Arts & Culture

Cornell Celebrates Annual Israel Week

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This upcoming week, from May 1 to May 7, Cornell will celebrate its annual Israel Week, run by Cornell Hillel. The week will focus on Israeli culture and traditions, with events ranging from a book fair to a food market, Tel Aviv Bar Night to Israel Shabbat and so much more. 

There has never been a more critical time for Israel Week. Presently, an encampment stands on the Arts Quad, where only a few days ago protestors chanted together, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada.” This “intifada” they mention is referring to the First and Second Intifada, two Palestinian uprisings which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Calls for another intifada revolution are calls for violence against Israel and those who support Israel’s right to exist. Calls to “globalize” the intifada are worse.

Opinion

JOHNS | Lessons from Yad Vashem

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Up the slope of Mount Herzl, in western Jerusalem, lies a 44-acre complex that is one of the world’s most moving testaments to the real life costs and consequences of totalitarianism. Yad Vashem, which I visited earlier this month as part of a small Cornell student delegation, is often described oversimplistically as Israel’s “Holocaust memorial.” Yad Vashem memorializes the millions of innocent lives lost to the Holocaust, but also those — Jews and non-Jews — who bravely resisted it. One does not leave Yad Vashem without a deep recognition of what happens when the power of the absolute state is wedded to an ideology that denies the God-given, individual rights of man. This past Sunday, the world appropriately commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the most solemn international memorial days marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and death camp operated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Each International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hear the phrase “Never Again.” Yet, sadly and frighteningly, we appear to be in the process of forgetting anyway.