Commencement Is Not a “Safe Space,” Nor Should It Be

Defending JTS’ decision to host Israeli President Isaac Herzog at Commencement

Nick Baum/Columbia Sundial

Earlier this week, a group of graduating seniors at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) circulated a petition asking the institution to rescind its commencement invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The letter contends that Herzog is too “divisive” a speaker for the occasion, and that he stands to undermine the day’s spirit of “unity and joy.” The link to the petition as of April 29 has become inactive, however Sundial was able to obtain a PDF of the document that can be found here.

What makes the petition especially difficult to take seriously is how sharply it departs from the actual experience of a JTS education. In my own time at List, JTS’ undergraduate college, disagreement amongst peers has been a core element in the classroom.

In Talmud courses—which are required for all List College students—we learn just how central thoughtful disagreement is to the Jewish tradition. A page of the Talmud itself models a culture of argument: Competing interpretations are presented side by side, minority opinions given serious consideration even when ultimately not accepted, and there is no expectation that a clear consensus will emerge at the end of the discussion.

That same ethos—to list another example—is carried into our history and nationalism courses, where the focus is not on advancing a single vision of Zionism but on confronting the deep and often irreconcilable disagreements within it. We read competing Zionist thinkers — Ahad Ha’am alongside Theodor Herzl; A. D. Gordon alongside Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Each author offers fundamentally different answers to what a Jewish state should be and what it should prioritize. These are not minor disagreements but foundational ones: cultural versus political Zionism, labor versus revisionism, spiritual renewal versus state power.

Discussions are often tense and frustrating, but always substantive. Students frequently articulate differing views from each other and their professors. Those disagreements are not treated as threats to the learning environment; they serve as its very foundation. To ask, after four years of that kind of training, to be shielded from hearing a speaker one disagrees with suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what that education was for.

What should be clear, then, especially at a place like JTS, is that sitting in an audience and being addressed by a speaker does not entail an institutional endorsement of said speaker. To pretend it does is anathema to the very tradition that informs the JTS experience.

Nonetheless, the authors argue that inviting a speaker “with whom many students… vehemently disagree” undermines the mission of the ceremony, but institutions of higher learning, including List College, are not designed to shield students from discomfort, but to prepare them to engage with it.​ What is more, it is understandable that a Jewish institution like JTS specifically would engage with an important figure in Jewish life like Herzog, politics be as they may.

Clearly, my peers do not agree with this fundamental truth. The letter worries that JTS’ invitation reveals the Seminary to be “only for Jewish students who align with a specific political viewpoint.” The authors frame this as a complaint about the narrow bounds of acceptable Jewish discourse, but their complaint, in effect, inscribes narrower ones.

To say that the president of Israel cannot address the graduating class of America’s only pluralistic Jewish undergraduate institution is to define the “diverse Jewish community” so as to exclude the political center of gravity of world Jewry. Of the world’s roughly 16 million Jews, a plurality live in Israel, the Jewish homeland; Another large share, in the American mainstream, hold positions considerably closer to Herzog’s than to the signatories of the letter.

The group of seniors also reduces Herzog to little more than a moral caricature, alleging that he “condones the suffering of others” and incites “violence against an entire nation.” Instead of engaging in productive dialogue with JTS administrators, the letter diminishes complex political realities to a series of buzzwords in a blatantly transparent attempt to vilify their own institution.

A recent piece in Jewish Currents notes the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory’s suggestion that statements made by Herzog could be interpreted as incitement for genocide, citing remarks made in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Yet, even within that reporting, the conclusion is comparatively ambiguous to that of my peers, as it acknowledges that Herzog “did not expressly call” for genocide, while noting the importance that his words be read in context. Turning a contested, conditional finding into a moral indictment, as the petition’s writers do, is rather reductive.

The truth is, Israeli presidents do not direct the cabinet, command the IDF, or oversee humanitarian policy. Israel’s chief executive is the prime minister; the country’s wartime decisions run through its Security Cabinet and General Staff. The presidency is largely ceremonial, modeled on the constitutional monarchies of Western Europe. In short, the signatories’ portrayal of Isaac Herzog as a decisive political actor is a grand exaggeration of his authority.

Still, the letter’s most bizarrely ambitious appeal might be one invoking Abraham Joshua Heschel, who taught at JTS for nearly three decades and stands among the Seminary’s most consequential twentieth-century theologians. It quotes his plaintive Vietnam-era question, “Where is God present now?” The authors transcribe a brief, conventionally anti-war excerpt but stop short of acknowledging what might dismantle their case against the Israeli head of state altogether: that Heschel was an ardent Zionist whose 1969 treatise Israel: An Echo of Eternity serves as a theological defense of the Jewish state. It argues that Israel’s existence and security are both a religious imperative and a contemporary manifestation of the divine-human covenant.

To cite him while engaging in performative activism—alluding to a past conflict with which there are few parallels to the contemporary Israeli situation—is not homage; it is, simply put, disrespect. Heschel’s moral urgency was rooted in a lived commitment to the Jewish people and their future, which included a serious engagement with (and support of) the State of Israel. Invoking his name in this context is to misrepresent what he actually stood for and use his legacy in a way that ignores his real commitments.

One can oppose war in principle while still recognizing the necessity of self-defense. Communist Vietnam is not generally thought of as having posed an existential threat to the United States. In contrast, Hamas presents a direct ongoing existential threat to the State of Israel. Heschel’s opposition to the Vietnam War does not necessarily imply a blanket opposition to all forms of military action, and especially not those taken in defense against groups like Hamas and for the sake of preserving the Jewish homeland.

In any case, JTS is not even doing anything remotely unusual here. Places of higher learning—including JTS itself—have long hosted speakers whose views are controversial, polarizing, and, to some, deeply objectionable. Student groups on campus routinely invite activists, scholars, and public figures who take hardline positions on Israel and Palestine—figures many students view as morally indefensible or even offensive. Those invitations are almost always defended—rightly—under the principles of open discourse and academic freedom. That standard cannot suddenly be abandoned when the speaker is Isaac Herzog. If it is acceptable to host voices that sharply criticize Israel, even in ways many find extreme, it must also be acceptable to host Israel’s president. To argue otherwise is not a defense of pluralism but instead an attempt to impose a one-sided boundary on acceptable speech.

While it is true that commencement is, in some sense, a public expression of an institution’s values—different, one might argue, from a University club inviting a controversial speaker—for JTS, those values clearly include engagement with Israel in all its complexity. Inviting Israel’s president to speak is not a betrayal of that mission: It is an affirmation of it. If anything, it precisely reflects the intellectual rigor and pluralistic tapestry of a JTS education, which aims to teach both tolerance for dissent and the capacity to listen and critically engage with arguments one may oppose—bounds Herzog comfortably falls within.

To complete a degree at JTS and then ask to be shielded from a speech is an ironic rejection of this ethos. It is my modest hope that my peers can come to realize this basic point—or else they may find themselves in a dogmatism all too common in Columbia’s broader campus community, contra the complex, the beautiful, and the true.

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Mr. Lederman is a junior in the joint degree program between the Jewish Theological Seminary and the School of General Studies. He is a guest contributor for Sundial.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.