Your Daily Phil: Yom Kippur in Ian's wake + A new Masa course on navigating campus

Good morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we look at how communities in Hurricane Ian’s path plan to observe Yom Kippur and feature an op-ed by Masa’s Amy Weinreb and Sarah Mali on preparing gap-year students to discuss Israel on campus. Also in this newsletter: Rabbi Avi Olitzky, NYT’s Sarah Wildman, Arthur Blank, Edward Avedisian, Jacki Altman, Judah Samet and Novak Djokovic. We’ll start by looking at the Jewish response to Ian, as well as backlash to an anti-Zionist measure from student groups at UC Berkeley Law. 

Jewish organizations have mobilized in response to Hurricane Ian, which as of this morning has left at least 83 people dead in Florida and the Carolinas and more than 600,000 still without power since it made landfall in the United States last week.

The Jewish Federations of North America launched a hurricane relief fund, though it has yet to set an overall financial goal as it is still assessing the damage. Local Chabads are fundraising money for the relief effort. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (which does not provide assistance in the United States) is currently assessing international aid needs. The NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning and team owner Jeff Vinik are also donating $2 million toward Hurricane Ian relief efforts.

A recent decision by a coalition of nine groups at The University of California, Berkeley Law School to bar events with Zionist speakers has sparked a backlash.

The ban, which was enacted in late August, includes an endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, against Israel, and continues, “in the interest of protecting the safety and welfare of Palestinian students on campus [the organizations] will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism.” Debate on campus over the ban had died down recently, according to Jewish Insider.

The document received renewed attention over the weekend after Ken Marcus, the founder of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which advocates for Jewish and pro-Israel students, wrote in an op-ed in the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles that the measure amounted to creating “Jewish-free zones” in light of data showing that the vast majority of Jews feel an affinity with Israel.

“Now anti-Zionist groups target Jewish Americans directly,” Marcus wrote. “Zionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many Jews. Its derogation is analogous, in this way, to other forms of hate and bigotry.”

Others have echoed his argument, with the Anti-Defamation League calling the student groups’ measure “discriminatory and antisemitic.” Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, which spearheaded the measure, did not respond to a request for comment on Marcus’ op-ed but wrote in an August Instagram post that the ban is a way of “exercis[ing] democracy” and is “absolutely a tenable action.”

When the measure was adopted, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in an email to students that while he believes the exclusionary policy constitutes protected free speech, “It is troubling to broadly exclude a particular viewpoint from being expressed… Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies.”

He saidJ.: The Jewish News of Northern California, that the policy would likely also apply to “90 percent or more of our Jewish students” and is “seen by many students as antisemitic.” That same week, the Jewish Students Association at Berkeley Law issued a statement saying the ban “will disproportionately silence Jewish voices on campus.”

But Chemerinsky has also objected to Marcus’ op-ed, calling it “a grossly misleading picture of what happened at Berkeley Law” in an essay in TheDaily Beast, adding, “no group has violated the Law School’s policy and excluded a speaker on account of being Jewish or holding particular views about Israel. Such conduct, of course, would be subject to sanctions.”