Windmueller Quoted in eJP Article

Steven Windmueller was recently quoted in an article written for eJewish Philanthropy titled After mainstream groups express concern over Gaza aid crisis, experts say Jewish world widening tent of acceptable views on Israel.

“It needed to happen,” Steven Windmueller, emeritus professor of Jewish communal service at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Probably because the situation itself has evolved to a point where the donor, the student, the rabbi, you name it… where everyone is struggling to find a way forward in terms of how to understand what is happening, how to question and ask questions about the crisis and the response.”

These changes, where organizations feel the need to widen the conversations around Israel and Zionism are happening “from the bottom-up,” Windmueller said. “So many folks are asking questions, and they have been to so few places where people were prepared to offer answers, or at least give space for the right to ask such questions.”

According to Windmueller, the people pushing for these shifts are not “necessarily coming at this from a point of view of being an anti-Zionist or a non-Zionist, but rather from the point of view of their love of and engagement with Israel and their difficulty and even frustration at times with understanding and managing the events that are unfolding.”

He added: “That’s a very different kind of conversation than one having to do with folks who have walked away from the Israel discourse. This is where the mainstream of the Jewish community is having, finally, that kind of essential conversation.”

Read the full article here.