When we posted Dr. Yaacov Lozowick’s podcast on Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, in which he asserted that Israel has not been sufficiently conscious of the high number of Gaza children getting killed, we also promised to air a somewhat dissenting view. That, after all, is the whole point of Israel from the Inside.
Our guest in today’s podcast is Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, author of a book we recently discussed with him on an earlier podcast, Ethics of our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality. When Rabbi Brody wrote to ask if he could present a different view from Dr. Lozowick’s, he was obviously not suggesting that Israel should not care about the lives of Gazan children. But there are issues that he believes Israel has to consider that did not receive enough attention in Yaacov’s interview.
So today, as promised, our conversation with Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody.
But first, a few quick words on American campuses, and how they are reminder of how utterly different our young generation is from that in America.
Shortly before Shabbat, this statement from the student editors of the Columbia Law Review made its way around social media. The students, having themselves instigated the protests in violation of Columbia’s polices, are now asking for exams to be cancelled, or at least for courses to be Pass/Fail.
If you haven’t seen it, here it is for your shock and entertainment.
I was certainly not the only person to be rather appalled by the claim that they are “irrevocably shaken” by what happened. Haviv Rettig Gur, infinitely more pithy than am I, asked in this tweet:
Rettig Gur had much more to say in that tweet, but you can follow the link on your own.
When I read the Columbia law students’ message, I couldn’t help but think about our own students at Shalem College. We began our Fall Semester at the very end of January, a month later than the Ministry of Education had permitted opening universities, because some 60% of our students had been called up (twice the national average), and we wanted to give as many of the soldiers a chance to get out of Gaza and back to class for the beginning of the year.
Many of them returned from Gaza, and sometimes a day or two later, were sitting in class. The video below, one of hundreds released by the IDF Spokesman’s unit, is a reminder of what Israeli students were dealing with.
THAT is what many our students, male and female, had been in just days before they sat down to read the Iliad as first years or other equally challenging works for other years.
None of our students said they were “irrevocably shaken” by what they’d been through. We tragically lost a student at Shalem College, so many of them had lost a classmate, and many others had lost friends and loved ones—not to the NYPD’s gentle arrest, but to death.
Still, what they wanted was to study and think and work. They didn’t ask, not even once, to be pampered.
Why are our students and American campuses so different? Some thirty yeas ago, Francis Fukayama argued in The End of History and the Last Man that human beings were reaching “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
That wasn’t entirely correct, obviously, and Fukayama has written extensively about his thesis in the intervening years. But even then, back when it did, indeed, seem that liberal democracies were on the ascendancy, Fukayama recognized a key danger of that otherwise good news:
If the greater part of the world in which they lilve is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
Israeli students, like their parents and grandparents, have never known peace. None of them believes that their children will, either. While that is tragic in countless ways, it has apparently help us escape the sickness of which Fukayama warned and which is now spreading like a plague across America and the West.
I keep wondering—if we had to call on this generation of American students to storm the beaches of Normandy, where would we be?
Probably living under fascism.
And now, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody:
Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody is the executive director of Ematai and the Jewish Law Live columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He previously served as the founding director of the Tikvah Overseas Student Institute and co-dean of Tikvah Online Academy, a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, and as a junior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.
His first book, A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates (Maggid), received a National Jewish Book Award. He is also the author of Ethics of our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, which came out in English at the end of 2023. We had Dr. Brody on the podcast in January 2024 to discuss the book. You can listen to that conversation here.
The link above will take you to a brief excerpt of our conversation; the full conversation, along with a transcript for those who prefer to read, is being made available to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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