When Jews in Berkeley vote to cut support for Israel

If you haven’t read Bradley Burston’s piece on Haaretz on the recent events at Berkeley, you definitely should.

A snippet:

In a place like Berkeley, it takes guts for anyone, whatever their politics, to admit that they care about Israel. If their politics are progressive, if, like the J Street U people, they explicitly oppose both the occupation and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, one of the voters in the Jewish Student Union decision may take the trouble to denounce J Street in the Northern California Jewish newspaper as “anti-Israel” and, perhaps most damning, not “part of the mainstream Jewish community.”

What remains unclear is why, when Jews in Berkeley boycott fellow supporters of Israel, they believe that they are doing Israel, or the Jewish people, any good.

Does the Berkeley vote truly reflect the kind of community that Jewish students at the University of California want? An intellectual ghetto, walled off from debate, bricked up against nuance, a trompe l’oeil of democracy, of openness, of communication?