Coalition of orthodox rabbis blast liberal Jewish leaders for ‘choosing progressivism over Judaism’

The Orthodox rabbinic group condemned a statement by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), which criticized the funding cuts and claimed the policy sought to punish “free academic inquiry.”

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing 2,500 Orthodox rabbis, strongly condemned Jewish leaders from three liberal Jewish denominations for signing a statement that criticized Trump’s decision to withhold funding from universities that fail to address antisemitism on campus adequately.

The statement, issued by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), criticized the funding cuts and claimed that the policy sought to punish “free academic inquiry.”

The JCPA is choosing “progressivism over Judaism” by siding with the universities that have done little to protect Jewish students,” according to the Orthodox rabbinic group.

The fact that the JCPA “would issue such a statement is sadly unsurprising, but, shockingly, it was joined by the rabbinic arms of all three deviationist movements in American Judaism: Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association,” the CJV continued.

Furthermore, “With this move, America’s progressive Jewish denominations placed their ideological commitment to left-wing politics above the safety and dignity of Jewish students. Due to the environment tolerated and even encouraged at many of America’s leading universities, Jewish students are choosing to go elsewhere.”

The CJV mentioned Columbia University, where the anti-Israel climate has become so severe that Rabbi Elie Buechler, the director of the Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative at Columbia, urged Jewish students to return home for their own safety.

While progressive rabbis are defending the universities’ “free speech,” the CJV said, “Jews are being actively excluded from research. It is hard to imagine a more anti-Jewish position.”

“Similarly, the [Trump] administration is deporting foreign nationals who have misused their visas to incite hatred against Jews and support for Hamas, a designated foreign terror organization, here in the United States,” the statement noted, mentioning the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a spokesman for Columbia’s Apartheid Divest, “the organization that rendered Columbia’s environment so toxic to Jews.”