Campus Israel Fellows are modern Maccabees

Later this month, Jews around the world will celebrate Hanukkah, a holiday that recalls an ancient rebellion aimed at restoring the pride and purity of the Jewish people in the face of a hostile dominant culture.

Something of a similar heroic campaign is being waged today on American college campuses, where a small group of Israeli army veterans have deployed to help restore the reputation of the Jewish state.

The Jewish Agency’s Israel Fellows program, begun in 2003, has grown so that there are now 71 young Israelis embedded as professional educators on college campuses in the United States and Canada. The ancient Maccabees of the Hanukkah story fought with spears, swords and perhaps slingshots. Their modern descendants are using a contemporary approach that includes coffee dates, coalition building and subsidized or free trips to Israel for student leaders. Their aim is, in part, to combat the “boycott, divest, sanctions” movement, an attempt by Israel’s enemies to demonize the Jewish state.

At Ohio State University, Idan Simchony, 29, arrived in 2015 after five years in the Israel Defense Force’s Unit 8200, an intelligence corps. He’d never before been in the United States. He works with Buckeyes for Israel, the pro-Israel student group, and also coordinates with the various other national organizations — the American Jewish Committee, the David Project, the Zionist Organization of America, Christians United for Israel, Hillel, Stand With Us — to make sure they are cooperating rather than tripping over one another on campus.

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the Israel Fellow is Rebecca Avera, 30, whose family came to Israel from Ethiopia. Last year, when she was stationed at Stanford, anti-Israel students infiltrated an on-campus observation of Israel’s Independence Day and staged a dramatic “die in” as a protest. But at Stanford, Avera was also able to co-sponsor an event with the African Student Union that attracted 300 people to celebrate Sigd, an Ethiopian Jewish holiday.

When I asked Avera how she answers efforts to depict Israel as an “apartheid state” for its treatment of Palestinian Arabs, she responds, “I use my personal story. … I’m just telling them, look at me, I’m Israeli, and I am black. How is that racism? If there is an apartheid state, I would be the first to be discriminated.”

At the University of Michigan, Israel Fellow Liraz Cohen, led a 10-day trip to Israel for student leaders, including student government officials. The personal relationships built on the trip helped in eventually defeating a boycott-divest-sanctions resolution when one came up for a vote on campus.

The executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, Jacob Baime, said the Israel Fellows “help the average student on campus see Israel through their eyes. They are showing students all over the country the real Israel. It’s amazing.”

Simchony, the Israel Fellow at Ohio State, recalls the emotional high last year when, after two weeks of intense preparation and six hours of debate at the student government, a boycott-divest-sanctions resolution was defeated. “Everyone was hugging each other,” he said. “It was a very happy moment.”

He said it reminded him of 1948, when the modern state of Israel was born.

Really turning around the hostile anti-Israel climate on college campuses might seem like a miracle akin to the one marked by the holiday of Hanukkah. If anything, universities have taken the place of the Temple in Jerusalem as institutions in the direction of which modern American Jews worship and send their money.

The miracle of Hanukkah was that the oil for the candelabra in the rededicated Temple lasted for eight nights even though there was enough for just one night. The Israel Fellows I talked to hope that their influence on students extends past a BDS vote and lasts even after graduation. That’s not an easy thing to measure, but if it happens, it will be worth celebrating, too.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of “JFK: Conservative.” His column appears Sunday.