By Grace Gilson
The University of Maryland Student Government Association passed a boycott, divestment and sanctions resolution on Yom Kippur, drawing widespread condemnation from campus Jewish leaders who said its scheduling was “exclusionary.”
The resolution, which passed 29 to 1 on Wednesday night, Oct. 1, calls on the university and its charitable foundation to implement BDS policies against companies and academic policies that it says “support or profit from Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.”
The resolution is symbolic and campus officials said it will not influence university investments.
The vote was criticized by Rabbi Ari Israel, executive director of UMD’s Hillel chapter, who said it excluded Jewish students from the process by being held on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
“Holding a vote that seeks to demonize the Jewish homeland on a day when Jewish students will not be able to participate is exclusionary, biased and flat-out wrong,” wrote Rabbi Israel in an Instagram post by Campus for All, a Hillel page seeking to combat campus antisemitism.
The vote was originally scheduled to be held on Rosh Hashanah but was later moved to Yom Kippur, according to the university’s student newspaper The Diamondback.
In response, 18 Jewish student organizations, including the campus Hillel, announced their intention to boycott all future SGA meetings on the issue.
Abel Amene, a Maryland senior, delivered comments defending the scheduling during the meeting, according to The Diamondback.
“I know some Zionists and Jewish exceptionalists have claimed that today is not the day to bring this resolution to a vote,” Amene said. “But I ask you this simple question — if the genocide is occurring on a Jewish holiday … should we wait until tomorrow or the next day to do the little work we can do in our power to stop that genocide?”
BDS resolutions failed at the university in 2017, 2019 (which was scheduled for a vote on Passover) and 2024. The latest vote’s passage comes after Maryland students voted in favor of divestment in a campus-wide referendum in April.
It also comes on the eve of the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that started the Gaza war and ushered in the current wave of campus protests against Israel.
Last year, a federal judge ordered UMD to allow a pro-Palestinian student group to hold a campus rally on the one-year anniversary of the attack after the school previously revoked the group’s permit.
College Park has the fourth-largest relative Jewish student population in the United States, with nearly 6,000 of its 30,000 undergraduates identifying as Jewish, according to Hillel International.
Einav Tsach, a UMD student and co-chair of Hillel International’s student cabinet, also condemned the vote.
“I am deeply disappointed that SGA decided to hold a BDS vote on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people,” Tsach wrote in the Campus for All Instagram post. “This strategy underscores the true intention of the BDS campaign: to divide our campus community and exclude Jewish students from a vote that is biased and wrong.”
Waves of BDS resolutions have roiled college campuses before and during the course of the Israel-Hamas war but have not always passed. Last month, the University of Connecticut student government voted against an attempt to hold a referendum on BDS at the school.
In a statement to The Diamondback last week, the university emphasized that the SGA’s resolution would have no impact on the school’s policy or practice.
University President Darryll J. Pines also told the paper that while the college supports students’ right to discuss the issue, the university wanted to ensure the process is “open and fair and has dialogue from all parties of our broad student body.”
Grace Gilson wrote this article for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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