On expulsion – Peter Beinart in NYT (thanks to my friend P):

‘On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.
Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.
Ms. Segal was charged with resisting arrest without violence. The state later dismissed her case. The University of Florida, however, had already banned her from campus. University officials had warned protesters that they could be punished if they violated tough new restrictions on protest. Administrators also said that officers had instructed the demonstrators to disperse. Ms. Segal said it was too loud to hear that directive.
Ms. Segal told me that she was barred from taking her final exam of the semester and participating in a school-sponsored summer program to which she had been admitted. A university disciplinary committee ruled that she had not acted in a disruptive manner but deemed her responsible for violating university policy, among other things. It proposed a one-year suspension. The university’s newly installed dean of students went further. In a letter shared by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, he declared that Ms. Segal’s conduct “caused major disruption to the normal functions of the university and prevented law enforcement officers from performing their duties promptly” and boosted her suspension to three years. (The university would not officially confirm or comment on events surrounding Ms. Segal’s suspension, pointing out that it’s protected information under privacy laws.)
The University of Florida requires any student absent for more than three semesters to reapply for admission. Ms. Segal said she had been on a full scholarship. She now works in food service and doesn’t know how or when she’ll return to college.’

(…)

‘Since Oct. 7, 2023, several prominent Jewish organizations and their political allies have repeatedly demanded that universities protect Jewish students by punishing violations of campus conduct and protest, including with suspension or even expulsion. Ms. Segal is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She’s an alumna of a Jewish summer camp. Why weren’t Jewish organizations concerned about her? Because over the past few years, mainstream American Jewish leaders — in partnership with sympathetic politicians — have done something extraordinary: They have effectively redefined what it means to be a Jew. To silence condemnation of Israel, they have equated support for the state with Jewishness itself.’

(…)

‘Many American Jews, particularly young Jews, hold critical views about Israel. A 2021 poll by the centrist Jewish Electoral Institute, which monitors Jewish voting engagement, found that 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 40 considered Israel an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who did not. When presented with the accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in a survey last year, 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 44 agreed.’

(…)

‘There is a deep irony in the American Jewish establishment’s apparent questioning of the Jewishness of these young dissenters. Because what distinguishes today’s Jewish student activists from earlier generations of American Jewish leftists is precisely their interest in incorporating Jewish ritual itself into their protests. In New York alone, at least 10 non-Zionist or anti-Zionist minyanim, or prayer communities, have sprouted in the past several years. They’re overwhelmingly populated by Jews not much older than Ms. Segal.’

Read the article here.

The good Jew and the non-Jew i.e. the not so good Jew.

There was a time that a totalitarian regime decided who was a Jew and who wasn’t.

Once again, the question comes up. And it’s not a rabbinical question.

If the fight against antisemitism is used to frighten protesters, to silence dissent, the future for the Jews appears to be bleak.