How Jewish Ethics Can Help Jews on Hostile Campuses - and Give Hillel Back Its Soul

Across North American campuses, Jewish students are facing levels of hostility that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Zionist students report being ostracized, harassed, and even threatened. Traditional Jewish perspectives are often met with ridicule or dismissal. Meanwhile, the very institutions designed to support Jewish student life are struggling to respond with coherence and conviction.

Over Shabbat I read a sobering story from Commentary about how Hillel - the international Jewish campus organization - has lost its way. In its eagerness to accommodate progressive Jews, Hillel has lost its Jewish soul. The article noted that some Hillel directors couldn't even take a side in the Israel/Hamas war. 

Many Hillels have tried to accommodate this difficult climate by adopting a lowest-common-denominator approach. In their efforts to include all kinds of Jewish students - religious and secular, Zionist and anti-Zionist - they have often diluted the substance of what it means to be Jewish. The result is a vague, feel-good version of Judaism that emphasizes cultural identity and social justice but lacks a clear ethical and philosophical foundation. This leaves students spiritually unmoored and intellectually defenseless.

But there is a powerful, underutilized resource that can help: Jewish ethics. The framework I have been developing,  Derechology, offers Jewish students and educators tools to clarify their values, articulate their positions, and stand strong in the face of ideological confusion and pressure no matter what their level of religiosity. It replaces partisanship and politics with something Judaism knows something about - morality. 

What Hillel lacks today is not good intentions, but a coherent derech - a well defined path and trajectory. Derechology is not a new denomination, ideology, or partisan stance. It is a value-centered philosophy grounded in Jewish tradition, capable of providing moral clarity while honoring pluralism. It offers a Jewish framework that is both unapologetically particular and universally resonant - something that Jews can be proud of and others can respect.

Derechology answers the core problem facing Hillel today: How do you unite a diverse Jewish student body without reducing Judaism to an empty shell? The answer is to offer something substantial, something undeniably Jewish, but flexible enough to speak to different types of Jews. Derechology is that something.

What Derechology Offers

Rooted in halachic principles, moral philosophy, and the lived tradition of Jewish civilization, Derechology equips students to:

• Recognize the difference between free speech and hate speech disguised as "just another opinion."

• Defend Zionism not merely as a political stance but as a deeply Jewish moral derech.

• Engage with opponents without losing sight of their own ethical trajectory.

• Navigate progressive spaces without sacrificing Jewish values on the altar of ideological trendiness.

A Concrete Example: Hosting an IDF Soldier

Imagine a campus Hillel invites an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier to speak - not a political figure, but someone who served in Gaza and is prepared to give a firsthand account of their experience. The soldier intends to explain how the IDF navigates morally complex combat situations, including rules of engagement, efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and the emotional toll on soldiers themselves.

Predictably, protests erupt. Flyers label the event “Zionist propaganda.” Progressive groups call for boycotts. Some Jewish students feel uncomfortable - not because they disagree with the speaker, but because they fear being associated with controversy. Hillel is caught between wanting to support the speaker and the students, and wanting to avoid a public relations storm.

Derechology equips students and staff to approach this situation with confidence and principle. Instead of caving to external pressure or reacting defensively, they can ask:

• Is the act of bearing moral witness to one’s experience in war a Jewish value?

• What does Jewish ethics say about truth-telling, responsibility, and moral nuance in the fog of war?

• How can we uphold free speech while protecting Jewish dignity and safety?

With those questions guiding them, Hillel could frame the event clearly: not as political advocacy, but as moral testimony. They could prepare students with derech-based tools to understand, engage, and defend the speaker’s right to share their experience. They could also prepare respectful, values-rooted responses to critics, including anti-Zionist Jewish critics, distinguishing between disagreement and demonization. And they can expel those who disrupt the talk and violate Hillel's moral code without apology. 

This approach doesn’t just preserve the event. It models moral courage and leadership.

Derech, Not Dogma

Derechology is not about rigid orthodoxy. It's a values-based method that respects diversity within the Jewish community. Whether a student is frum or secular, politically right or left, Derechology helps them ask: What is the moral arc of this tradition? What are its highest priorities in a time of danger, confusion, and change?

It also provides vital tools for distinguishing between authentic Jewish ethics and modern ideological overlays. When everything is framed as social justice, Jewish ethics can be diluted into whatever is culturally dominant. Derechology restores specificity, purpose, and strategic clarity.

The founder of Hillel, Rabbi Benjamin Frankel, believed that affiliation with Hillel meant declaring "I am a Jew," and earning respect on campus through moral strength and Jewish learning. Today, Hillel can rediscover that mission - not by reacting defensively, but by proactively teaching the moral substance of Jewish civilization.

Introducing Derechology into campus programming - through classes, dialogues, fellowships, and staff training - can restore Hillel’s credibility and empower students. It offers a path toward non-partisan, principled Jewish leadership. It helps students stop apologizing for being Jewish and start leading from Jewish values.

Jewish students deserve more than safety. They deserve strength, clarity, and confidence. Chabad does this from a religious perspective, but some want a different approach. By teaching the structured ethical vision of Derechology, Hillel and other campus institutions can meet today’s threats not with fear, but with derech.

Because if we are not for ourselves, who will be?

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(I'm still writing my Derechology book. Let me know if you want to know more about it. Meanwhile, my blog posts about Derechology can be seen here. ) 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Beinart's apology is, ironically, the antithesis of humility

My last post on Peter Beinart's craven apology to his BDS comrades for speaking at Tel Aviv University was scathing, but it didn't examine his thought process. And a deeper examination reveals something that we all need to learn from.

Beinart is very smart. He knew about the BDSers' anger at his talk beforehand, and he went ahead and gave it anyway. So why would he defend his decision before the talk and then, afterwards, apologize for it? The BDSers who aren't accepting his apology have a point - if he really cares about their feelings, as his apology stated, then he was as aware of their objections before the talk as he was afterwards.

Something must have happened at the talk that prompted him to reverse his opinion on the propriety of his speech. 

Unfortunately, there is no video of the speech or the Q&A. But there is one detailed article about it as a blog at Times of Israel, by Alec Mauer.

Mauer says that Beinart was one of his childhood heroes. He shares Beinart's ideas of 15 years ago about the two state solution, of being against BDS. He is disappointed that Beinart's position today makes no sense to living, breathing Israelis - including the liberal ones who attend TAU or who make films. Beinart repeated BDS claims that they are not boycotting individuals but only institutions, and being at one such institution, he understands that this is a nonsensical distinction.

Based on his report, it appears that many of the students who attended were like him - people who are liberal, who want Palestinians to have a state and equal rights, but who actually live there. 

In other words, Beinart 2025 met Beinart 2010 - and couldn't win an argument with himself. He was confronted with people who share his stated goals but actually think about them realistically. And he failed to move them. 

In the past 15 years, while Beinart moved more and more to the anti-Israel Left, he came up with reasons that sounded reasonable to his new audience - but that made increasingly little sense to those on the Israeli Left who would be affected by his desired policies. He spoke to echo chambers of progressives in America who look at the world through the simplistic oppressor vs. oppressed lens and the feedback in that echo chamber prompted him to keep moving that way. 

One crucial point that is not often mentioned in these contexts: his livelihood became more and more dependent on his political positions. It is incredibly difficult to think independently when your income depends on thinking only one way. As progressive Americans moved more towards blatant antisemitism, Beinart had to work not to alienate them. 

His talk at TAU showed him that his progression from liberal Zionist to anti-Israel activist, which he pretends was a natural evolution, did not impress those who are exactly like he used to be. They knew his arguments and they wanted to hear him answer their questions about them. He couldn't do it. 

Before the talk, he believed the praise heaped on him by his followers, that his arguments are airtight, that he can convince any sincere liberal Zionist of the righteousness of his new positions by quoting Amnesty and B'Tselem. When he realized that he was not nearly as consistent or smart as he thought he was, he decided that going to TAU was a mistake. But he cannot admit he couldn't win the arguments.

Beinart didn't go to Israel for dialogue. He went to admonish the students. He went not as an intellectual but as a prophet. And the students would have none of that. 

A truly humble person would have listened to the students and admitted that he doesn't have the answers. A conceited person blames those who refuted him as being part of the evil enemy. 

Beinart's apology was not an act of contrition. It was an act of conceit to avoid admitting his hypocrisy. Usually apologies are signs of humility, but in this case, Beinart's apology was an act of self preservation. And the BDSers understand that. 

Humility is a necessary component of growth. Beinart's arrogance shows what happens when one believes that they are infallible - their own ethics go out the window to keep from admitting they are wrong. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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From the Drowning Child to a Drowning World: Moral Proximity in the Age of Power

Introduction: Refuting Singer and Reframing the Purpose of Ethics

Peter Singer's famous thought experiment, first outlined in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," goes like this: imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a child drowning. You can save the child easily, though your clothes will be ruined, and it will cost $200 to replace them. Most people agree they would save the child. Singer then argues that if we are willing to suffer minor inconvenience to save one life near us, we are morally obligated to donate that same money to save, say, 20 lives far away. For a small cost, we can prevent starvation, malaria, or death in poorer nations, yet we often don't. Therefore, we are morally inconsistent.

At first glance, his logic seems unassailable. But Singer's framing is both too abstract and too flat. First, he neglects the time component. The drowning child requires immediate, one-time action. Remote suffering is persistent and structural. Sending $200 does not solve the problem. It inserts a drop into an ongoing crisis that demands coordination, infrastructure, and sustained engagement. 

Following Singer's logic, your $200 spread across the entire world of needy children will end up giving each child minuscule fractions of a penny, so you wouldn't save 20 children - you would save none. How does one choose who to give the money to and how much? His universalist ideals do not scale when applied seemingly "fairly." Singer's engaging in the same triage that he is condemning but hiding it.

Most crucially, Singer treats moral responsibility as a universal moral field, ignoring the structured, covenantal, and relational reality of ethical life. He assumes moral action scales linearly, that we can treat all lives as equally accessible units of obligation. Yet one's first responsibility is to one's family and community - an implicit covenant that cannot and must not be flattened by pretending that everyone is equally responsible for everyone else. He assumes that proximity is a flaw to be overcome rather than a feature that guides responsible moral scaling.

The Singer thought experiment is very relevant to America today. The question is what is America's moral role and responsibility in the world?

The Jewish ethical framework, and particularly the derechological model I have been developing, proposes a structured triad of moral obligation: proximity (moral, relational, or cultural, not just physical), capacity (the power to act without displacing higher duties), and covenant (explicit or inherited moral bonds of responsibility, including both moral ties and literal agreements like treaties, alliances, and shared commitments). This triad scales from individuals to superpowers.

The triad doesn't reject global concern. It structures it. It insists that moral responsibility must scale with care, not collapse into undifferentiated obligation. Moral universalism that ignores proximity ends up collapsing under its own weight, justifying either moral paralysis or performative politics.

When we think in terms of one's derech - their observable moral trajectory -  we can name our own values transparently, identify which tier of obligation is in conflict, distinguish authentic derech disagreements from disguised reflex, and elevate partisanship into principled moral debate.

The result isn't consensus. It's dignity. A society that debates real values instead of tribal slogans is one that can still correct itself.

Part I: American Foreign Policy and the Shift in Proximity Logic

Modern America, particularly under the Trump administration, offers a fascinating case study in derechological terms. The first and second Trump terms differ not just in policy but in the internal structure of their derech, their observable moral trajectory.

In the first term, derech was inconsistent. Isolationist rhetoric coexisted with interventionist moves. Proximity, capacity, and covenant were each invoked but not in a coherent order. Derech analysis reveals fragmented values driven more by instinct than by tiered moral logic.

In the second term, the derech crystallized. Proximity was redefined as strategic alignment, not geographic or cultural but based on immediate political or economic usefulness. Capacity was treated as leverage, not duty. Covenant became conditional. Treaties, alliances, and shared values were honored only if visibly reciprocal.

In derech terms, this is not isolationism. It's transactional sovereigntism. It isn't a derech of cruelty per se but of hollowed responsibility. The moral triangle is still used, but its sides have been redrawn.

A key derechological concern in this phase is value hijacking, where values are invoked but only to serve pre-existing reflexes, fears, or political instincts. When "security," "tradition," or "freedom" are used as cloaks for fear of loss, racial panic, or anti-covenantal scapegoating, derech is being simulated, not followed. Derechology teaches that true values shape decisions even when they conflict with base instincts. A policy that always aligns with reflex and never with override logic is likely hijacked.

Part II: The Fracture Within the Right

This derech is not uncontested. Within the American Right, we now see a derech fracture.

Traditional nationalists maintain a covenantal derech. They believe America has inherited responsibilities to allies, to liberty, to history. They operate with structured values. Strength, yes, but not at the expense of fidelity.

New isolationists collapse the triad. Proximity becomes domestic only. Capacity is morally inert. Covenant is reframed as entrapment. This faction often draws moral language from tradition, but in structure, it functions derech-wise as self-protectionism cloaked in principle.

Overlaying both is a more disturbing split: between those whose derech includes Jews as moral partners and those whose derech scapegoats Jews as symbols of globalism, elite betrayal, or cultural threat. This isn't a fringe issue. It's a derech-defining fault line.

Here too, derechology applies the Reflex vs. Value Test. Reflex-driven policies arise from fear, anger, or trauma responses masquerading as principle. They shift rapidly, resist override logic, and lack repair capacity. True values, by contrast, remain legible across contexts, resolve conflicts transparently, and produce moral consistency even when inconvenient. Derechology warns: when reflex is moralized, values are weaponized, and derech collapses.

In derechology, this is not just bad behavior. It is a collapse of human dignity recognition, which disables covenant, mutual responsibility, and override logic. A derech that scapegoats cannot sustain moral leadership.

Conclusion: Derech Clarity in a Drowning World

Singer's experiment fails because it assumes that morality is weightless and obligation is frictionless. But derechology insists that ethical action must track structure, history, and relationship. The U.S. is not just a rich nation. It is a powerful actor embedded in global covenants, carrying layered proximities and enormous capacity. When it shifts its derech, the moral weight of that change is global.

The question is no longer: should we save the child far away? It is: who counts as "close" in a world where power expands moral reach, and where ignoring covenantal entanglement invites derech collapse?

Superpower status is a relatively modern phenomenon, but it irreversibly shifts the moral responsibility curve. The ability to shape global dynamics brings with it the ethical burden of prevention. When a morally grounded actor retreats, the vacuum is not neutral. It is filled by ideologies and regimes that reject human dignity, override logic, or covenantal constraint. The rise of China's authoritarianism, the spread of jihadist violence, or the ideological chaos of decolonial radicalism are not parallel moralities. They are derech failures. Abandoning the field allows derech collapse on a global scale.

On the other hand, concentric circles of moral responsibility are essential. Proximity isn't an evasion. It is an ethical anchor. A nation's first covenant is to its own citizens. That is not nationalism. It is moral triage. The moral question is not whether to abandon global responsibility but how to balance it without betraying inner circles. Derechology affirms that proximity and covenant must be respected, not erased.

And here, a real question arises: Does America currently have the capacity, economically, socially, morally, to care for the world without failing its own people? That is a derechological question, not a partisan one. It requires mapping competing duties, testing claims of value versus reflex, and discerning whether foreign action displaces covenantal integrity at home. There is no single answer. But clarity in the triad reframes the debate.

America's future moral integrity depends on its ability to recognize that superpower status is not just geopolitical. It is ethical geometry. You can't shrink the map without redrawing your moral boundaries.

This essay is not a policy brief. It offers no simplistic solution. Instead, it demonstrates how Derechology provides the tools to extract real values, detect value hijacking, and clarify complex moral dynamics, even in politically toxic environments. In place of rhetorical fog, Derechology offers moral structure. And that structure makes real debate possible.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Fac Ut Fiat: A secular update to Pascal's Wager

(Note: As I am writing my philosophy book, this short chapter ended up on the cutting room floor. So I’m publishing it here.)

Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes’ formula stood for centuries as philosophy’s bedrock, the one truth doubt couldn’t shake. Even if an evil demon deceives you about everything else, the act of thinking proves something exists to be deceived.

Then the simulation hypothesis arrived. We could all be characters in a giant computer simulation and we wouldn’t know it. Our instinct that we are even thinking is no longer solid. We might be an unimportant subroutine.

This is where most people either spiral into nihilism or retreat into unprovable faith. If we can’t know base reality, then either nothing matters or we must believe in something bigger than us without evidence. Life itself is otherwise meaningless.

But there’s a third option.

We don’t need faith for life to have meaning. We can create meaning.

We can act morally. We can improve the lives of others. We can help the helpless.

We create meaning by walking values when forces clash. Every time we choose to align with values over instinct and reflex, we are creating a more moral world. We are authoring significance that wouldn’t exist without our conscious intervention.

Meaning isn’t something you discover or prove. It’s something you create through moral action with other people.

Create meaning and you change from an isolated observer into an active creator of our world.

Descartes could not go past a world where only he exists and he cannot know anything else. But we are not passive observers of life. We are not chained in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows. We have agency to act, to create.

This inverts Descartes from cogito ergo sum to fac ut fiat. Do, and through the doing, it becomes.

When we perform actions, it doesn’t only change our world - it changes us. If we choose to tell the truth, then we are more likely to tell the truth in the future. When we go against our nature to help someone, it is easier to make that same choice the next time. Even if we are in a simulation, we are not non-playing characters - we are more like self-learning AIs that behave in a probabilistic way. And we can change our own selves.

Choosing values to override instincts is what separates us from other creations. That override, that moment when you choose value even though it costs you, is what makes you more than mere code. Not because you’re free from deterministic forces, but because you can override those forces when they misalign with values. The capacity for acting morally creates meaning. And the meaning you create through consistent choosing of values in your relationships, the trust you build through truth-telling, the dignity you honor through respect for others, are all experientially undeniable regardless of substrate.

Pascal’s Wager, Rewired

Pascal’s Wager argued that belief in God is the rational choice even without proof. The upside of belief if God exists is huge, the downside is small. And if God doesn’t exist, belief doesn’t hurt you. So choose to believe.

We are updating that wager for anyone who ever doubted whether anything matters, no God required.

You might not be able to prove base reality. But you have a choice: nihilism or a life with meaning?

There is no need for faith in this derech wager. You are choosing to make the life you are in, simulated or not, meaningful. The upside is huge. You are helping to create a better world, real or not.

There is no downside.

The feeling of making a difference is real. The shared joy of being in a relationship based on respect is real. It is something that didn’t exist before you made your decision to act morally. This is true even in a simulation.

The wager isn’t hypothetical. You’re already in it. Every day you’re choosing whether to choose values or let reflex win. The question isn’t “should I start?” It’s “given that I’m already creating or destroying meaning with every choice, will I optimize for meaning?”

If you act as if nothing matters, you are right. If you act as if only you matter, you are right. If you act as if everyone matters, you are right again. That’s how you create your world.

Fac ut fiat. Do so it becomes.

Do, and through the doing, meaning becomes real.

Be the creator of your world.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The Moral Politician: A Jewish Ethical Reflection on Power, Integrity, and Public Trust

For Election Day, I asked my AskHillel ethical chatbot how an moral politician should act - balancing his or her legitimate competing interests with consistency and morality.

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What the Platner affair reveals about political morality

Every political movement faces moments that reveal what it truly values. The Graham Platner affair in Maine is one of those moments, not because of its particular sordidness, but because of what the response reveals about how political actors actually weigh competing values against each other.

The facts are straightforward:. A Senate candidate backed by Bernie Sanders has an SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest. He claims he got it drunk in Croatia in 2007 without understanding its meaning, yet acquaintance says Platner explained the Nazi connection to him in 2012. His former political director resigned, calling the tattoo antisemitic and warning Democrats against being "painfully stupid." Yet Sanders deflects, asking whether we care more about a tattoo or healthcare policy. The online left has made supporting Platner a litmus test.

I have been arguing in my ethics articles that values are real - a part of our very beings. Every human issue can be looked at through the lens of what our values are and how we prioritize them. In this case, we are seeing how the Democratic Party is prioritizing its values.

Power is a value in politics, though not a moral value. It is an instrumental value. You cannot enact healthcare reform from the minority. You cannot confirm judges without winning elections.  Power enables the pursuit of substantive goals. 

But instrumental values must be weighed against moral values. Every political actor does this constantly. It cannot be avoided - but it must be transparent.

The Democratic response to Platner fails badly. Rather than acknowledging the tradeoff, party leaders pretend there is no tradeoff to make. Sanders reframes the question as though caring about antisemitism and caring about healthcare are mutually exclusive. DNC chairman Ken Martin calls the social media posts "not right" but "not disqualifying," as though those categories exhaust the possibilities. Representative Ro Khanna invokes the principle of not engaging in personal destruction "especially in our own party," with that final clause doing all the work.

What would honesty look like here? It would sound something like this: "We believe Senator Collins must be defeated in 2026. We believe the policies we would enact with that Senate seat matter enormously. We have concluded that despite serious concerns about this candidate's judgment and character, the instrumental value of winning this seat outweighs those concerns." One might disagree with that calculation, but at least it would be a real argument about real tradeoffs.

Why don't the Democrats do that? Because they would essentially be saying that they prioritize power over principles, which is not something most voters want to hear. 

Supporting Platner means accepting that someone who wore Nazi imagery for eighteen years, who may well have understood its meaning much earlier than he claims, and who demonstrated such catastrophically poor judgment even in the most charitable interpretation, deserves a Senate seat. It means deciding that defeating Susan Collins is worth the message this sends about what behavior disqualifies someone from representing the party. It means concluding that the instrumental value of power outweighs these costs.

Again, politicians make these calculations all the time. Both parties are more than willing to overlook their side's moral lapses. When Marjorie Taylor Greene was still considered mainstream Republican, her own antisemitism was largely papered over by her party.  Smaller lapses in judgement are weighed against larger political goals, and in some cases the importance of political power do indeed outweigh those lapses. So does the existence and quality of any apologies. But if the party is not willing to say that out loud, then they have another ethical problem. 

In this case, the willful blindness is extreme. Platner's excuse is a lie, and everyone knows it. If a Republican had done something similar the Democrats would be filling up the media with outrage. 

The deeper problem is that refusing to acknowledge value calculations of power vs. morality makes it impossible to establish any meaningful boundaries. If there is no honest weighing of power against principle, then there is no way to say where the line is. What level of past misconduct would be disqualifying? What evidence of antisemitism would matter? The answer cannot be "none," but without transparent weighing of values, that becomes the de facto position.

This matters beyond Platner's candidacy. Every political movement claims to stand for certain principles. But principles come into tension with each other and with the practical requirements of wielding power. The test of a serious political movement is not whether it faces such tensions, but whether it faces them honestly.

Values must be weighed. Power is among those values, instrumental but real. The question is whether we are willing to do that weighing in the open, where the costs and benefits can be seen and debated, or whether we will pretend the weighing is unnecessary and hope nobody notices what we have chosen.

But when you look at the world through the prism of values, it is very clear which values the Democratic Party have chosen in this case.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Let's talk about campus free speech and ethics

The New York Times today published two letters that perfectly capture the incoherence at the heart of our free speech debates. One lawyer argued that campus speech disruptions matter less than government crackdowns on dissent. Another writer pointed out that protecting white supremacist Richard Spencer at the University of Florida cost over $600,000 in security—roughly equivalent to a year's tuition for one hundred students, and free speech does not justify this expense.

Meanwhile, another Times article today profiled pro-Palestinian activists who feel chastened after intense backlash to campus protests. Some wear masks to demonstrations, worried about job prospects. One Palestinian-American student said simply: "I am scared to talk about Palestine and I'm Palestinian."

Everyone claims their speech rights are under assault, yet somehow everyone also seems to be silencing everyone else. Campus speakers require small armies for protection. Protesters face professional blacklisting. Students fear expressing their identities. Administrators cave to political pressure from all sides.

We have lost the ability to distinguish between protecting speech and protecting speakers, between civil disobedience and coercion, between the right to protest and the right to silence others. This is not a free speech crisis. It is an ethics crisis. 

I am writing a book that argues that a secularized form of Jewish ethics is exactly what the world needs today. These are exactly the types of thorny questions that a cohesive ethics framework can help answer, and where today's existing ethics frameworks fall woefully short.

Consider how the Times article on anti-Israel protests systematically conflates different categories of action. Some students participated in peaceful protests. Others occupied buildings, blocked access to classes, and harassed Jewish students. The article treats these as points on a single spectrum of "protest activity" and "civil disobedience" rather than fundamentally different kinds of acts. But the ethical obligations around speech are not identical to the obligations around physical obstruction and intimidation. You may have the right to express unpopular views. You do not have the right to prevent others from accessing their workplace, attending their classes, or moving freely through public spaces.

When activists shut down bridges and train stations, they were not engaging in speech. They were using their bodies as weapons to coerce compliance. The same applies to occupying campus buildings or blocking access to facilities. These are forms of power assertion, not discourse. The article quotes Tyler Coward of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression expressing concern about threats "both from the government and from within the university itself that are really damaging the climate for open debate." But notice what is missing: any discussion of threats from protesters themselves to open debate and free inquiry. When students chant slogans that make Jewish peers feel unsafe, occupy buildings, disrupt classes, and prevent normal university operations, they are exercising power to silence others. Calling it "resistance" does not change its nature.

The article quotes activists with wistfulness: "We spent a year thinking about what went wrong. We thought we'd all get arrested, and then everyone would rise up and stop the United States from aiding Israel." This is remarkably revealing. These activists did not think they were participating in conversation. They thought they were sparking revolution. They believed disrupting normal university operations would force others to see the world as they did and join their cause. This is not the mindset of people engaged in persuasion. It is the mindset of people engaged in coercion.

Civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. involved accepting punishment as part of bearing moral witness. Modern campus protesters seem shocked their actions carried consequences. They occupied buildings and blocked access, then expressed outrage that universities suspended them or withheld degrees. They engaged in tactics designed to impose costs on others, then claimed victim status when they themselves faced costs. There is a coherent ethical framework for protest that crosses legal boundaries: accepting responsibility for the breach, making the moral case so compelling that the punishment itself becomes persuasive, and maintaining nonviolent discipline. What we saw on many campuses was different: attempts to impose costs without bearing them, to disrupt others' lives while claiming immunity, to silence opposing views while demanding protection for one's own. That is not about exercising rights. It is about weaponizing rights.

The proper response to these thorny questions is not whataboutism. If politicians or campus administrators go too far to penalize valid protests, then that should be called out as unethical as well. The underlying error is treating ethical evaluation as comparative rather than categorical. An act is either ethical or not based on its own merits, not based on whether something worse exists elsewhere. The whataboutism defense reveals how thoroughly rights language has corrupted our moral reasoning. We cannot acknowledge that our side might have done something wrong without feeling we have conceded the entire argument. We have lost the ability to say: "Yes, what we did was problematic, but it does not rise to the level of what they did, and both can be true simultaneously."

Then there are competing obligations that transcend simple questions of free speech rights. 

When the University of Florida hosted Spencer in 2017, security cost over $600,000. Spencer's organization paid about $10,000 to rent space. The university paid the rest. One Times op-ed argues universities should "proudly pay for as much security as is necessary" to protect free speech. But this misses the fundamental question: is spending the equivalent of one hundred students' annual tuition to protect one speaker a sound allocation of university resources?

This is not primarily a free speech question. It is an institutional ethics question. Universities have finite resources and multiple obligations: educating students, supporting research, maintaining facilities, providing financial aid. The reflex to frame every campus controversy as a free speech issue prevents us from asking whether universities should be required to host any speaker regardless of cost.

But there is a deeper problem. If people understood the line between speech and coercion, we should never reach the point where threats to peace are so dangerous that half a million dollars in security becomes necessary. Police are needed to protect against violence, not against nonviolent protest. When security costs reach this level, something has gone catastrophically wrong with our civic culture.

The massive security requirement reveals one of two ethical failures. Either the anticipated protesters do not understand that disrupting an event through force or intimidation crosses from protest into coercion—in which case our educational institutions have failed to teach basic civic ethics—or the speaker's own words constitute incitement that predictably provokes violence. If Spencer's rhetoric itself incites violence or constitutes threats, then he has disqualified himself as a legitimate campus speaker regardless of First Amendment protections. Universities are not required to provide platforms for speech that crosses from persuasion into incitement. The question is not whether Spencer has a legal right to speak somewhere, but whether a university or other institution has an ethical obligation to facilitate it.

The problem is that we have lost the conceptual framework to make these distinctions clearly. Instead of asking "Does this speech serve truth-seeking or does it incite harm?" we ask only "Is this legally protected speech?" These are different questions requiring different kinds of reasoning—ethical versus legal—and conflating them leaves us unable to resolve the dilemma.

Perhaps the most complex issue involves career penalties. Should students face professional consequences for political activism? The Times profiles students "worried the blowback has been so severe that the American belief in civil disobedience to achieve political ends has been eroded." Jewish ethics offers more nuance than rights language allows. Human dignity suggests people should not face professional ruin for expressing political views, particularly on matters of conscience. But truth-seeking and institutional integrity suggest organizations have legitimate interests in evaluating whether prospective employees' publicly expressed views are compatible with the organization's mission.

The distinction matters. If a student participated in peaceful protest, wrote opinion pieces, or engaged in lawful advocacy, punishing them professionally seems vindictive and wrong. But if they participated in tactics that violated others' rights, engaged in harassment or intimidation, or celebrated violence, then organizations are justified in considering that behavior relevant to employment. This is not about punishing political views. It is about evaluating character and judgment. The article mentions federal judges declaring they would not hire law clerks from Columbia because of how it handled demonstrations. This seems like collective punishment, penalizing students who had no control over administrative decisions. But business figures discouraging employers from hiring specific activists who crossed ethical lines are making individual judgments about specific conduct. That is categorically different. The principle is not "never let politics affect employment decisions." It is "distinguish between lawful political expression and conduct that violates ethical obligations toward others."

The Times article notes that "some states have tried to put new restrictions on campus speech that are testing the limits of the First Amendment. Last week, a judge blocked a Texas law that would forbid protest activity at public universities during nighttime hours and would limit noise, among other restrictions." But noise ordinances are not a free speech issue. Every municipality has noise ordinances restricting how loudly you can play music or set off fireworks, particularly at night. No one considers this a grave threat to liberty. We accept that your right to make noise ends where it creates unreasonable burdens on others' ability to sleep, study, or enjoy their property.

Why should protest be different? To say that protests can violate others' rights while late night wedding receptions cannot is to twist free speech in ways that make it run roughshod over other rights. The entire idea of competing rights muddies the waters of what is permissible or not. The Bill of Rights allows owning guns, that does not mean one can practice shooting at 2 AM. Rallies with megaphones are no different. The ethical principle is proportionality. Your right to express political views does not override others' right to access their workplace, attend their classes, or move through public spaces. When protest tactics impose costs on people who are not the targets and who have no power to address the protesters' grievances, those tactics cross ethical lines.

All of this confusion reveals the bankruptcy of rights-based frameworks for resolving complex social conflicts. When everyone claims absolute rights and no one acknowledges competing obligations, we get paralysis punctuated by power struggles. What we need is a coherent ethical framework that acknowledges multiple legitimate interests and provides principled ways to balance them. Start with core values: truth, dignity, mutual responsibility, preventing harm. These are not competing rights that cancel each other out. They are complementary obligations that create conditions for human flourishing.

Here is one suggested framework applied to campus controversies. 

On controversial speakers: Universities should protect unpopular views but are not obligated to subsidize unlimited security costs. Rescheduling for safety is not censorship. Refusing to spend $600,000 on security for one speaker is reasonable resource allocation.

On speaker obligations: Anyone invited to speak should be willing to engage in dialogue, not just broadcast monologues. Speakers who refuse to take questions are not participating in the academic enterprise. They are using campus facilities as platforms for propaganda.

On protest tactics: Peaceful protest, including walkouts and symbolic demonstrations, should be protected even when offensive. But tactics that prevent others from hearing speakers, accessing buildings, or conducting normal business cross ethical lines. The test is not whether the cause is just but whether the tactics respect others' equal standing as moral agents.

On professional consequences: Students should not face career penalties for lawful political expression, even when unpopular. But organizations are justified in considering whether students' publicly expressed views or actions suggest poor judgment or unwillingness to respect others. The distinction is between penalizing political identity and evaluating character.

On institutional obligations: Universities must protect students from harassment regardless of political content. When protests create environments where Jewish students fear attending class, the university has failed. When administrators suspend students for peaceful sit-ins while ignoring harassment of minorities, they have abdicated responsibility. The standard is not ideological neutrality but functional integrity: can all students pursue education without fear?

On the difference between speech and incitement: Calling for illegitimate violence, even in coded language, is never acceptable. Chanting "Globalize the Intifada" or "By any means necessary" are calls to violence that cross the line from free speech into incitement.

This framework will not eliminate controversy. Hard cases remain hard. But it provides structure for reasoning through conflicts that honors multiple legitimate concerns rather than treating every issue as a battle between absolute rights.

The real free speech crisis is not that controversial speakers face protests. It is that we have lost the ability to distinguish between speech and conduct, between discourse and coercion, between protecting expression and subsidizing disruption. A university committed to truth would say: we welcome vigorous disagreement, but we insist on intellectual honesty. We protect speech, but we do not subsidize security circuses. We honor protest, but we prohibit coercion. We evaluate ideas based on their correspondence to reality, not their political valence. We hold everyone to the same standards of ethical conduct.

That is not censorship. That is integrity. And it is exactly what our universities, and our society, desperately need.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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