Greenstone's essay highlighted the fact that discrimination starts very early. Children learn to discriminate against other people implicitly from their parents, peers, and the media. The fact that a sixth grade girl had such strong feelings towards jews shows that she learned that from someone else, she likely did not have any life experience that caused her to feel that way. The rest of Greenstone's essay just discussed her activist activities, which I thought was wonderful but I didn't personally get a lot out of reading about it. I think that her own experience is unique but by seeing an example of someone who is all about activism, it shows the type of path one can take to pursue those activities.
Pruce's essay was a great example of someone who was passionately devoted to a cause on a college campus and actually had an impact. I was shocked to read about the discrimination against Jews that was present at Rutgers. Its hard to image what it would be like to be a Jewish student at Rutgers during that time. I can't imagine that taking place at Colgate. Pruce showed that she could use her experience from one activist project and apply it to another and stay committed to a cause in order to see the results she wanted. If she hadn't done that, there is no way she would have ended up living in Israel.
In response to your comments on Pruce--I am a Jewish student and unfortunately, I can imagine this happening at Colgate. I am currently in a Jewish History course and we recently discussed the situation of Jewish survivors in displaced persons camps following the Holocaust. As Pruce explains, many of them say Zionism and Israel as light at the end of the unimaginably horrifying tunnel. One student in my class insisted on trying to instigate a discussion on how Israel has no right to exist. While many students expressed their rage at his trying to force this conversation in class, I was the only student who spoke against this sentiment in the classroom. The professor, an Israeli, simply said it was a debate we were not having in that class. Although it is not quite on the same level as being splashed across the school newspaper, comments in class going unchallenged is not such a far step. I was quite shaken and enraged by the experience - this is the same dangerous ideology that energized the suicide bomber that killed my great-aunt in Israel at Hebrew University- but it wasn't half a world away, it was in a class at Colgate University, and a Jewish History class at that. And the students in the class other than myself, who happen mostly to be Jewish, did not speak in defense of Israel.
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