For a Jewish boy from Rhode Island, college life provides thought-provoking challenges

I am a high school senior at Moses Brown School. This school is the embodiment of what I call the “Rhode Island Effect”: Every day I am welcomed by the same people and I feel comfortable knowing that I am never far from a friendly and familiar face. 

The same thing happens when I go nearly anywhere in Rhode Island, whether it be to the movies or to eat on Thayer Street in Providence.

I’ve been at Moses Brown for the past 10 years and now the time has come to go to college. I could not possibly be going to a more different environment. At Moses Brown, there are about 100 students in my grade and only about 15 people in each class. I will be going to the University of Michigan in the fall, along with about 6,500 other freshmen, in an undergraduate student body of about 35,000. 

Besides all the new faces, I will also be encountering many more Jewish people than I ever have at my current school. Despite a strong Jewish community in Providence, and Rhode Island as a whole, I have been one of three Jewish students in my grade at Moses Brown. 

The few people I already know at Michigan are all Jewish and involved in Greek life. Only about 17 percent of Michigan students participate in Greek life, but for the people I already know there, it is the main hub of their social life. When I visited them, I was faced with a very unfamiliar question: “Will you want to be in a Jewish frat or a frat with mostly Jewish people?” 

I already started feeling the sense of community between Jewish students at Michigan. 

I had applied to about 15 schools and had received many acceptances and rejections without hearing from my top choice, Michigan. It was my top choice because of the mix of academic prestige and strong sense of school spirit. 

Of course, the day I finally heard was April Fools’ Day – but, thankfully, it was not a joke. My first instinct after receiving my acceptance was to read up and learn everything I could about the school. I was bombarded with news of the football program and its rapid success in Coach Jim Harbaugh’s first season. 

Other articles that I read gave me a very different feel for the school as a whole. 

Freedom of expression is a prized right at most schools, and Michigan is no different. Most of the time, this results in protests or movements to fix injustices on college campuses around the country and world.  But there have been some cases of students on college campuses, including Michigan, expressing anti-Semitism or strong feelings against the state of Israel. There also seems to be a lot of support for the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement against Israel, as punishment for alleged mistreatment of Palestinians. 

It is good to know that while Jewish students face this opposition, they also have the right to stand united, build community and express their own opinions on college campuses.

Coming from a small, private, Quaker school, I have very rarely experienced genuine opposition to my religious practices or my beliefs. I have had to answer basic questions about Judaism and accept some light-hearted jokes, but this is something else entirely. For the first time in my college fact-gathering process, I had found negative, anti-Jewish sentiment. 

Mostly, I had encountered the opposite in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan: The famous bakery and deli Zingerman’s is run by two Jewish alums, Jewish bakeries and delis line the streets, and the large and beautiful Hillel and Chabad both have enormous student involvement. 

I will be attending a large school where I will be able to find the very large and tight-knit Jewish community that I have already heard a lot about, but I will need to think about my reaction to opposition. 

It’s ignorant to assume that you will be completely accepted at any place you go. I will need to show up on campus and find out who my friends are and whom to associate with - a common and daunting goal for any incoming freshman.

GORDON EIDES is a senior at Moses Brown School. He is completing a senior project at The Voice.