Cambridge student says she is forced to choose between being Jewish and equal opportunities for all minorities

Today, Hull University voted to disaffiliate from the NUS, citing largely financial reasons. That did not stop Jewish News and Guido Fawkes linking the decision to the election of the NUS’s first female, black Muslim president Malia Bouattia – an outspoken anti-Zionist. In her column for the Jewish Chronicle on Cambridge University’s own referendum, entitled ‘No one should have to compromise religion for politics – but the NUS elections made me doubt myself,‘ Noa Gendler makes no explicit reference to Bouattia, but is otherwise extraordinarily frank:

there’s no way I can decide whether or not [Cambridge University Students Union] should disaffiliate from the NUS without my Judaism coming into play. I’ve had to ask myself whether the NUS can offer me, as a Jewish student, representation and equality, and I’ve had to ask myself if its support for other minority students is more important than its support for me, as a Jewish student. Essentially, I’ve been forced to choose between two fundamental aspects of my life and values: being Jewish, versus liberation and equal opportunities for all minorities.

The final-year student at the University of Cambridge adds,

I’m ashamed to be part of a community which has asked me to make such a painful and irrational decision. No one should ever have to compromise their religion for their politics, or vice versa.

The clear inference is that the rights and needs of Jewish students do not accord with those of other minority student communities, and are incompatible with the struggle against oppression. She claims that choosing in favour of the latter would entail a compromise of her religious beliefs. It’s a dangerous attempt to blur the boundary between religion and political ideology. Gendler also attempts to make ‘her [Jewish] community’ complicit in this cynical calculation.

As I have argued here, a NUS institutional racism review launched in October 2015 – and which was broadened to explicitly include antisemitism at the 2016 conference – is being invoked by “Yes to NUS” campaigners to win over Zionists. Oxford University Student Union Rep, Lily Aaronovitch has presented it as a ‘battle’ against anti-Semitic ‘bigots,’ and claims staying in NUS ‘sends a message to anti-Semites.’

Gendler writes of her decision not to reveal whether she chose ‘being Jewish’ over equality and liberation for all:

what’s holding me back from wanting to share my decision is the fact that it’s a decision linked so fundamentally to my Judaism.[…] I’m so uncomfortable with the choice I made; not that it was necessarily the wrong choice (although perhaps it was) but because I’ve neglected one of my core beliefs for another. There was no way for me to win on this one. Whichever way this referendum turns out, I’ll have lost – and I think many other Jewish students will feel the same.

There’s no mention of Zionism in her column, but is there any other possible explanation for this false dichotomy? It would appear, however, that it’s largely counter-productive to at once accept the premise that the NUS is institutionally antisemitic, and to persuade Zionists to stay in: either way it hands them a victory. It’s revealing that Gendler thinks she is the loser, not the struggle for equal rights.

Elly Fryksos