I came to Penn not intending to get involved in the Jewish community on campus. I planned to only be involved with Kol Tzedek, a local synagogue, where I had family friends.
The pandemic uprooted these plans. Fall semester of my first year was remote, and I realized that if I wanted to have a community in college, I’d have to find ways to do so in a virtual space. Bonding over identity and religion felt like the easiest way to surmount this challenge.
I became involved with the Conservative Jewish Community at Penn Hillel that fall, attending weekly Friday night Shabbat services over Zoom and participating in Torah study activities. When I returned to campus in the spring, I automatically had a group of people to spend Friday nights with. I became a board member: helping plan more socially distanced Shabbat nights, holiday meals together, and backyard Havdalahs. CJC gave me some of my first friends at Penn and my first sense of belonging at my new university.
I stayed on board until the end of my sophomore year, when I decided to step back from being a student leader at Hillel. Penn Hillel has a strong commitment to state Zionism and makes support for Israel a core part of how it defines Judaism. I have never identified as a Zionist Jew, and my leanings became even more progressive in college. It was unfair to myself and to CJC to be a student leader in an organization whose mission I not only disagreed with, but actively opposed.
Stepping down from board did not mean I stepped away from the community. Friday night services with CJC remained a highlight of my week. I also continued to engage with the mainstream Jewish communities at Penn — Hillel, Chabad, and MEOR — by participating in MEOR’s Maimonides Fellowship. I built relationships with MEOR leaders and other students and continued to go to MEOR’s religious events after the fellowship ended. I did not hide my politics, but those didn’t matter — we were a Jewish community because we all loved our Judaism and felt it was an integral part of who we were. We wanted to celebrate that together.
My junior year, I also became more involved with Penn Chavurah, a Jewish community at Penn with a more critical attitude towards Israel. I was able to pray with my friends at CJC services and immediately afterward go to a Chavurah dinner and schmooze with my friends there without either community holding my ability to exist in two different political spaces against me. There is nothing antithetical about being a non-Zionist, religious Jew, and it felt like the spaces around me were willing to accept that fact, even if they saw themselves as being on one side of a dividing line.
This all changed after Oct. 7. The Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, understandably, set emotions aflame in the Jewish community. Every American Jew, including me, has no more than two degrees of separation from someone who has been killed or taken hostage. While my politics and perspective on Israel’s response to the attack differed from those of some of my peers, I thought our concern for the safety and well-being of Israelis and Palestinians alike and our years of engaging in community through our Jewishness would hold us together. I was wrong.
For decades, mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States, including those with chapters on Penn’s campus, have maintained the false narrative that being a Zionist and being Jewish are intertwined. The long history of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews has been practically erased; the diversity of Zionist beliefs, including those opposed to the creation of a one-nation state, has been suppressed, and no room has been made to talk about pluralism around Zionism in the Jewish community.
Since Oct. 7, Penn Hillel, Chabad, and MEOR have continued to host communal events for Jews that necessitate standing with Israel. There has been no collective Jewish space for us to mourn and grieve through difficult times that does not inherently alienate those who take a critical stance on the Israeli government’s actions.
We had let the concept of non-Zionist Jews become so taboo that, at a time when all Jews needed to be in community and talking to each other most, there was no space made for non-Zionist Jews at the table. Because of this, the Jewish community was set up, in my opinion, to rupture.
Worse, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews became villains in the eyes of many mainstream Jewish organizations. Jews — even rabbis — who have taken stances against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza were disparaged as traitors and self-hating Jews. Chavurah specifically was accused of engaging in “Jew-hatred” by other Jewish students online for wanting to show a documentary critical of Israel. Members are constantly accused of being race traitors, fake Jews, and kapos by other Jews online and in the Penn community. These ruptures have even affected some of my personal relationships, with my Jewishness being called into question by people it had once put me in community with.
The situation was not helped by the way the Penn administration approached the war. Despite being a Jewish organization, Chavurah was left out of discussions about how to make campus safe for Jewish students. In her statement on Oct. 15, former President Liz Magill claimed that security and support were being increased “for centers of Jewish life on and near campus.” Yet, nobody from Chavurah was ever contacted about the possibility of having security or support at our biweekly dinners. In her statement on Nov. 1, Magill claimed to have been “conferring closely” with Jewish leaders and students about how best to address antisemitism on campus. No one from Chavurah was ever invited to “confer” with Magill or anyone in her administration.
Several non-Zionist Jewish students applied for the Student Advisory Group on the Jewish student experience, and none were accepted. Eventually, after a weeks-long struggle via email with administration, one Jewish student critical of Israel was given a spot. The message from the administration has been clear. They only care about one Jewish perspective, one Jewish story: the one that aligns with what donors want to hear.
These actions further fuel the flames of division within the Penn Jewish community. Penn administration’s preferential treatment of Jewish communities with particular politics gives credence to the false narrative that Jewish voices critical of Israel don’t matter, are invalid, and should not be heard.
Nobody in Penn Chavurah wants to be alienated from the rest of the Jewish community. But the unwillingness of current organizations to even entertain the idea that non-Zionist Jews are valid in their Jewishness makes it hard for us to feel safe and supported. Penn uses the presence of Hillel and Chabad houses as a way to claim that there are communal spaces for all Jews. But these spaces are only meant for Jews with a particular political ideology.
There is not a single Jewish space on campus dedicated to keeping the Jewish community together, regardless of theological or political differences. Penn administration and mainstream Jewish leaders on campus are actively impeding the possibility of that space ever coming into existence.
I am deeply saddened and scared by the way I have seen Jews on this campus turn on each other in what is an emotional time for us all. I am ashamed at how little effort many leaders on this campus seem to be making to try and promote civil discourse. I am disheartened that the people who claim to care for the whole Jewish community have let the community fall apart.
I was able to attend two intra-communal dialogues among Jewish students hosted by Penn staff — but these conversations came too late — we should have been having them for years. If we continue down the road we have been on — not talking about the hard truths, ignoring the presence of differing political opinions in the Jewish community, and blocking out voices that challenge us — it will only get worse for the Jewish community on this campus. I implore the administration and Jewish leaders at Penn to learn how to listen to all Jewish voices and create communal spaces that welcome all perspectives in practice, not just in theory. Create dialogue. Create a space for us to all come together in ritual. Create a space that allows the Jewish community to still feel like a community in the next 10 years. That is the only way we can truly heal.
OLIVIA HAYNIE is a College senior studying sociology from Durham, N.C. Her email is ohaynie@sas.upenn.edu.
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