Student took Israel advocacy to Binghamton U

Jewish organizations and leaders have been racking their brains trying to address the issue of skyrocketing anti-Semitism on college campuses. But at least one prominent pro-Israel activist is reassured by the presence of a student more than five decades his junior.

“Justin Hayet lets me sleep at night,” says Alan Dershowitz, the 76-year-old former Harvard Law School professor, referring to Justin Hayet, a 21-year-old student at Binghamton University.

The laundry list of recent anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses isn’t pretty. Swastikas were painted on the building of a Jewish fraternity house at University of California, Davis. Jewish candidates for student government at University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford Univer-sity have been grilled about their religion. A Jewish professor at Connecticut College has been persecuted over false accusations that he called for the annihilation of the Palestinians.

Enter Hayet, who says that while many of his peers “run away and try to ignore” anti-Semitism, he is “running toward it.”

“I want to fix it,” Hayet said.

On May 3, Hayet will receive the David Bar-Illan Award for Outstanding Campus Activism award at media watchdog  CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) annual gala dinner.

“Justin Hayet—this is a guy who can really become a major leader in the pro-Israel community,” Dershowitz said.

All this, and Hayet was not even raised in a particularly Zionist family, says his mother, Cheryl Hayet. But Cheryl says she “always encouraged my son to follow his dreams.” 

In 2008, Hayet decided he wanted to visit Israel. He enrolled in a leadership development opportunity through the local Jewish Community Center. In 2009, he traveled to Israel with that group.

“When he got back, the next words were, ‘How do I get back’?” Cheryl Hayet recalls. 

Justin Hayet found more than one way, traveling to Israel eight times between 2009 and today. His visits included one to Baltimore’s sister city, Ashkelon, as a Diller Teen Fellow. It was that trip that charted his course.