As weather across the United States warms, concern springs eternal that universities will once again draw national attention for all the wrong reasons. Last year, milder temperatures brought unsanctioned encampments full of students (and faculty) demonstrating against Israel. Administrators tolerating Zionist-free zones predictably invited lawsuits, which have progressed considerably in recent months. One innovative lawsuit, brought by Jewish students at UCLA, argues that such exclusionary zones violated Jewish students’ First Amendment rights because they discriminated against many Jews’ closely held belief that Judaism requires support for Israel’s existence. In a scathing rebuke of UCLA’s handling of the situation, the judge overseeing the case denied UCLA’s motion to dismiss the complaint, calling the state of affairs on campus “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”
Merits of this lawsuit and similar ones on other campuses aside, the story told by the UCLA plaintiffs suggests that Jewish students—particularly religiously observant Orthodox Jews—may start reconsidering their traditional academic destinations.
Only about 10 percent of American Jews are Orthodox, generally defined by adherence to traditional Jewish law, such as Sabbath and kosher observance. Fewer still are Orthodox and interested in receiving a secular higher education. These Modern Orthodox—distinguished by traditional observance combined with full participation in American life—have long maintained a disproportionate presence at elite universities relative to their population size. (Indeed, there are an estimated 600,000 Modern Orthodox Jews in America, or about 0.18 percent of the population; during my undergraduate years at Princeton University the Modern Orthodox community of which I was a part constituted approximately 3 percent of the student body. At colleges like Barnard, which recently was the site of an anti-Israel riot, the proportion is considerably higher.) Yet these students feel the weight of recent campus controversies most acutely, as they are both “visibly” Jewish—often identifiable by their dress—and near-unanimously ardent Zionists.
Though demonstrators repeat that there is a clear line between Judaism and Zionism, the campus Jews who practice Judaism most studiously seem to disagree. Modern Orthodox Jews generally consider some form of Zionism central to their faith, which is itself inviolable. To them, support for Israel flows from the imperative to safeguard the welfare of all Jews, reinforced by a reading of the Torah emphasizing the centrality of land to the performance of God’s commandments. After praying for the welfare of the American government and armed forces each Shabbat, nearly all Modern Orthodox congregations pray for Israel’s welfare, calling the state “the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption.”
Forced to choose between their religious convictions and social acceptance on campus, they may well pack up and leave. (Indeed, Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of American Modern Orthodox Judaism, has seen increased interest from both transfer students and high school applicants.) This potential exodus, while numerically small, carries outsized implications for the institutions they might leave behind.
The higher education market has begun responding to this anticipated displacement. Several universities are making concerted efforts to recruit Jewish “refugees” from schools perceived as increasingly inhospitable. Washington University in St. Louis opened a transfer portal generally understood to be geared towards Jewish students. The University of Florida has launched an aggressive recruitment initiative, in partnership with the intrepid Jewish non-profit Tikvah, through its full-scholarship Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program. Meanwhile, Yeshiva has intensified its messaging to bright young Jews, essentially urging them to “come home.” Even some Christian colleges are building the infrastructure necessary to sustain Orthodox Jewish life.
It’s easy to see why these recruiting institutions perceive this exodus as a boon. They gain access to a generally talented pool of students who might otherwise have attended more prestigious competitors. For the students themselves, who in simpler times would have carried on the rich if small tradition of Modern Orthodox Jews building communities at Cornell or Columbia, there are tradeoffs. They will have to choose between the credential of an Ivy League or similar degree and a college experience with marginally less prestige but that doesn’t revolve around constant ad hoc extracurricular activity as untrained investigative journalists or activists, or simply trying to navigate campus environments fraught with national controversies. Spending four years doing that work can be ennobling and rewarding. But it can just as easily be demoralizing or incentivize cowardice among those Jewish students who conclude it’s best to go along to get along.
What is not self-evident is why the universities from which Orthodox Jews may flee should care. Their minuscule acceptance rates indicate that they could easily replace Orthodox Jews’ SAT scores and tuition payments. There are more than enough qualified high school graduates to fill the Ivy League several times over.
What, then, would universities be forfeiting should they fail to retain their Orthodox Jewish students? Administrators might respond that they value Jewish students as they would any element of their diverse community, just as a rainbow without any of its colors is incomplete. That amounts to a tautology befitting campus diversibabble: They’ll miss the Jews because they’ll miss the Jews. And from their perspective, that may be all there is to it.
But for anyone attuned to the worrisome emerging divides in American culture today, there is more to the story. What elite universities—and the future leaders they train—would lose is both more subtle and substantial: one of the last remaining bridges between the religious and secular worlds.
Though they do not attend college primarily for this purpose, observant Jews often serve as a window for other students to witness religious belief and practice with an open mind. Secular American students, who vastly outnumber religious students at elite schools, typically know Christian culture too well to give it the examination it deserves. Many have either grown up in it or around it, associate it with various cultural controversies, and generally find its expressions overly familiar or occasionally gauche. They have, in many cases, already developed the lexicon for resisting its influence. It is considered culturally acceptable, unfortunately, to mock Christianity and the Christian conception of God.
This isn’t to say that students can’t find themselves attracted to and even converting to Christianity during their college years. Some certainly do. (The same goes for Islam, though its presence on American campuses is among the smallest of all religions.) But Judaism tends to play a distinctive role in our culture generally, replicated in microcosm on campus, where Orthodox Jews take leading roles alongside their non-observant coreligionists at Hillel and Chabad houses. To the outsider, American Judaism is the benign tradition of the great comedians, the one that shows up in Adam Sandler songs and episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Jewish practices immediately accessible to non-Jews (or non-observant Jews) usually involve food, wine, and socializing. To the extent Jewish moral teachings come up at all, they are unobjectionable injunctions to be a mensch, which naturally distinguish themselves from secular students’ impression of Christian talk about sin, hell, and (the great campus bogeyman) sexual ethics. That doesn’t mean that these represent a full account of either religion’s teachings or practices; it’s just that Judaism appears less threatening to the average secular student. And that perception is what matters, on campus, for getting secular young people in the door to observe religion at work.
Modern Orthodox Jews are told before going off to college to be a kiddush HaShem, or “sanctification of God’s name.” While they do not proselytize, they do not isolate themselves either. They invite their friends to attend Shabbat dinners at campus Hillel and Chabad houses. On some campuses, menorah lightings draw large crowds every Hanukkah.
Perhaps most crucially, non-Jewish and non-observant Jews inevitably notice when their Orthodox peers abstain, unthinkably, from what are thought to be key components of campus life. They notice when their friends aren’t at parties on Friday night, shut off their phones and laptops for 25 hours each weekend, and can’t eat the late-night pizza provided by the debate club. They see their kippah-clad peers uncomfortably approach professors the first day of each semester to inform them that they will have to miss classes for holidays. Yes, even the esoteric ones. No, I can’t show up to class and just listen that morning; I need to be in synagogue, praying.
Those demonstrations of forbearance are especially important. By example, they drive home the possibility that a life well-lived can be governed by restraint and obligation rather than choice alone.
Secular culture has not altogether done away with the notions of restraint and obligation. But it is saturated with the justification “because I want to” for nearly every choice. That is the moral language college students learn to speak. You choose your classes. You choose your friends. You choose how and when you want to have sex. You can eat ice cream for breakfast. Saying that it is better to eat, dress, or spend your time one way rather than another is generally considered deeply unfashionable, if not offensive.
If obligation enters the picture, it is due to the specter of immediate and tangible consequences. Students must do their classwork because otherwise they will flunk out. They must receive continued affirmative consent from their partners because otherwise the Title IX coordinator will come knocking. Indeed, when college students want to obligate their peers to abide by a morality they consider absolutely binding, they insist that administrators punish wrongdoers. If administrators resist—and this is precisely the story of the Christakises, who refused to crack down on culturally insensitive Halloween costumes at Yale, on the grounds that students should learn to tolerate things that offend them—students turn on them. In this moral schema, every choice is equally valid unless it is explicitly disapproved and punished.
Observant Jewish students demonstrate the virtues of a life less focused on the immediate and tangible, whether pleasures or punishments. Rather than the secular creed of “because I want to” they embody its religious counterpoint: “because I have to, even if I know nothing ‘bad’ is going to happen to me if I don’t.”
My own experiences at Princeton illustrate this dynamic. Our Shabbat dinners at the Center for Jewish Life regularly attracted as many non-Jewish students as Jews. Our secular classmates came for the community, conversation, and unimposing rituals: Raising a glass, hand-washing, breaking bread. Many expressed genuine curiosity about how we managed to disconnect despite Princeton’s relentless pace. It could be done, was all we could say. And as my CJL friends’ remarkable academic success would testify, it could be done well.
One recurring theme of conversations with non-Jewish peers was more profound. My Orthodox friends and I would regularly field the question: Why? Why do all this when no one would know, or care, if we ate pork in our dorm rooms or violated the laws of Shabbat? We told them we didn’t think God was going to strike us down with illness or death for violating Shabbat; we didn’t think our non-observant or non-Jewish friends were destined for hell.
We believed, rather, in the power of a covenantal community. We are obligated to do certain things, and if you want to be a full member of our community, you fulfill your obligations. Not out of fear of punishment, but out of conviction that it is the right thing to do—even if it is difficult to explain without reference to ancient rabbinic teachings, or hard to balance with coursework and extracurriculars. That is what binds Jews as a people, we believe. And that is more important to living a meaningful, fulfilling life than all the choices—all the bacon, all the sex, all the freedom—in the world.
We tried to provide secular students with living examples of religious practice, and a religious approach to living a meaningful life, that don’t conform to the caricatures they may have absorbed from popular culture or political discourse. Had most students not already been inured to Christianity I am sure my Christian friends could have done this as well, if not better. The difference is only that we had the opportunity. We had the honor and responsibility of representing religion to people disinclined to take it seriously.
At the time it certainly seemed as though we found some receptive ears. We didn’t win scores of converts, not that we were trying to, but perhaps we did something to keep open the lines of communication between two increasingly separate Americas: the sacred and the secular. These two sides find each other locked in interminable arguments over political questions because we speak largely different languages: One primarily recognizes the legitimacy of rules and norms that increase autonomy, authenticity, and choice; the other speaks of politics in terms of obligation, service, and subordination of our desires. And as Jonathan Rauch notes in Cross Purposes, his new book examining the perils of this divide, secular Americans generally “lack the vocabulary and intellectual equipment to receive religious wavelengths.” Graduates of elite schools will have to navigate a future whose culture and politics will be defined in part by the choices we make to mediate this division. Will they be able to do so without the exposure to religion observant Jews offer, on campus as nowhere else?
Or will they be left exclaiming as the Egyptians did, after the Jews ventured into the wilderness once prior: “What have we done?”
