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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the campus-divisiveness frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Disinformation-laundering frame
Graduating students are recycling a debunked smear that ripped a Herzog sentence fragment from context to manufacture a 'genocide incitement' charge, and Jewish scholars-in-training of all people should have been able to spot the distortion.
Campus-divisiveness frame
Commencement should be a moment of shared celebration, and inviting a wartime Israeli head of state — however moderate his politics — forces graduates into a political conflict many feel morally unable to sit through on their own graduation day.
Misread-the-messenger frame
Herzog is a left-of-center former Labor leader holding a deliberately nonpartisan ceremonial post built around unity and compromise, so casting him as a hardline warmonger reveals how unmoored the criticism has become from the actual figure being protested.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot B
The graduation-isn't-a-battlefield case
A graduating JTS student would argue —
We've spent years debating Israel and Gaza in seminars, in shul, at Shabbat tables, and we'll keep debating them for the rest of our rabbinic and scholarly lives. Commencement is the one day that isn't built for that. Putting a sitting Israeli head of state on the stage during an active war turns a ceremony meant to mark our ordination and our families' pride into a political event we have to either endorse or boycott. There are countless venues at JTS to engage difficult ideas with nuance; the commencement dais, with no room for response and our diplomas in the balance, isn't one of them. Asking for a unifying speaker on graduation day isn't censorship — it's asking the institution to read the room.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.