|
|
|
| |
StandWithUs trains Israel’s collegiate defenders on an Oxnard beach |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
StandWithUs trains Israel’s collegiate defenders on an Oxnard beach
There were 33 Emerson
Fellows at this year’s workshop in Oxnard. Photos by Joshua Plotke
By Roberto Loiederman
Tribe Journal
(Front Cover)
September 24, 2012
As the sun dipped toward the Pacific Ocean at Oxnard’s Mandalay Beach one August evening, dozens of college students sat on the sand and looked out at waves lapping, sailboats passing and sea gulls overhead.
But they weren’t paying much attention to the idyllic postcard scene. These were Emerson Fellows, campus leaders advocating for Israel, so most were discussing serious work.
For college students like these — whose credo is “I ♥ Israel” — campuses can be hostile territory. Whether it’s dealing with Muslim students who prevent an Israeli statesman from speaking or university senates that pass measures boycotting products with an Israeli connection, pro-Israel activism can be a spine-testing task.
The Emerson Fellowship aims to give these students the tools, support and connections they need to carry out that task. Now in its sixth year, it is an important program of StandWithUs, founded in 2001 by Roz and Jerry Rothstein, president Esther Renzer and others to counter, as one of its brochures says, “the misinformation that often surrounds the Middle East conflict.”
Steve and Rita Emerson, in their mid-60s, hosted this year’s workshop at one of their two area beach houses, providing not just the funding but also personally welcoming the 33 undergrads and making sure there was enough water, food and sunscreen to go around.
The Oxnard gathering is an intensive four-day boot camp of practical information and guidance in both offense — pro-Israel advocacy techniques — and defense — ways to monitor and short-circuit actions intended to paint Israel in a negative light. Workshop leaders, who often are previous Emerson Fellows, show students how to present Israel’s side.
“Much of what we do with the Emerson Fellows is to give them facts about the Middle East,” said Leah Yadegar, a former fellow who became a workshop leader and now attends law school. “How many Arab countries are there? How many Jewish countries? How many Jews in the world? How many Muslims? Everyone has the right to hate Israel, if that’s what they think. But if you’re going to hate Israel, do it on the facts.”
At a session on the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement (BDS), which aims to undermine Israel by targeting companies that do business with it or artists who intend to perform there, Charlotte Korchak — a blond, high-energy dynamo with a booming voice and a speedy delivery — told the students that BDS “presents itself as a nonviolent way to pressure Israel to make concessions, but in fact it’s a Trojan horse meant to destroy the Jewish state.”
Korchak, a former fellow who’s now the StandWithUs West Coast campus coordinator, said students need to know that BDS exists “on many fronts,” including cultural. Elvis Costello and Santana called off performing in Israel after being pressured.
She stressed that advocating for Israel does not mean demeaning Palestinians. “It’s important,” she said, “to push measures that help both communities.” This was a recurring theme at the workshop.
At one of the breakout sessions, Matt White, founder of UC Berkeley’s Tikvah Students for Israel and now a campus coordinator for StandWithUs — fluent in a number of languages and sporting several studs in his ears — asked students to talk about anti-Israel actions they had witnessed on their campuses. One described a professor’s views as “pro-Palestinian.”
“Being pro-Palestinian is not the same as being anti-Semitic or anti-Israel,” White cautioned. “We’re also pro-Palestinian. What we need to communicate is that Palestinians have suffered, in part, because they haven’t had good leadership.”
Another student mentioned a professor who said Israel has no right to exist and showed the class a “documentary that glorifies suicide bombers.”
“Ah, OK,” White said. “That’s a situation we want to do something about. That’s where we draw the line: when they say Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.”
The goal of anti-Israel rhetoric, White said, is to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. One of the methods, he said, is demonization, as when someone says that Israeli soldiers are “bloodthirsty” and take pleasure in the mass slaughter of Arabs.
“When somebody makes a comment like that about Israelis,” said Brett Cohen, StandWithUs’ national campus program director, “ask them to rephrase that same sentence with Mexicans or blacks. Would they say black soldiers are bloodthirsty and take pleasure in killing? If you frame it that way, it makes the rhetoric clear and people understand.”
Emerson Fellowship Basics
Now in its sixth year, the Emerson Fellowship is a year-long program of StandWithUs, an organization founded in 2001 to counter “the misinformation that often surrounds the Middle East conflict.” The fellowship is funded by Steve and Rita Emerson.
CANDIDATES: American and Canadian students going into their second, third or fourth year of college
QUALIFICATIONS: Leadership and a track record of advocacy and education on behalf of Israel
OBLIGATIONS INCLUDE:
• Attending a free summer training seminar in Oxnard and a free fall conference in Santa Monica
• Fostering a group of students dedicated to promoting Israel on campus
• Running up to six Israel educational events on campus
• Reporting anti-Israel events on campus and actively countering misinformation campaigns against Israel
• Organizing a coalition-building event with another group on campus
TO APPLY: Applications open in mid-March to become a fellow for next year: emersonfellowship.com.
ABOUT STANDWITHUS: A nonprofit organization, it was created with the mission of informing the public about Israel and combating the extremism and anti-Semitism that can distort the issues. StandWithUs is based in Los Angeles, with 16 offices in the United States, Israel and elsewhere.
Source: StandWithUs
StandWithUs doesn’t take an official position on what a future Middle East peace settlement would look like, but some conference leaders mentioned their hope for a two-state solution.
“One of the keys to StandWithUs and the [Emerson] kids is to keep the politics nonpartisan,” Steve Emerson said. “It’s a difficulty with fundraising, because some potential donors want a hard-right ethos. That would just totally alienate the kids. So StandWithUs is neither right or left; it doesn’t dictate views. What unites all of us is our love for Israel and defending its right to exist.”
Emerson Fellows defend that right on their campuses. Whenever an “Apartheid Wall” goes up protesting Israel’s security fence in the West Bank, they set up — with the help of StandWithUs — “Israel Matters: The Path to Peace Display” to counter it.
These students have used their training in a variety of other situations, sponsoring some events and reacting to others. When the governing body at the University of California, Berkeley was urged to divest funds from General Electric and the tech company ITT because of their Israeli ties, Emerson Fellows guided a letter-writing campaign against divestment.
When Yadegar got a note from UC Santa Barbara students saying that a professor had sent e-mails with photos comparing Israeli soldiers to Nazi troops, she helped students call attention to it.
This year’s Emerson Fellows were chosen, as in the past, because of proven pro-Israel activism. Robert Weitzner started an Israel advocacy group at Ohio’s Kent State University called “Golden Flashes for Israel.” Leah Karchmer spearheaded a letter-writing campaign at Chicago’s DePaul University to confront an Israel apartheid demonstration.
Being Jewish is not a requirement for being an Emerson Fellow. Hunter Ligon, a Christian who founded an Israel advocacy group at the University of Oklahoma, said he initially became interested in Israel because it is America’s strong ally; then he moved on to the shared religious-heritage factor. “As a Christian,” Ligon said, “I see the need to fight for Jews to have the right to live in their own homeland.”
Another important motivation for this conference is simply to bring all of these people together, according to Yadegar.
“We show the Emerson Fellows they’re not alone. There are other students who think like they do,” she said. “Once they’ve been to the workshop, they feel connected.”
They may feel a little lucky too, considering the setting of the workshop. Step outside the back porch of the Emerson home, and you’re on a pristine beach.
For students whose lives are still works-in-progress, the setting and training sessions may offer an implicit message: You can do well for yourself — and, at the same time, do good work for a cause that matters to you.
For Steve and Rita Emerson, that cause is the future of Israel and the future of Jews.
Steve Emerson, a portfolio manager, and his wife, Rita, an information specialist at the National Cancer Institute, are passionate pro-Israel philanthropists who examined many groups and liked what they saw at StandWithUs. They praise its ability to respond quickly and effectively, its management skills and leadership, and its ambitious global reach.
Steve Emerson sees his involvement with StandWithUs as similar to his profession: investing in small companies with large growth potential.
“What I like about StandWithUs is that it’s not run by the professional fundraisers who know how to raise funds but don’t do much to defend Israel. And the fact that StandWithUs is still relatively small has allowed me to take ownership of the part of the program that I’m involved with,” he said. “It’s given us a lot of bang for the buck.”
It’s also given him the ability to think big.
“With these Emerson Fellows, we now have hundreds of trained activists, so our next step is to organize these kids into a country-wide, worldwide pro-Israel army,” he said.
“Look,” he continued. “Let’s say that Israel attacks Iran, destroys Iran’s nuclear capacity, and oil goes up to $200 a barrel and Israel gets blamed. It’ll need all the support it can get. These kids are ready to go anywhere and defend Israel. I hope it never happens, but if it does, we’re ready.”
Steve Emerson:
A long strange journey to Zionism
by Roberto Loiederman
Let’s say your parents are from Germany and left there in the 1930s. Despite their origins, they — and you — have a suspiciously common English last name. You’re born in 1945 in Southern California, where your well-to-do parents send you to a Christian private school and take you to a Methodist church.
Neither you nor your parents have much social contact with Jews. In fact, some of your mother’s friends are Pasadena society ladies, known for their avoidance of anything Jewish. And when, as a teenager, you tell your mother that you want to go out with a Jewish girl, your mother tells you not to, because “we don’t date Jewish girls.”
Something about this story never stopped gnawing at Steve Emerson: the generic English surname, leaving Germany when Hitler rose to power, the odd reaction to anything Jewish. He continued to ask questions until his parents finally told him that they’d fled Germany because one of his grandparents was Jewish.
Then, at age 21, Emerson received word that his father had died suddenly in Frankfort while touring in Germany. He attended the funeral at a Christian cemetery, then visited Great Britain, where some rarely mentioned relatives he had never met lived.
That’s when someone told him: You know you’re Jewish, don’t you? Not one-quarter Jewish. Not just one grandparent. You’re Jewish. Totally. One hundred percent. Both your parents are Jewish, and their parents and so on. It turned out that his family’s original name had been Eisner.
Emerson, who would later become an ardent Zionist, said that learning he was Jewish “made me very strong in my passion to defend who we are as a people, anywhere in the world. Who knows? Maybe I’m so dedicated to this cause precisely because Judaism and Zionism weren’t forced on me when I was a kid.
“I grew up with this common name — Emerson. It’s like Wonder Bread,” he continued. “No name, no heritage. I had parents who tried to deny who they were in virtually every way. So finding out I was Jewish when I was an adult was the best bar mitzvah I could have had.”
Emerson actually went on to have a bar mitzvah as an adult after his life-changing discovery. Over the years, he was a longtime member of Temple Isaiah and is now affiliated with Ohr HaTorah in Mar Vista.
He said another major change in his life came when he met his future wife, the former Rita Rosenfeld, who came from a different end of the religious spectrum. She grew up in a Jewish home in Newark, then moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
“My parents were Orthodox and I was raised that way,” Rita Emerson said. “By the time I was in high school, my parents were secular. But when I dated a non-Jew, they went crazy.”
The couple has been together for 40 years and traces their involvement with Zionist causes to having witnessed the effects on Israel of the Second Intifada, then seeing what happened to the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. “The U.S. was brought to its knees [by 9/11],” Rita Emerson said, “and Israel goes through that on a daily basis.”
The late Newt Becker, a fellow philanthropist, introduced the Emersons in 2006 to Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs. The Emersons were impressed by the pro-Israel organization’s can-do attitude, and for the past six years, the couple has funded and hosted the Emerson Fellowship at one of their beach houses in Oxnard. The workshop trains college students to be, in the words of Steve Emerson, “an army of ambassadors for Israel.”
Thinking about his parents now, Steve Emerson is compassionate about their choice to hide their heritage. “My mother told me she didn’t want me to grow up with the stigma of being Jewish in a non-Jewish America,” he said.
Steve Emerson has his own concerns about the issue, but they play out in a different way: activism.
“Why do I give so much money to help Jews defend themselves? Because I’m scared of what might happen to Jews in America,” Steve Emerson said. “The future of Jews in America is not a given. It’s not automatic. We have to remain vigilant. And Israel is our lightning rod. If they denigrate Israel, it could happen that they’ll eventually denigrate the Jews in America.”
He said that his mother eventually acknowledged her past — somewhat.
“She loved to go to our chavurah parties, but she never really embraced the fact that she was Jewish,” Steve Emerson said. “You know what her dying breath was? She said: ‘Please don’t tell my Pasadena friends that I’m Jewish.’”
|
|
| Filed under Education, Israel, Knesset, Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Muslims in Israel, Arab - Israeli Relations, Campus, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Israel, United Nations, Religion, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Media, Technology, Medicine, Boycott, Free Speech, West Bank, StandWithUs, Fellowship, Advocacy Training, Unites States, Responds to BDS, Responds to Anti-israel Campus Activities on Wednesday, October 03, 2012 by Author: Admin. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
Now in our Store |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
| |
(8.5" x 11") |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
