Nine student clubs at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law announced in August they would not invite speakers who support “Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” This concerned campus Zionists while following a now familiar pattern on American campuses: Progressive student groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East take a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Jewish Zionist students, who are often progressive themselves, end up feeling ostracized.
This became major news last week when Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, slammed the move in the Jewish Journal. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley School of Law, has since rebutted the piece and written a stand-alone article in the Daily Beast, as did two Berkeley professors in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
