There is a particular kind of anguish that feels both ancient and immediate—like an old wound torn open anew. That was the sensation I experienced while reading the recent Tufts Daily op-ed by Rumeysa Ozturk and three fellow students. Ozturk, a Turkish national studying in the United States on a student visa, co-authored an article entitled “Zionism is Not Welcome at Tufts,” which purports to be a bold assertion of justice. In truth, it is a chilling expression of intolerance, laced with historical amnesia, and animated by a rhetorical framework that seeks to erase not only an ideology but an entire people’s narrative of survival and return. The collective piece would be lost in the welter of similar hate pieces were it not for Rumeysa having been stopped on the street near her home in Somerville, MA last Wednesday evening and taken into custody by ICE agents in anticipation of her likely deportation from the U.S.
I despise her views—categorically and without equivocation. I reject the premise of her article, the worldview it promotes, and the consequences it portends for Jewish students and faculty who refuse to divorce their Zionism from their Jewishness. And yet, despite the moral repulsion I feel when encountering her words, I am compelled to defend her right to express them. Not because they are worthy, but because the true test of a society’s commitment to free expression lies not in how it protects popular speech, but in how it tolerates even the speech it finds odious.
This is not a position I take lightly. Nor is it rooted in naïveté. I am painfully aware of the context in which Ozturk’s article appears. Less than eighteen months ago, on October 7, 2023, the State of Israel experienced the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Civilians were butchered in their homes, children abducted, women raped, and entire communities devastated in the name of “resistance.” And in the days that followed, as the Jewish world reeled in grief, too many on college campuses responded not with empathy, but with euphemism—refusing to name terror as terror, and often suggesting that the victims somehow deserved their fate.
Ozturk’s essay, consciously or not, emerges from a moral fog. She does not merely critique Israeli policy; she deems Zionism—the foundational movement for Jewish self-determination—a form of racial violence that must be “cleansed” from campus. This is not discourse. It is delegitimization. It does not invite debate; it seeks to foreclose it. And it leaves no room for Jewish identity in its full complexity.
To call Zionism inherently racist is not a policy critique—it is an ontological assault on the legitimacy of Jewish national existence. And it is particularly galling when it comes from individuals who themselves benefit from the protection of liberal democracies, while openly supporting the destruction of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Yet my commitment to the values of liberal democracy—values shaped and reinforced by the Jewish tradition—requires me to resist the impulse to silence. My tradition does not shrink from disagreement; it sanctifies it. The Talmud is, at its core, a sustained and sacred argument. Its pages preserve minority opinions, honor dissenting voices, and insist that even rejected views may contain fragments of divine truth. As the sages declare in Eruvin 13b, “Both these and those are the words of the living God.”
This ethos is not relativism—it is reverence for the dialectical process through which wisdom emerges. Not all views are equal, but even deeply mistaken ideas must be brought to light so that they may be challenged, exposed, and dismantled through principled rebuttal. As Pirkei Avot teaches (a seminal Jewish moral text) “Every dispute that is for the sake of Heaven will endure.” The disputes that endure are not those waged in bad faith, but those motivated by the pursuit of truth, however imperfect.
Ozturk’s essay is not a dispute for the sake of Heaven. It is, at best, a polemic grounded in shallow ideology and, at worst, an incitement cloaked in the language of liberation. But I will not meet her attempt at erasure with erasure of my own. I will meet it with argument. With rigor. With moral clarity.
I am not blind to the threat this rhetoric poses. On campuses across the country, Jewish students are told—explicitly or implicitly—that their presence is conditional. That their belonging depends on ideological conformity. That their support for a Jewish homeland renders them complicit in atrocity and therefore unworthy of full participation in campus life. This is not inclusion. This is coercion. And it is as antithetical to the values of the academy as it is to Judaism.
To those unsure of where they stand, I implore you to watch the documentary October 8th (https://www.october8film.com/. It does not seek to score political points or justify specific policies. It documents what happened in the aftermath of Hamas’ barbarism, centering the voices of survivors, the stories of the murdered, and the grief of families who saw their loved ones slaughtered not for what they believed, but for who they were. To witness these stories is to remember that Zionism is not merely an ideology—it is, for many Jews, the thin line between life and death.
To Jewish students: You are not alone. You are not crazy. You are not unwelcome on your campuses, no matter how many voices suggest otherwise. You inherit a tradition of resilience, intellectual courage, and moral clarity. You do not need to apologize for your love of Israel or sever your Jewishness to gain acceptance. Stand tall. Speak with dignity. Remember that disagreement is not danger, and that argument—when done well—is a form of love.
To my colleagues in academia, clergy, and public life: the time for ambivalence is over. It is no longer sufficient to privately lament antisemitism while publicly hedging for fear of controversy. We must confront harmful speech not with censorship, but with truth spoken boldly. Disagreement is not violence—and disagreement without moral grounding is mere noise.
I despise what Rumeysa Ozturk believes. I want her ideology exposed, countered, and discredited. But I will not demand her silence. Because I believe in better words. Stronger arguments. Truer stories.
Let us use them—with courage, compassion, and without apology.
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