A group of college students shuffled into a hotel conference room in Jerusalem on a recent Monday evening, settling in to hear a lecture about modern Israeli history after a long day visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and the Mount Herzl military cemetery.

Three days into what was for most students their first visit to Israel, they had already taken in a lot.

“A lot of us were surprised to learn how deeply ingrained IDF service is within Israeli society,” said Noah Schranz, a Jewish student leader on the tour. “After all the accusations we’ve heard that Israeli soldiers are ‘baby killers,’ our group spoke with normal 20-year-old kids who look just like us, and many of them have friends who were killed by Hamas.”

There would be many more eye-opening lessons for the 15 non-Jewish student leaders from the University of California, Los Angeles, who came on the 10-day visit sponsored by the Maccabee Task Force. The trip was designed to help the school’s estimated 3,000 Jews build allies on a campus that has been one of America’s most high-profile flashpoints for protests following the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023.

“I didn’t know much about the conflict before I came,” said Daniel Diercks, a UCLA senior majoring in psychology, who said he now plans to organize outreach events with Jewish students next year at the campus ministry he works with. “Now, I feel really invested in the issues.”

In addition to the anti-Israel rallies, encampments, and the recent student council condemnation of a talk by former Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov, many of UCLA’s 31,000 undergraduates feel a constant and overwhelming pressure to pick a side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, according to Dan Gold, executive director of UCLA’s Hillel.

“The biggest thing that changed on campus after October 7, beyond how ugly, intimidating and violent things got, was the fact that, almost overnight, Jewish students didn’t know who had their backs anymore,” said Gold, who estimated that about 10% of the student body is Jewish.

“The anti‑Zionist movement is basically telling people, ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ That’s a hard thing for 18- and 19‑year‑olds to deal with,” he said.

MTF is a nonprofit founded in 2015 by the late billionaire philanthropist Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, to build alliances with non-Jewish students on campuses steeped in anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment. Alongside partnerships with campus partners such as Hillel and Chabad, the organization is best known for bringing non‑Jewish student leaders on trips of 8-10 days to learn about the complexity of the conflict from both sides.

“We know that trips to Israel are a powerful tool to........

© The Times of Israel