To the Editor:

Re: “The Wrong to Remain Silent,” Opinion, Jan. 27 and “Gaza Razed: Will Israel Be Held Accountable?,” Opinion, Jan. 29

A few evenings ago, I found myself sitting around the dinner table, participating in a heated discussion sparked by Ariela Rutkin-Becker’s “The Wrong to Remain Silent.” I suppose I should pity Ms. Rutkin-Becker, for she is unable not only to feel the great pride in American Jewry that I felt listening to my peers that evening, but also to see the flaws in her passionate logic regarding the “laws of humankind.” Perhaps these are the same laws that govern the “social contract” of our “enlightenment philosophers” to which Munier Salem so admiringly alludes.

I hate the fact that I feel the need to defend the legitimacy of my ideas to you before I have typed a single, substantive sentence, but I’m afraid that such is the nature of the current discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Discourse and discussion have become polarized into what feels like two distinct groups: those that support the state of Israel, and those that support the humanitarian Palestinian cause.

It’s lonely to be a person who feels like he can relate to both Israelis and Palestinians in the wake of the newest cycle of violence in the conflict. It’s even more frustrating to read columns that are painfully shallow in depth and unnuanced in their treatment of the recent hostilities.

To the Editor:

Re: “Gaza Razed: Will Israel Be Held Accountable?,” Opinion, Jan. 29

I was deeply disturbed by Munier Salem’s Op-Ed, “Gaza Razed: Will Israel Be Held Accountable?” I am sincerely saddened by the loss of Palestinian civilian life, and I will not claim to agree with every specific action Israel takes. Nonetheless, Mr. Salem’s insistence on Israel's total accountability for the conditions in Gaza reflects a lack of understanding about the situation. Israel is simply pursuing its right to self-defense, a right guaranteed to all nations by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.

In his column today, President Skorton urges university citizens to engage in debates and discussions about political conflicts, particularly that in Israel and Gaza. While we agree with Skorton that an academic setting is the best place to foster such political engagement, we hope that he and the University do more to encourage these dialogues.

As campuses across the United States reopen after winter breaks, the recent Gaza conflict has been on many people’s minds. This is particularly true at Cornell, which has substantial and activist communities of Jewish and Islamic faiths. Many of us here feel the anguish of the situation in the Middle East.

Some students, faculty and staff have requested that I take some sort of action, or make a public statement in Cornell’s name. These communications have caused me to think again about the role of universities — and university presidents — in events outside our campus but not outside of our hearts and minds.

This column made its humble beginnings with rants on coffee-drinkers and adjectives. I am proud to say that it has grown up and is ready to address more consequential issues.

Now I would like to outline three facts:

(1) Guantanamo Bay is an American Gulag.

(2) The Israeli initiative in Gaza is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

(3) Universities are a place for liberal minded hipsters with no sense of morals or direction who will cling to any fleeting cause just to increase their sense of self by the smallest of margins.

Do you see how important it is not to exaggerate things?

Ariela Rutkin-Becker wants to know what I want to know, and the bomb-loving crowd won’t tell: “What I want to know,” she wrote on Tuesday, “what burns me up at night is how are so many other American Jews not red-in-the-face, infuriated, embarrassed and righteously indignant now with Israel’s response to Gaza’s rocket-fire?” Ms. Rutkin-Becker, unwillingly and unknowingly conscripted by her temple sisterhood into the Stay-Here-in-America-but-Send-Money brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, isn’t the only one with a presumptive synagogue.

To the Editor:

Re: “The Wrong to Remain Silent by Ariela Rutkin-Becker,” Opinion, Jan. 27

Although we can empathize with the inanity of the modern synagogue and its pernicious mailing list, we take offense at Ariella Rutkin-Becker’s assertion that observant Jews “concern themselves more with laws of kashrut … than with laws that deal with our own humankind.”

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington, but that didn’t make the moment any less memorable. I traded a sea of admirers surrounded by neoclassical monuments for a cozy corner of Collegetown Bagels, where my eyes could wander from the television screen to the swirling snow beyond the café’s broad windows.

What I liked most about the inauguration was that it distracted me, if only for a moment, from thoughts of the thousand-plus Gazans killed since late December.

One of the most inspiring moments of the speech came when Obama spoke to the Muslim world, claiming that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Nuance was finally back in Washington, and she looked sexy.

Note: Yesterday I received a letter from my hometown temple, notifying me that as part of the “Sisterhood” College Connection program that I’m signed up for, a donation was made in my name to a village helping to relocate Israeli youth “away from the stress of the situation.” Receiving notification that my name was so perfunctorily assigned — that my beliefs were assumed based on my affiliation with a congregation — to a unilateral cause which I never would have personally supported, re-ignited a fire of anger that persisted throughout all of winter break. Interspersed in this column are actual quotes that I received in my present yesterday from Mr. Isaac Herzog, Israel’s minister of welfare and social services (believe me, I could not have dreamed this title up.)