There’s a timeless quip among Jews: If two of us are discussing a topic, expect to hear three opinions.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t of one mind on the survival of Israel. It means there are multiple views on how to ensure that.
That debate — along with related issues of Jewish identity, Jewish life, Jewish intellect, Jewish faith — is at full boil at a venue where diversity of opinion is supposed to be the rule, though some, particularly on the right, believe that it’s been crushed by left-leaning intellectual intolerance: the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, an exemplar of free speech as foundational to democracy.
The election in Virginia nearly 2½ years ago of a nationally ambitious, religiously conservative Republican governor — paired with the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, now six months on — mean that criticism of Israel over its conduct in this brutal conflict in which 1,100 Jews and 33,000 Palestinians have been killed is increasingly interpreted as antisemitism or an invitation, thereto.
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At the University of Virginia, Jews are arguing over the many sides of this issue. Two Jews, three opinions? In this instance, it might be more. It’s part of the larger feud at Mr. Jefferson’s academical village over supposed woke-ism that erupted after the deadly siege of Charlottesville in 2017 by white nationalists, latter-day Confederates and torch-carrying antisemites.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, burnishing his credentials as the culture warrior Republicans expect their presidential prospects to be, depicts the university as a hotbed of liberal orthodoxy. Through his public utterances, policy dictates and appointments to its oversight board of like-minded individuals — some of them headline machines with long histories of controversy — Youngkin aims to yank UVa to the right.
And soon.
Whether its UVa or Virginia Military Institute, another tax-supported four-year school beset by bitter differences over race and culture, post-George Floyd, or any of the other dozen Virginia public colleges and universities, Youngkin — come July 1, the start of the new spending cycle — will have installed on all of their governing boards majorities of trustees who presumably share his conservative agenda.
If only temporarily — and hastened by the Gaza war and, more recently, the duel between Israel and Iran following the former’s attack on the latter’s embassy in Syria — the shoving match at UVa over diversity, equity and inclusion is taking a back seat to claims by conservatives that the university is turning a blind eye to alleged antisemitism.
Whether that’s true depends on who you ask. And this calls attention to generational, religious, cultural and intellectual differences among Jews — differences that should make clear what is often overlooked or subordinated to a convenient but not necessarily informed generalization: Jews are averse to monolithism.
Consider the reaction to the fraught give-and-take early last month over antisemitism between Robert Hardie, head of the UVa board of visitors and appointed to that governing panel by two Democratic governors, and Bert Ellis, a Youngkin pick briefly blocked from the board by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority and who has been outspoken on hot-button topics at the school since his days as an undergraduate in the 1970s.
To a Jewish students group at UVa, an important fact — that, in the organization’s view, antisemitism is not rampant at the school — is overwhelmed by fury. To the parent of a Jewish student, more people should be furious because an important fact — that, in her view, antisemitism is rampant at the school — is being ignored.
In an April 3 letter to the board — first reported Tuesday by the student news site, The Cavalier Daily — the five students who oversee Hillel, the largest Jewish organization on campus, said that concerns about antisemitism at the university had been needlessly politicized. It is estimated that Jewish undergraduate and graduate students account for 1,400 of the school’s total enrollment of just under 22,000.
“We believe the overwhelming majority of students, faculty and staff at the university do not act with malicious intent nor hatred towards Jewish people,” the students said.
“We acknowledge that antisemitism is a top concern at UVA, especially among parents, although it is not as widespread as some outside of the university community believe. It saddens us to see concerted efforts to exploit Jewish students as pawns for political agendas. Such efforts threaten the safety and well-being of Jewish students.
“There have been instances where we do believe that students and faculty have acted with ignorance and hate. We are of the opinion that this is a small but vocal contingent of the university community.”
Small, maybe.
But to UVa parent Julie Pearl, a big problem, nonetheless.
The Northern Virginian wrote the board of visitors that hostility toward Jewish students is common and that the university has been slow to respond. Pearl, whose letter was reported on the website of the Jefferson Council — an organization launched as a conservative counterweight to what it regards as liberal overreach at UVa — offered an inventory of perceived offenses, including physical and verbal abuse of Jewish students and fear of bullying.
Ellis wanted the board to discuss in public antisemitism at the university. He pegged the concern to a call by students, in an advisory referendum in February, that UVa’s investment arm shed from the school’s nearly $14 billion endowment holdings, as the ballot question put it, “companies engaging in or profiting from the State of Israel’s apartheid regime and acute violence against Palestinians.”
To Ellis, the vote — condemned by Attorney General Jason Miyares, a possible Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2025, as giving comfort to Hamas terrorists — was a put-up job by groups identified by federal agencies as antisemitic. He did not elaborate.
Hardie, according to a video posted on YouTube by the Jefferson Council, told Ellis that concerns over antisemitism would be discussed in secret because they touched on student safety and potential litigation. After the brief, crisp exchange, the board voted to go into closed session.
Ellis is a hugely successful broadcast investor from Atlanta. He appears to have inherited a dogged certainty on politics and policy from his late father, Urchie, a storied railroad lobbyist. Urchie Ellis later was a tireless critic of Richmond government who pressed for municipal accountability in frequent appearances before City Council and published letters in The Times-Dispatch.
Hardie, also a UVa alum, runs with his wife, Molly, luxury hotels in Virginia and Tennessee. Both are five-figure donors to U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. By business, family and marriage, the Hardies have a keen appreciation for the intersection of politics and public higher education. Molly Hardie is the daughter of Bill Goodwin of Richmond, the billionaire investor, high-dollar Republican donor and former UVa rector.
Since the Ellis-Hardie dust-up, tensions have only escalated. Spotted around the university: a box truck emblazoned with a neon sign branding Hardie unfit to head the board and demanding that he resign for refusing to address antisemitism there. It’s not been determined who’s responsible for that rolling billboard.
To Pearl, the board of visitors seems more interested in its status than that of Jewish students. In her letter she said, “How does the billboard incident directed at you merit outrage, an immediate statement of condemnation, and investigative action … while the ongoing harassment and intimidation faced by Jewish students receive no such response?”
Pearl may get one — more to the point, the one she wants — when Youngkin completes his takeover of the UVa board.