Last week, Rabbi Andrue Kahn from Brooklyn received a unique request from a group of Jewish students at New York University. They asked him to lead prayers at their sukkah, which they called a “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah,” to criticize Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Despite the controversial nature of the request, Rabbi Kahn agreed and led the students in prayer and meditation at Washington Square Park, as the student group had not obtained permission from NYU to build the sukkah.
However, the situation escalated when the sukkah was taken down prematurely due to alleged aggression from opposing groups like Betar US, a right-wing pro-Israel organization. This incident sparked a larger debate on campus about anti-Zionist activism during Jewish holidays, with similar Gaza solidarity sukkahs being constructed at universities across the country, often met with opposition and removal by university administrators.
The movement raised questions about the intersection of religious rituals and political activism, with some viewing it as a legitimate expression of Jewish anger towards Israel’s actions in Gaza. Rabbi Kahn, who has been critical of Israel in the past, supported the students’ right to practice Judaism in a way that aligns with their political beliefs, as they may not feel welcome in more traditional Jewish spaces like Hillel or Chabad.
Ultimately, the Gaza solidarity sukkah movement highlighted the complexities of Jewish identity and activism, with some seeing it as a genuine expression of dissent within the Jewish community, while others viewed it as a divisive and inappropriate use of religious symbols for political purposes. Drummers play inside a Gaza solidarity sukkah on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles, California, Oct. 22, 2024. Campus police would later break up the sukkah and arrest one person. (The Daily Bruin / Screenshot via YouTube)
Comparing the movement to the Freedom Seders of the civil rights era and afterward, Kahn said it fell in with a history of Jews merging political causes with their religious observance: “Although, yes, there were political messages on the sukkah itself, the intent of the students was a religious one.”
Elsewhere, the line between the sukkah movement and the encampments became blurred. At Columbia University, whose students originated the encampment movement, anti-Zionist Jews continued the language of their protester coalition by deeming their hut a “liberation sukkah.” At the University of Pennsylvania, students had founded their campus JVP chapter only days before hosting the sukkah. Some of the sukkot, like one at Northwestern University, were constructed on the same campus locations where the encampment movement had been held.
And the University of California, Los Angeles, played host to perhaps the most chaotic scene surrounding a Gaza solidarity sukkah. Joining up with a brief attempt to resurrect an encampment at the same spot, the sukkah shared space with a banner reading, “Resistance is justified from Warsaw to Palestine.” UCLA campus police soon broke up the display, arresting one protester for failing to obey a dispersal order as they broke up the sukkah, whose participants numbered around 40. A Betar group also showed up, threatening to “organize groups of Jews” to remove the display themselves until their progress was also halted by police.
Signs like the one at UCLA, that directly advocate for violence against Israelis, are why detractors say the Gaza solidarity sukkot shouldn’t be seen as authentic means of Jewish practice.
“Using these holidays as an excuse to justify the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust does a disservice to Jewish students,” Julia Jassey, founder of the activist group Jewish On Campus, told JTA. Jassey pointed to the UCLA sign in particular.
UCLA authorities said the sukkah had violated several “time, place and manner” restrictions around campus speech, including “assembling in an area not designated for public expression, using unauthorized structures, and they have used amplified sound.” The justification was notable at UCLA, which recently received a legal ruling ordering it to do a better job protecting Jewish students’ freedom of movement throughout the campus.
And UCLA wasn’t the only site of a Sukkot clash between Jews. A Hillel sukkah at Simmons University, a private school in Boston, was vandalized with messages reading “Gaza Liberation Sukkah” this week. The university president condemned the action as “the antisemitic vandalism of a Jewish religious symbol on our campus” in a statement and said it was being investigated as a potential hate crime.
The school’s Hillel chapter also called the vandalism antisemitic in a statement, adding that its sukkah had been “co-opted through vandalism to make political statements” and that the act “sends a clear message: Jewish students are not welcome to openly celebrate and practice our customs.”
On Instagram the Simmons JVP chapter pushed back, posting an image of the graffiti and declaring, “This is not antisemitism.” The chapter argued that the wording of the vandalism “is quite clearly meant to represent these Gaza Solidarity Sukkahs” on other campuses, and declared that labeling it antisemitic instead of anti-Zionist “directly harms and endangers Palestinian students and BIPOC and Muslim students who support Palestine.” The JVP post added, “Drop Hillel. Drop this bs.”
Such endorsement of a sukkah sabotage was cause for alarm in some corners of the Jewish world, and the national JVP movement generally steered away from endorsing such actions. Instead it pushed the idea that most Gaza solidarity sukkahs were intended as alternative modes of Jewish practice for anti-Zionists. (Individual JVP chapters are given a degree of independence from the national movement to declare their own positions.)
“This year, students could not separate their observance from the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in temporary shelters due to [the] Israeli military’s mass destruction of homes in Gaza,” JVP said in a news release last week about the solidarity sukkahs. Among the guests at these solidarity sukkahs were Jewish author Naomi Klein and Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Simone Zimmerman.
At some schools, students intended to stay in their sukkot for eight days, a Jewish tradition that is rarely practiced in full outside Orthodox communities. These students were prevented from doing so by their administrators in most cases. This was wrong, JVP maintained.
“The students explained that sleeping in Sukkahs is an essential part of this holiday and part of their religious rights, but administrators choose to disregard the students’ pleas,” the JVP statement said, calling the dismantling of the sukkahs “a desecration of a religious structure.”
Not every Gaza solidarity sukkah was built without trying to seek permission. At the University of Southern California, a student JVP chapter initially received permits to construct a sukkah at a religious center on campus, but the permits were later denied after the university learned of the group’s plans to decorate the sukkah with political messaging, including a Palestinian flag banner. The JVP chapter then built its “solidarity sukkah” elsewhere on campus. The university stated that the permit was denied because the JVP chapter was not an officially recognized student organization.
Similarly, at Brown University, permit requests from BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now to host a Gaza solidarity sukkah were initially approved until the students announced their intention to sleep in the structure for eight days. Brown University considered this act prohibited and attempted to resolve the situation with the students before initiating disciplinary proceedings. The students eventually took down the sukkah after the eight days of the holiday were over, but 17 of them are facing potential conduct violations.
These incidents are not isolated, as they occurred in the context of larger protests and actions related to divestment from Israel at Brown University. The university has also suspended its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for conduct violations related to the protest.
Some progressive Jewish observers criticized the universities for shutting down the sukkot, arguing that it is not the place of universities to determine what constitutes authentic Jewish religious practice. On the other hand, some Jewish analysts, like Haviv Rettig Gur, described anti-Zionist sukkahs as “unkosher” and criticized them for using Palestinian iconography in a cynical way.
The controversy surrounding the sukkahs highlights the need for greater diversity of Jewish expression within the community. Rabbi Lex Rofeberg visited Brown’s Gaza solidarity sukkah and emphasized the importance of allowing for different forms of Jewish practice and expression.
In conclusion, the sukkah incidents at USC and Brown University shed light on broader issues within the Jewish community regarding religious expression and political activism. It is essential to support diverse perspectives and allow for open dialogue within the community. Regenerate means to restore or renew something to a better or more vigorous state. It can refer to the process of regrowth or renewal in a biological context, such as the regeneration of cells or tissues in the body. It can also refer to revitalizing or reinvigorating something emotionally or mentally.
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