Since Adam Jaffe arrived in Evanston three years ago, Northwestern University Hillel has been the college senior’s home away from home.
“It’s been always the place that, when I need to get out of the house, when I need to go for a walk, when I need to be with people and find community, that I go to,” Jaffe said.
Hillel is the oldest and best-funded organization for Jewish students at Northwestern. Staff say it is a space for all Jewish students, whatever their politics, to find fellowship and guidance as they figure out who they are and who they want to be.
Those are often vexing questions for young people, but the conversations have been especially fraught, and the need for community especially pressing, in the year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s onslaught of Gaza.
The deaths of more than 1,200 Israelis, more than 40,000 Palestinians, and the escalation of the conflict in recent days, have caused pain, grief and confusion and made providing a community for all Jewish students all the more necessary — but also far more difficult. That’s because the ceaseless death and destruction have drawn out deeply held beliefs among Jewish students that are not easily reconciled.
Jaffe is emblematic of the internal and external strife many Jewish students are experiencing.
“My belief[s] that Israel has a right to exist, and yet there is vast injustice to Palestinians, [have] always remained pretty steadfast,” Jaffe said. “And I think sometimes I have felt at odds with both of those parts of myself this past year.”
As he’s wrestled with these complicated feelings, Jaffe has had a harder time finding where he fits in at Northwestern.
“I definitely have felt on campus in this pocket of, I don’t know if I really feel comfortable going to the [Palestinian solidarity] protests, and yet at the same time, I don’t want to go demonstrate for Israel as well,” Jaffe said. “So I’m in an isolated area.”
Jaffe wants Hillel to be a place where anyone from Northwestern’s Jewish community, no matter their views on Israel, can discuss these big questions he is working through himself: “What it means to be Jewish, what it means to question my Zionism, what it means to question my belief in the State of Israel, and to do that openly and honestly and authentically.”
But inviting that kind of reflection and dialogue is hard. Zionism is a core value for Hillel International, the organization that oversees Northwestern Hillel and chapters at more than 800 other campuses around the world. It does not allow speakers who support boycotts and divestment from Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, for instance.
Northwestern senior Sari Eisen chats with other students in the lobby of the campus Hillel, where she is in her second year as student president. She considers calls for divestment an affront to her Jewish identity. “For any student who feels a connection to Israel, who has been there, who has friends or family there … to encourage Northwestern to completely cut ties, feels … like they’re asking a person to put aside a part of their identity.”
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The policy makes Hillel a place where senior Sari Eisen, Northwestern Hillel’s student president, feels safe. Eisen considers calls for divestment an affront to her Jewish identity.
“For any student who feels a connection to Israel, who has been there, who has friends or family there … to encourage Northwestern to completely cut ties, feels … like they’re asking a person to put aside a part of their identity,” said Eisen, who attended a Jewish day school growing up and who has traveled to Israel many times. “[It says], ‘You’re welcome, but your family is not,’ or, ‘You are welcome, but your country is not.’ ”
But the policy that makes Eisen feel safe at Hillel makes others on campus feel the opposite.
Junior Dan Murrieta is one of the students calling for Northwestern to divest from Israel over its attacks on Gaza. They found many people who shared their political views, but they wanted to find classmates who shared their Jewish identity too.
“I had a lot of friends who … agreed with me about the illegal occupation of Palestine and about the horrible atrocities committed against Palestinians using U.S. arms, using the Israeli military and the Israeli government,” said Murrieta. “But I had only had one Jewish friend that felt like that, and as a Jewish person that felt very isolating.”
Murrieta gave Hillel a shot, but their first time there they got into an argument about Israel.
“I had a whole table of people arguing with me and telling me that I was crazy, that I didn’t know what I was talking about,” they said. “So I just didn’t want to go again.”
While Hillel’s Zionist position and policies make it a safe space for some Jewish students, it has not been the case for Northwestern junior Dan Murrieta. They helped started a chapter of the pro-Palestinian group Jewish Voice for Peace at Northwestern.
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Earlier this year Murrieta and other Jewish students at Northwestern started a chapter of the pro-Palestinian organization, Jewish Voice for Peace. The group has just a small fraction of Hillel’s funding, but it’s given Murrieta the sense of community they so badly wanted.
“I met all these people I didn’t know who were also Jewish and felt [like I did], and it gave us a space to work together from that perspective,” they said.
Back at Hillel, in the meditative space overlooking a rainy sidewalk, Jaffe recognizes that Jewish students who are not Zionist might not feel welcome there. Yet he still wishes students like Murrieta and Eisen could be a part of the same community, uniting in their shared Jewish identity while discussing and trying to understand one another’s viewpoints.
“Because at the heart of Judaism is skepticism, and that is what we do best in many ways,” Jaffe said with a laugh. “And I think it makes Hillel at Northwestern and Hillel internationally a stronger organization, to make sure that those Jewish voices are being heard.”
Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus.