Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series. Part two is available here.
When Dr. Ira Kirschner sought to formally strengthen ties between Jewish faculty and staff at the University of Kansas and the school’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB), he wondered if he’d face indifference, if not outright refusal.
After all, Kirschner said, many DEIB organizations and progressive spaces across the U.S. are openly anti-Zionist. Given the strong views on Israel in the DEIB field, the educator felt his idea to create a Jewish Faculty and Staff Council (JFSC) at KU in 2022 — both to support the campus Jewish community and promote allyship with other marginalized groups — might be a tough sell to KU’s DEIB program.
“I didn’t expect it to be a walk in the park,” said Kirschner, who at the time was KU’s assistant director for student engagement in the International Support Services office. “I thought I would have to explain to people that Judaism is not just a religion, it’s an ethno-religion that contains different meanings and associations to different Jewish communities. And I just thought people wouldn’t understand.”
“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Kirschner said.
Instead of pushback from the DEIB office, Kirschner received a warm welcome from staffers “excited to recognize that there’s another marginalized group on campus that wants to come together as a community, represent themselves to others and also support others.”
“They helped me every step of the way,” added Kirschner, a native of Israel who served as a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces and holds a doctoral degree from KU in higher education administration.
Following the establishment of JFSC, the council worked with KU’s DEIB office to hire one of America’s leading educators on fighting antisemitism, Jonah Boyarin, to conduct campus training sessions.
More DEIB programming soon followed as part of a broader effort by the office to promote Jewish inclusion and do so with the same level of commitment it’s shown to supporting other marginalized groups, according to multiple KU faculty members, students and campus Jewish organization leaders interviewed for this story.
Attention shown by the office to KU’s Jewish community contrasts starkly with some higher-education DEI programs, which have been accused of stoking antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.
According to Jewish students, faculty and other campus community members, DEIB successes at KU include ensuring university-supplied kosher meals were made available to students every day starting in the fall of 2023 in partnership with KU Chabad, with an eye toward the opening of a new kosher kitchen on campus.
DEIB staff also work to ensure Jewish students and others can miss class on religious holidays, get take-home assignments when under serious emotional stress and have access to any campus resources they need in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel, where Hamas-led terrorists massacred some 1,200 people.
The office has also partnered with KU’s Jewish Studies Program on multiple events that foster inclusiveness during the 2023-2024 academic year, including the “Jews in the Americas” conference held in April, said Dr. Rami Zeedan, acting director of KU’s Jewish Studies Program.
Boyarin said he considers KU an institution that “integrates fighting antisemitism and supporting Jewish communities into their larger DEIB work.”
“There’s a lot going right there,” said Boyarin, who authored New York City’s official antisemitism training for city employees, youth and the general public.
Faculty and students who attend Boyarin’s antisemitism training sessions — funded by campus DEIB — learn how “antisemitism, first and foremost, hurts Jews, and it also hurts our entire society.”
“We’re in a time of crisis in our society, a very polarized and scary time,” Boyarin said. “And that’s a time when the story of antisemitism can find more fertile ground, because antisemitism likes to blame Jews for society’s problems.”
Several members of KU’s Jewish community said DEIB efforts have helped them feel safer amid an unprecedented surge in antisemitic acts in the U.S. since Oct. 7.
Among those who sang the praises of campus DEIB’s work was Rabbi Zalman Tiechtel, who opened the KU Chabad in 2006 with his wife Nechama.
Tiechtel said he had never experienced antisemitism at KU before Oct. 7, when the atmosphere on campus changed for Jews.
“There’s been a heightened sense of animosity, negativity — I would even use the word hatred — from voices on campus advocating for Hamas, a terrorist entity that has declared in their charter that they have a mission to annihilate the Jewish people,” Tiechtel said. “Jewish students and I have been targeted with shouts that are clearly hate speech.”
“This does not represent the student body,” Tiechtel added. “This is not who we are as a community.”
Amid the antisemitic acts — and the erecting of a campus encampment by KU’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter in May — the DEIB office helped Jewish community members feel welcomed in campus spaces, Tiechtel said.
He credits the office and its leader, Vice Provost for DEIB Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley, with helping Jewish students feel they’re on equal footing with any other group.
“She came for Shabbat dinner and she met with the students, and students reach out to her directly,” Tiechtel said. “I think [DEIB] plays a crucial role in setting the tone that there’s no room for hate on our campus. And that every student needs to feel there’s someone there, ready to listen.”
Hodges Persley, a professor of American Studies as well as African and African American Studies, was named vice provost for DEIB in Oct. 2022 after serving in an interim role.
“Across the spectrum of religious and cultural practice and diversity, it’s really important that anyone who is teaching, attending, working or sending their student to campus feel that they can holistically present themselves at the institution with confidence, not shame or fear of being accepted,” Hodges Persley said. “We just want to make sure that people feel not just safe, but feel that they can thrive and have a good experience.”
KU Hillel Executive Director Ethan Helfand, who began his role in June, said he was “floored” to find Hodges Persley among the three high-level KU administrators who met with him his first week on the job.
“If I was to ask other Hillel directors at similar public institutions around the country if they had a meeting with that level of DEIB administrator in their first week, they probably would have said, ‘No, I’ve been trying to get those meetings for months,’” Helfand said. “I had it my first week on the job. That is the level of commitment to Jewish students on our campus. That is remarkable.”
Jordan Kadosh, who leads the Anti-Defamation League’s initiatives to fight hate in Missouri, Eastern Kansas and Southern Illinois, said the antisemitism watchdog is “encouraged by these developments at KU, because a seat at the table for Jewish employees and students is the first step to being a truly welcoming community.”
“We hope others will follow this example,” Kadosh said of KU’s DEIB efforts promoting Jewish inclusion.
