Five students represent Dickinson at the Our Time to Lead, the J-Street U national conference in Washington DC. The conference was a three-day event promoting advocacy, education, and leadership for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Sept. 28 through Sept. 30.

J Street U is the campus branch of J Street, a non-profit organization and lobby group that advocates for a peaceful two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. J Street U operates chapters on more than 50 campuses across the country, and students from more than 90 schools were in attendance at the national conference.

Jessica Klimoff ‘16 and Emily Katz ‘16 are currently seeking club recognition for a Dickinson chapter of J Street U. Katz and Klimoff attended the conference with three other Dickinson students: Shayna Solomon ‘16, Maretta Sonn ’16, Kayla Reisman ’14.

The conference featured panels and keynote speakers, including vice-president Joe Biden, to educate attendees about the conflict and provide training for advocacy and leadership.

“It was a lot of fun. I think my favorite panel that I went to was about racism, nationalism and sexism in Israel, and there was a lot of discussion about what role Judaism should play in Israeli politics,” said Klimoff. “It made me question a lot of things I took for granted, and it was a lot of different perspectives brought to life.”

The students who attended the conference, who are either leading or involved in the nascent J Street U chapter on campus, hope that they will be able to bring the discourse about the conflict back to campus.

“We don’t feel that there’s much of a conversation about Israel or the Israeli Palestinian conflict on campus, so we wanted to bring more of that to campus. For some of the people who are aware of it, I don’t feel that as much discussion about the Palestinian side of Israel’s existence as there could be,” said Klimoff. “[The conference] made me excited to see the J Street chapter here take off. Right now, we just want to get a discussion going and bring in multiple perspectives.”

The club is currently seeking recognition from Senate, and plans to apply for senate funding with the goal of bringing more events to campus to educate the community about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although advocacy is a driving component of J Street, Klimoff says that they want the focus of the Dickinson chapter to be educational.

“In the future, we’d like to have a professor panel to hear their views on the conflict, and in the far future we’d like to bring speakers to campus [and] have film screenings,” said Klimoff. “We see our main role as being informative and opening a discussion. J-Street is meant to be a movement and have a very strong advocacy component, but in our chapter we want to focus more on education and creating understanding.”