Jewish students urged to speak up

A young college student stares moodily out of a sepia photograph. “I love Radiohead and mushroom pizza,” the white lettering reads. Then the words turn red: “I hate that my sister had her stomach blown to bits with nails by a suicide bomber.”

The student is real -- his name is Uzi Berman, and he is 18 years old -- and the tag line reads, “Since 2000, there have been 14,000 terror attacks on Israelis.”

This is one in a series of 12 ads running in Southern California college newspapers this month, part of a $400,000 media blitz sponsored by a group of up-and-coming Hollywood players who’ve dubbed their effort Project Communicate. The group, which numbers 90, includes Internet entrepreneur Dan Adler; Art Levitt, chief executive of the Internet movie site Fandango, and writer-director Michael Tolkien (“The Player”). From the Hollywood establishment, Paramount Pictures chairwoman Sherry Lansing is lending her support.

The plan is to slowly roll out the campaign -- which also features postcards, a Web site, and town hall-style meetings -- across the country.

The goal is to bolster students’, particularly assimilated Jewish students’, confidence in expressing their political opinions in an increasingly contentious political environment.

While liberal Hollywood historically has embraced a wide variety of issues with all the media spotlight it can muster, causes involving Israel have recently evoked a certain ambivalence. That’s because the Jewish community, while large, is deeply assimilated, has conflicted feelings about the current Israeli government and is hesitant to do anything that might somehow promote the stereotype that Jews run the entertainment industry. So while the Palestinian-Israeli conflict might be privately debated, and certainly influences how some view the current war in Iraq, it’s an issue that has provoked more private soul-searching than public activism.

Many members of Project Communicate say they are proud, and on some level surprised, that they’ve bucked the trend toward noninvolvement and pulled together a plan that targets people like them. “We’re going after the unaffiliated Jews, those who don’t belong to Hillel [the Jewish college campus organization], wouldn’t go to Hillel. The people in Project Communicate were once those people,” says writer Tom Teicholz. “We’re not saying who’s right in this conflict,” adds Adler. “We’re just saying that madly blowing up victims is not a way to effect political change.”

The Hollywood players are entering a debate that has been raging in academia for the last year. Across the country, petitions have been circulating on at least 40 college campuses asking administrations to divest their institutions of investments in Israel, sparking counter-petitions at universities such asHarvard and MIT.

Last fall, Harvard President Lawrence Summers made headlines when at a campus prayer meeting he warned that “profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.” Two weeks ago, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. campuses had risen 24% in 2002, from 85 to 106, with many of the attacks growing out of anti-Israel demonstrations.

Many in the Jewish community have noted an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic strain in the antiwar movement in Europe, and creeping into the mainstream here. At a recent antiwar protest at Cal State Northridge, students chanted, “Out of Palestine, out of Iraq.”

On the national scene, Virginia Congressman James Moran sparked a media storm when he said, “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq, we would not be doing this.” Moran was chastised by the White House and leaders of both political parties.

Given the war, “we spent a lot of time trying to figure out if this was a good time or bad time [to run the ads],” says Adler. “The situation has not changed in Israel. Just last weekend there was a suicide bombing. Just as Americans on Sept. 11 began to understand what terrorism can do to a society, so do we as a country now seem to appreciate what happens when a government introduces terrorism as a means of fighting its war. That’s what happened with the suicide bombing of the Marines at the checkpoint.”

Kovel Fuller, the firm that created the ads pro bono, tested a variety of approaches, from showing a famous picture of a Palestinian infant with a gun (deemed by youths to be too unbelievable) to trying out the tag line “pray for another way” (too polarizing on a religious level). They ultimately settled on the campaign featuring real Israeli students. “I don’t think you can dictate anything to a college student,” says Lee Kovel, who developed the ads.

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the director of the UCLA Hillel center, says that many Jewish college students are “intimidated” by the thought of weighing in on the conflict. “Most Jewish students are politically ill-prepared for political struggle. That’s why they might feel difficulty, not because of anti-Semitism, but because there’s a rough political climate in general and most of the Jewish students have been brought up in a softer environment where they haven’t felt a need to assert themselves politically, to fight for Jewish acceptance.”

This said, he’s skeptical that any ad campaign is going to help them. “It’s about media. It’s the American fix. It’s Hollywood. You have a sound bite and solve the issue. This issue is profound. The battle is to promote a sense of positive Jewishness which includes and embraces Israel on a deep level.”