I am a child of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

List College, class of 1997. The Davidson School, 2002. The Rabbinical School, 2002. My father walked those halls. My sister did too. My family’s story, like that of so many American Jews, is braided into the sacred mission of JTS since its founding in 1886. My family dried pages of books, one by one, from water damage after a fire ravaged the JTS library stacks in 1966. So for me to speak of JTS is not to speak of an abstraction. It is to speak of a living covenant between generations of Jews who believed that Torah, peoplehood, and the Land of Israel are inseparable threads of an enduring, unbreakable fabric.

So let us speak plainly.

The decision by JTS to honor President Isaac Herzog as a commencement speaker is not a betrayal of Jewish values. It is an affirmation of them.

The recent controversy, amplified beyond all proportion, tells us far more about the current moment than it does about JTS. Six graduating seniors signed a letter opposing Herzog. Six. Twenty-four, four times as many, signed in support. Four JTS rabbinical students, none of them even graduating this year, added their names to the protest letter. This is not a groundswell. It is not a generational rupture. It is a small but loud dissent that is being misrepresented as something larger, something normative.

And we must not pretend otherwise.

JTS has never been neutral about the Jewish story. Nor should it be. From its earliest days, shaped by figures like Rabbi Sabato Morais, himself heir to the trauma of Iberian exile, the........

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