We have seen the enemy, and it is us. Stanford graduate students Daniel Kaganovich and Jeremy England issue a scathing condemnation of the Stanford Hillel in The Stanford Review, accusing the group of not standing up to Israel’s attackers on campus.
The writers list various events Hillel has hosted that they say are anti-Israel, and then question Hillel’s commitment to Jewish activities. I am excerpting the article but it should really be read in its totality to get the full force of the writers’ argument.

Hillel’s events are characterized by a severe aversion to anything too overtly Jewish (unless smoking huka in a sukkah can pass for a commemoration of Sukkot). In the new Hillel building [pictured above], which must have cost millions of dollars, there are pictures of some people in Darfur and some children from Honduras, there is a wall-hanging that features a pig, a cross, and four patches (according to our count) referencing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and yet there is not a single Israeli flag in plain view, nor any other physical evidence that anything Jewish goes on there. More importantly, judging from Hillel’s approach to the organization of Jewish events, it does not appear to see anything of autonomous value in Judaism. What is one to conclude from a “Chalah-ween” Shabbat gathering featuring vampire slayers (cum crucifix) and witches, except that Shabbat is not something one should waste any time on unless it’s first hybridized with a pagan holiday? Why must a meal at the end of Yom Kippur be dovetailed with a Ramadan break fast other than to imply that the Day of Atonement is not interesting unless converted into an introduction to Muslim religious traditions? (A similar event entitled “Sukkat Salaam” was put on by Hillel at Harvard a year ago, at which Arab students sporting Arafatesque kefiyas were given a platform to combine Sukkot with Israel bashing). Why is there so much time for social action, and none at all for observing Shmini Atzeret and Simhat Torah (which were excluded from this year’s list of Stanford Hillel-commemorated holidays, presumably because they could not easily be combined with a dialogue session or Catholic saint’s day)? To be sure, those at Stanford Hillel who send students to help the needy in Honduras see this as an expression of Jewish values, and so it may be, but those Hillel organizers who define Judaism as a vaguely articulated affirmation of whichever liberal pieties are currently most in vogue do a tremendous disservice to all Jews when they imply that there is nothing more to their tradition than having the right politics.
So long as more Jewish things happen in Stanford’s gym than at its Hillel house, Hillel has no hope of motivating students to take a strong position in defense of Israel. An organization that gets its moral teachings from a mixture of fashionable liberal values and Arab propaganda rather than from actual Judaism cannot take a morally inspired position on such a “divisive” issue as the Arab war against Israel.