allowing ourselves and our communities to hold nuance is the only way we can survive. In the same way that I cannot manifest all of my values at one time, my community, my Bayit, cannot manifest all of its collective values at one time. I can’t ask my community to be less complex than I am—it includes nineteen times as much complexity!

While embracing particularism on a college campus can feel dangerous, or at the very least stifling, who else if not Jewish college students (especially those who are observant) can understand the necessity of holding the particular with the universal? There is inherent tension in being a religiously observant college student: I am here to learn and explore, but I have unequivocal limitations on that exploration. I am here to challenge my beliefs and engage with ideas different from my own, but not to question my central priorities. As an observant college student, I am predisposed to internal conflict: I want to befriend many different types of people! But I don’t want to eat in their dining hall… I want academic excellence! But I can’t go to the extra credit event on Saturday… Many of us are familiar with this rhythm. We know what this tension feels like. We have felt the sharp edges of our particularity, our Jewishness, holding us back from being entirely present within the universal campus community.

Inversely, Jews on college campuses can benefit from a universal, shared sense of Jewishness, but we also find it challenging to reconcile the differences within our highly polarized and incessantly divided Jewish communities. We must ask ourselves: how do we hold our core commitments even when they are in conflict? How do we understand our own nuances and the nuances and dissonance within our communities?

While these tensions rise, we need our universal Jewish community more, but it is even more challenging to find the reconciliation we need within it. This year, with a war in front of us and a community beside us, we feel how keenly we need to maintain both the particular and the universal. I certainly do. Now might be the scariest time to show our vulnerability, to say “I feel this way even though I feel conflicted,” but this bravery, this vulnerability, is our only way toward establishing tolerance and establishing, for everyone, a true bayit.

Claire: Thank you to Lilah Peck and to Stephen Bartell for their essays, and thank you for listening to this special episode of our show.

This episode of Identity/Crisis was produced by M. Louis Gordon. Maitai Friedman is our executive producer, the show is edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, and our music is provided by Socalled.

You can read Stephen and Lilah’s essays and others from students and campus professionals online now at sourcesjournal.org, where you can also purchase a subscription to the beautiful print edition of our journal.

Identity/Crisis is always looking for ideas to cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to our podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next week, and thanks for listening.