There has been “a 1000 percent increase in the identification of Jewish (college) faculty members with Jewish causes during the past 20 years, according to Prof. David Sidorsky of Columbia University. However, he noted, while they are now “overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” Jewish faculty members are often reluctant to assume the leadership of pro-Israeli groups on campus. Dr. Allen Pollack, of Yeshiva University, disagreed and asserted that “public support for and identification with Jewish causes among this group is strong and growing.”
The two were speakers at a panel discussion during the day-long annual meeting this week of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations (COJO) where Dr. Joachim Prinz, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, was elected as chairman succeeding Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the American Section of the World Zionist Organization.
Rabbi Norman Frimer, national director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, during his address, expressed concern about the rising rate of intermarriage among Jewish college students, which he said now approached 40 percent. But he said this was “not the result of Jews seeking to leave the ‘narrow confines of the Jewish community for the great world outside’ but rather the result of living in an open society with the tradition of individual decision-making responsibility….”
Chaim Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, told the COJO meeting that Yugoslavia has become “one of the most violently anti-Semitic states in the United Nations, and had placed itself in the vanguard of those countries that are attacking Israel and the Jewish people in the world forum.” He also warned of the “sinister design” of Syria, who he accused of conducting a “policy of expansion and annexation which seeks to take over complete control of the Palestine Liberation Organization and to rule Lebanon through pro-consuls.”
Mrs. Jacobson and David Blumberg, president of B’nai B’rith international, were elected cochairmen of COJO. Yehuda Hellman, secretary-general of COJO. reported that the next meeting of the organization would take place in Israel in early July.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
