February 2, 2010
What drives political change?
It’s no surprise that our elected officials (and those who aspire to be elected officials) strain to understand that question, in no small measure because their own political survival depends upon it. So, too, do non-elected leaders around the world. In Six Days of War, then-historian, now-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren chronicles in great detail how the Arab leaders in the conflict states bordering on Israel scrambled in the Spring of 1967 to position themselves at the front of public sentiment that they had themselves inadvertently fostered, both in their own populations and in the populations of neighboring countries. Sometimes, Oren’s history informs us, leaders miscalculate and misjudge those whom they mean to lead, typically to disastrous ends for those same leaders.
More often, the people are far ahead of their leadership, and it takes that public sentiment and leadership to create political change. Such was the case in the movement to free Soviet Jewry. As then-refusenik Anatoly, now-Chairman of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky has said regarding that movement, “It was the iron will and efforts of an army of students and housewives who fought relentlessly, changed the world, and made a difference.”
The undeniable truth of leadership captured in those words were reflected in, and quoted by Hillel President Wayne Firestone during, the inaugural Web conference of the Student Coalition Against a Nuclear Iran, or SCANI, which took place on Thursday, January 28 and is described in greater detail in the accompanying columns. That effort, created in partnership between
Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and the
ICC’s Iran task force, chaired by
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recognized that students, already well ahead of the leadership of our community, were ready and eager to join the broader community’s efforts to block Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. All the community needed to do was ask. In the two weeks following the announcement of the convening of SCANI, nearly 100 students on more than 50 campuses nationwide volunteered to participate and lead this new movement. Those leadership students are but a fraction of the thousands of students on campuses nationwide already mobilizing on this issue.
I’m proud of the efforts that the ICC and Hillel took to convene the
SCANI initiative, and I’m doubly proud of the achievement that the ICC’s limited staff obtained in such a limited time. But I’m fully aware of the political truth reflected above.
We didn’t create this movement. Students did. They are, and have been, well ahead of us all along. All we did was recognize their desire to create a positive change in the world. And our role as putative leaders and aides to that movement is to listen, to encourage, and to support that change as it comes to reality. As the ICC’s work continues in the coming weeks and months, I will be sure to bear that important lesson in mind.
Stephen Kuperberg
Executive Director