One evening in the shocking and extraordinary October of 2023, I received a text message from an unknown number. The message was simple and short: “I am a current Jewish student at Brown named Joe. Someone told me to reach out to you. We need some help. Can I give you a call?” (To protect the student’s identity, I’m using a pseudonym.)
I assumed this was a result of some recommendations I had made about reporting antisemitic incidents on one of the many chat groups that emerged after October 7 — groups of suffering strangers finding solace in one another’s virtual company.
As I texted Joe to tell him that I’d be happy to talk, I wondered aloud to my husband: “How desperate must these kids be for help that they would reach out to a total stranger for support? What on earth is going on at Brown?”
When we finally spoke, Joe gave me my first glimpse of the chaos emerging on campus. He told me tales of harassment from students and faculty alike, and of the failure of the university’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity to respond to filed reports. He shared examples of terrifying threats against Jews made online and in person. Jewish students were being targeted, they were afraid, and they felt alone.
This was but the first of many texts and calls from unknown numbers that I soon realized I always needed to answer. Like the call from “Sarah,” another student, who had received my number from someone in the campus group Brown Students for Israel. In a tentative voice, she told me about the harassment she was experiencing in a Middle East studies class — a required course for her major. The professor had humiliated her publicly for her support of Israel, allowed classmates to jeer at her, told the class that Hamas was not a terrorist group, and was threatening to fail her on her final project. Efforts to get help from the department chairperson were useless, and she needed guidance on her options.
I was far from the only one receiving these calls and texts. As alumni, parents, and students began to find one another through WhatsApp and Facebook groups, ad hoc calls turned to sustained and regular communication. Soon, I found myself allied with a team of Brown alumni, parents, and students whom I had never met, but who were committed to preserving and protecting the ethos of an institution that we cherished deeply as a second home.
As the landscape of Jewish life on university campuses nationwide seismically shifted over the course of the past year, Jewish alumni activism was forced to evolve to address unprecedented challenges to Jewish community and life in academe. Since October 7, a new form of alumni activism has arisen: sustained and organized grassroots involvement by Jewish alumni who watched in horror as beloved alma maters devolved into sites of antisemitic frenzy, with little or no consequence for the perpetrators of harassment, discrimination, assault, and hate crimes. Jewish alumni, many of whom had never before taken an active role in campus life, have mobilized in unprecedented ways to protect Jews on campus and to try to restore universities to their foundational purpose and values.
These alumni, myself included, are motivated by their love for the institutions that once expanded their minds and launched them into the world. To this day they remain inspired by the values those institutions once instilled in them — values such as intellectual curiosity, honesty, and rigor, a respect for healthy differences of opinion, and a refusal to countenance discrimination, harassment, and exclusion.
Brown University entered the post–October 7 world in a much stronger position than most of its Ivy League brethren.
Jewish student enrollment at Brown had not declined drastically over the past decade as it had at most of its peer schools — in fact, it had increased. Brown actively recruits students from Jewish day schools rather than shunning them. Hillel board leadership and alumni-led fundraising resulted in Brown opening kosher meat and dairy kitchens in the Ratty, the main dining hall on campus. Hillel recently secured permission for a Jewish first-year student pre-orientation session for the first time. Close coordination with administrators and personal relationships fostered by alumni resulted in the establishment of a campus eruv — a designated area in which observant Jews may carry objects or push strollers on Shabbat — paid for in part by donors and in part by the university, increasing the ease of Shabbat observance on campus. In many respects, Brown stands out among the Ivies as one of the best options for Jewish students, a fact noted by Blake Flayton in a 2021 article, “Proud Jews Walking.”
Unfortunately, even an institution this welcoming to Jews could not escape the tumult that has engulfed universities over the past several semesters. Brown students and Hillel employees have received death threats. They have been taunted with the epithet of “Zionist pig” while crossing the Main Green. Their reports of discrimination in the classroom went unaddressed. Pro-Israel students were blocked from accessing university buildings during a hunger strike, and they frequently sought refuge in Hillel and Chabad buildings when studying in the libraries became too perilous. When the administration negotiated an end to the Main Green encampment, it granted protesters the right to a vote on divestment by the Brown Corporation, the university’s highest governing body. This launched a volatile and contentious six-month stretch of students and alumni devoting countless hours to marshall arguments and testify against divestment. The Corporation ultimately declined to divest, but not without setting a dangerous precedent.
Yet as campus life imploded, Jewish alumni were able to respond and organize at a rapid clip by drawing on a strong preexisting alumni base active in Hillel and with close relationships to the administration. By November 2023, alumni had created a powerful force for advocacy on campus: Brown Jewish Alumni & Friends (BJAF). BJAF connected students, parents, and faculty struggling through the unfathomable events on campus and in the world. This new vanguard of active alumni leaders learned in the heat of the moment how to leverage their diverse talents to try to preserve the values of our beloved university.
BJAF leaders have climbed a steep learning curve. While some of our experiences have been unique to Brown’s campus dynamics, there are broader lessons we can offer on how to be effective alumni activists.
Significantly, our experiences demonstrate that effective activism need not depend on giving or withholding large monetary contributions. Instead, we have focused on building institutional relationships, developing concrete guidance for students based on expert legal and compliance advice, and making use of the unique talents and professional expertise of alumni. We have drawn upon the distinctively collaborative Brunonian mindset instilled in us during our university years to build a strong community of effective advocates. By partnering with preexisting, effective organizations such as Hillel and campus institutes, we have been able to accomplish a great deal.
Our efforts have been organized into five main areas: education, advocacy, legal support, cultivating strategic relationships within the university, and community-building and engagement.
1. Education
We realized early on in our efforts that key academic and political perspectives were missing on campus. Through personal and professional networks and as a counter to anti-Zionist speakers on campus such as Peter Beinart and UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, we facilitated invitations to speakers such as Einat Wilf, Bassem Eid, Dan Senor, and Sapir editor-in-chief Bret Stephens. We also brought in training programs like Project Shema to better educate students on the Israeli–Palestinianconflict and the state of antisemitism in America.
2. Advocacy
BJAF advocates on behalf of Jewish students and works to ensure the safety of Jews on campus. We have issued petitions, written letters to President Christina Paxson outlining our concerns and recommendations for change, submitted position papers to the university during the divestment battle, published articles in the Brown Daily Herald and the Times of Israel decrying campus antisemitism, and successfully lobbied the Corporation to reject divestment this past fall.
3. Legal Support
Realizing that much of the harassment and abuse directed at Jewish students on campus was either illegal or contravened campus policy, we deployed our database of Brunonian lawyers to provide direct support to individuals filing complaints about policy violations and mistreatment at the hands of fellow students and faculty. Alumni helped gather and collate evidence of infractions perpetrated against Jews. Our legal brigade contributed extensive time to combatting the divestment vote by researching and drafting memoranda and briefs that were submitted to the university committee tasked with deciding whether or not to recommend that the Corporation divest. We have since published our library of anti-divestment resources on our website to support other schools facing similar struggles.
4. Cultivating Relationships
From the start, a key element of BJAF’s activism was our desire to cultivate and maintain constructive relationships with President Paxson and other administrators and faculty. Paxson deserves particular credit for welcoming and maintaining that open channel and treating us with a respect that our counterparts at other schools have not often received. BJAF leaders hold regular meetings with the president to review our concerns and the school’s progress in implementing changes to protect Jewish students. Although we do not always agree, and despite our frustration with the glacial “university standard time” pace of change, we know we are at least being heard. We have been able to maintain a seat at the table and to make inroads through productive, honest, and mutually respectful discussions.
5. Community-Building and Engagement
The job in front of us is a big one: Saving our institutions and restoring their ability to sustain thriving Jewish life on campus requires tremendous collective effort. As BJAF members, we don’t always agree among ourselves on the right path forward. But we have worked hard to build a culture that reflects who we are as Brown alumni: bridge-builders, not barn burners. Many alumni hail from a time when people could disagree in a much healthier manner, and this is part of the unique voice we bring to our activism. We maintain numerous lines of electronic communication across our 800-person membership and hold regular Zoom sessions with students, professors, and guest speakers. And by the time this article goes to press, we will have held our first BJAF Shabbaton on campus, bringing together in person for the first time the students and alumni activists who have forged such tight bonds.
In short, we have become family. This was no easy feat given the emotional tenor of the past 16 months. But when emotions have flared, we have been able to recenter by remembering our ultimate mandate: to serve the current students and to protect the worthwhile institution we love.
I am not naïve. Significant problematic areas remain — areas where we have been unable to effect change thus far.
We continue to confront academic elements who wield the concept of academic freedom as both sword and shield in their unremitting efforts to manipulate and indoctrinate America’s youth with antisemitic and anti-Zionist invective. This is particularly true at Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies, where professors refer to Israel as “the Zionist Entity” and refuse to countenance the study of Israel as part of their course offerings. Several recent troubling events have also posed serious challenges to our efforts to return Brown to a healthy, academically sound, and high-quality intellectual institution.
Take for example a conference on “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” organized by proudly anti-Zionist faculty, who violated Brown’s recently updated Nondiscrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy by directly attacking and delegitimizing Zionism and Zionists, contrary to the university’s express guidance on how to interpret that policy. Or the absence of sufficient antisemitism training on campus, and the university’s failure to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Encouragingly, however, our efforts at Brown have been mirrored by similar efforts among alumni of institutions across North America. Recently, BJAF linked hands with other Jewish alumni groups to form the new Jewish Alumni Council (JAC). Aimed at uniting the resources, knowledge, learnings, and voices of concerned Jewish alumni from colleges and universities across the U.S., the nascent JAC promises to strengthen the collective impact and voices of all Jewish alumni through cross-organizational cooperation.
Jewish alumni leaders across the country are indeed finding their voice.
Saving our universities is not a vanity project. This work is done out of a commitment to a flourishing Jewish life at the university that once gave us so much, the kind of rich Jewish life that will be sustained for generations to come. We refuse to abandon hope for our schools, which belong to us as much as they belong to posterity. At Brown, our work is a direct reflection of the school’s own mission: “to serve the community, nation, and world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding.” We are determined that this moment in history will be remembered as the spark that led to an awakening of Jewish alumni to their responsibilities, power, and importance in driving change for the better — for Jews, our institutions, and our country.
