For decades, debates about Jewish values have grounded divisions within Jewish communities about what our relationships should be to an Israeli state that claims to act on our behalf as it engages in illegal occupations and genocide of Palestinians. For many Jewish people who support a free Palestine, it is foundationally grounded in Jewish concepts like tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and Doykeit, or “hereness,” that calls on Jews to be in solidarity with other historically excluded people, including Palestinians. For these Jews, opposition to Israeli oppression is a core Jewish value, and protesting to help bring about a world without it is therefore a Jewish obligation.
The recent student protest at Cornell’s Statler Hotel brought this conflict over Jewish values into sharp focus. One Jewish undergraduate student was informed last week that he was identified via a social media video as a protest participant and is now suspended under Cornell’s interim policy on expressive activity. He remembers a fellow Jewish student directing the ethnic slur “kapo” towards him and also filming him outside the Statler.
This suspended student, a deeply committed member of Cornell’s Jewish community who seems to have been targeted as a Jew by another Jewish student precisely because of their different understandings of Jewish values, is now barred from campus, except for accessing Cornell Health. He was explicitly denied permission to participate in and lead Shabbat services for his campus-based Chavurah prayer group, which he helped found. He was told that he could instead attend services at local synagogues, as if Jewish prayer spaces and communities are interchangeable.
In ignoring antisemitic slurs hurled at Jews protesting on behalf of Palestinian lives, while issuing punishments that bar Jewish students from participating in their chosen Jewish prayer communities, Cornell is inappropriately weighing in on Jewish debates about Jewish values and practice.
This and the other suspensions lack due process: the same Cornell office makes the allegation and decides on its seriousness, excuses itself from obligations to prove either and declares whether the student constitutes a threat to the campus community. This is nothing less than the purging from Cornell’s community of any who dare to engage in nonviolent protest in the name of their deeply held commitments to peace, to justice and in this student’s case, to Judaism.
We call on Cornell to immediately lift this and the other temporary suspensions. We further call for a moratorium on future temporary suspensions related to expressive activity allegations. These students are part of the Cornell community, and they deserve to be included and respected as such. Instead, their concerns are dismissed and their non-violent but necessarily disruptive protest tactics are recast as violent and dangerous, so much so that attending their classes or leading Shabbat services are presented as a threat to the University. We categorically reject these distorted recastings, and we affirm that the University has no place deciding for us which Jewish values are valid and which are not.
Signed,
Noah Tamarkin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and STS
Chloe Ahmann, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Amiel Bize, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Shimon Edelman, Professor of Psychology
Eli Friedman, Associate Professor of Global Labor and Work, Department of Sociology
Neil Hertz, Professor Emeritus of Literatures in English
Dan Hirschman, Associate Professor of Sociology
Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Department of Literatures in English
Lois Levitan, Senior Extension Associate, Department of Communication, Retired
Risa Lieberwitz, Professor of Labor and Employment Law, ILR School
On behalf of the Cornell Jewish Alliance for Justice