Holocaust center director leaves after heckling, lack of support from university

• Published date: 17 April 2024
• Author: ANDREW LAPIN/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

After 20 years, she was leaving her job at Clark on bad terms. A member of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Ph.D. program had heckled her at a public event while she prepared to introduce an Israeli military reservist. The university, in her view, had failed to support her, she wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay recounting the episode

Now, Rein was about to assume a new role overseeing a center for "civic dialogue" at Assumption University. The Catholic gala was her first public outing in that job.

Clark is a private nonsectarian school with a reputation for producing Holocaust scholarship; Assumption, where Rein had previously directed the fundraising program, is Roman Catholic. But though Rein is very involved in her Worcester, Massachusetts Jewish community, she felt a sense of belonging at the Catholic gala event. The gala that night honored a Jewish person, and a cardinal joined via video chat to discuss tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world.

"I felt, this is just a message from God telling me I've made the right decision," Rein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week.

Rein's career change reflects two trends: the inhospitality some Jewish employees, students and faculty feel on secular campuses around Israel, and the efforts Christian colleges are putting in to woo Jews looking for a safe space from rising campus antisemitism - something that began prior to October 7 but has taken on new energy. Christian schools made up the lions' share of a coalition last year that signed an open letter declaring "We stand with Israel against Hamas" and "the fight against Hamas is a fight against evil." Some have also offered expedited transfers for Jewish students, even at schools like Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, which has almost no Jewish life to speak of.

A haven for civic dialogue

Assumption is a particularly distinctive case. Greg Weiner, the school's president since 2022, is Jewish and believes he is the first-ever Jewish head of a Catholic college in the United States. Weiner has also used the Wall Street Journal to promote Assumption - and Catholic institutions more broadly - as a "haven" for Jews since October 7. He claims that Christian schools, despite a history of largely inhospitable or proselytizing attitudes toward Jews, today give all students a better foundation for understanding how to civilly disagree than the Ivy League does.

"I find that the intellectual traditions of Judaism and Catholicism, and I...