Pro-Israel Group Puts Emissaries on Campuses

By ANNIE KARNI, Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 10, 2007

A group working to promote pro-Israel sentiment at American colleges is hiring students to act as campus emissaries of the Jewish state.

Jewish student leaders from Columbia University, New York University, and Queens College will receive up to $1,000 a year from the advocacy group StandWithUs to bring speakers and films to campus that portray Israel in a positive light.

"There's an atmosphere that everything has to be intellectually valid," a sophomore history major at Columbia University, Ariel Pollock, said of her campus. "It's a great framework, but for some reason Israel has fallen outside of that paradigm."

Ms. Pollock, 20, is one of 38 "Emerson Fellows" selected for the new initiative, funded by California-based philanthropists Rita and Steven Emerson.

She said she plans to use her stipend to bring to campus a film about Moroccan and Indian immigrants to Israel, "Turn Left at the End of the World," and to organize academic debates between Columbia faculty in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and pro-Israel professors she plans to invite.

A sophomore at NYU, David Avraham, who is on the board of the Middle East Dialogue Group, and a junior at Queens College, Alisa Bodner, have also been chosen as fellows from a pool of more than 100 applicants.

Mr. Avraham plans to organize social gatherings for Muslim and Jewish students. "There's a lot of effort at NYU to build bridges between the Jewish and Muslim communities," Mr. Avraham, 20, said. "The right-wing Jewish side, and the right-wing Muslim side, neither of those groups have their information correct."

In hiring its Emerson Fellows, StandWithUs gave special weight to finding student advocates at "problem campuses," where discourse on the Middle East is skewed by anti-Israel rhetoric, officials said.

The North American campus director of StandWithUs, Daniel Klein, identified Columbia, MIT, and the University of Michigan as hot spots of anti-Israel sentiment. "The story of democracy in Israel, of a vibrant diverse country, is not being told on campuses," Mr. Klein said. StandWithUs is an international education organization founded in 2001.