Guest Column by Marissa Priceman | The Real Noise on Campus
My experiences within the Jewish community at Penn have almost exclusively pertained to politics and religion. While touchy topics have been discussed, dialogue has occurred in a contained setting with a homogeneous composition. I’ve found that when it comes to Israel-Palestine, students claim to want dialogue, “substantive” facts and a non-propagandized setting. However, most students want anything but that. In a recent op-ed, Jeremy Jick referred to certain realities as “noise.” Jeremy used a recent PIPAC leadership statement as an opportunity to unsubstantially attack a campus memorial and installation, which occurred last year. In my mind, a memorial and campus criticism of Israeli policy are not existential threats to the US-Israel relationship, so I cannot understand the relationship between the PIPAC statement and aforementioned events. Unsupported and unoriginal, the argumentation employs deceptive distractions and is dependent upon an attempt to discredit pain and suffering, instead of providing insightful analysis.