Last week, we reported the direct, forthright messages from scholars and writers Haviv Rettig Gur and Prof. Coleman Hughes to campus-aged youngsters and their parents on how to confront the “social contagion” of brute antisemitism at universities and colleges today. They delivered, essentially, the same message to the hundreds in attendance at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal-hosted gathering in Toronto.
Gur urged us “to learn, teach and tell the story of the Jewish people”. Prof. Hughes urged students to know “who they are” to thereby enable themselves to “stand up for their values”. Both men acknowledged the difficulties involved in implementing their prescriptions.
We have all observed, over the past two and a half years, how the intimidation and bullying aimed at Jews and supporters of Israel have so poisoned the climate on some campuses that civility, respect and tolerance no longer grow there. Our children too frequently must confront the bent and crooked outcroppings of hatred. This is the world, today, in which, we earnestly, hope they will grow, develop and mature, nevertheless.
Many scholars, community workers, historians and other interested observers have begun to write on the subject of how our children might find the wherewithal to implement the ‘Gur-Hughes prescriptions’, that is, how to stand Jewishly tall in a landscape of “social contagion”.
For example, Michael Gencher, executive director of StandWithUs Australia, recently published an essay on eJP entitled Before resilience comes pride, in which he asks: “What helps when a Jewish young person is confronted by hostility, ignorance or the steady drip of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist messaging? …What works is a young person who already knows that being Jewish is something good, something deep and something worth holding onto.”
Gencher’s reflections rush to the difficult questions. “What helps when a Jewish young person is confronted by hostility, ignorance or the steady drip of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist messaging?
…What works is a young person who already knows that being Jewish is something good, something deep and something worth holding onto.”
Gencher understands that many young Jews are not raised with a deep familiarity of Jewish peoplehood. But he writes: “It is never too late. Pride can still be built. Identity can still be strengthened. A young Jew who did not receive that grounding at home can still find it through mentors, education, friendships, community and meaningful Jewish experiences. If we want resilient Jewish young people, then first we have to build proud Jewish young people. Not merely informed. Not merely prepared. Proud. Because the real test is not whether they can recite the right answer when challenged. It is whether they know who they are before anyone else tries to define them.”
It warrants emphasizing that “standing up” against the loud and boisterous spreaders of hate is not easy. But it also warrants emphasizing: this is the need of this hour in our history.
Gencher’s essay can be found at:
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In his memoir, Hostage, Eli Sharabi, recounts a conversation with Ori Danino and Hersh Goldberg-Polin after the latter two were confined, for a brief time, with Sharabi.
“Everyone is struggling. On our second day here, someone sighs, and Ori looks at him and says to Hersh, “Hersh, tell them the sentence you kept telling me back at the house.”
“What sentence?” we ask.
“Tell them,” says Ori.
“Hersh looks at us. “He who has a why can bear any how,” he says.”
“I mull it over. The saying feels like a gift.”
(Hersh, of course, was familiar with Victor Frankl’s teachings, for he had quoted the core philosophy in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s seminal work. Perhaps, posthumously, through his restatement of “the sentence”, Hersh might also provide a similar gift of inspiration to our countless children contending with their own, very different, struggles.)
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Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
May 15, 2026
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 