The seat at the table
TL;DR: The most misleading seat at the table is the one offered after the table has already been set. Jewish leaders can mistake access for influence, surrendering leverage while giving institutions legitimacy in return. The real question is not who gets invited, but what can still be changed once they arrive.
*
For much of Jewish institutional politics, getting a seat at the table has become almost synonymous with influence. The invitation arrives, representatives are received by senior officials, concerns are heard, perhaps another meeting is promised. There is relief in simply being inside the room rather than outside it. The chair reserved for the Jewish representative becomes visible proof that the institution recognizes someone it must listen to. Communal leadership can return and say, accurately, that access exists. For a small minority accustomed to decisions being made without it, that is not trivial. It is precisely why so much attention settles on the seat.
But the seat is usually the last thing placed in the room. Long before the Jewish representative sits down, decisions have been made about what the problem will be called, which facts belong in the file, whose conduct requires explanation and which outcomes appear reasonable. The briefing papers contain judgments made before the conversation begins; lawyers know which risks concern them; administrators know what they are prepared to defend; communications staff understand which reputational problem needs containing. This is how institutions work: prior judgments, routines and risk calculations shape the room without requiring conspiracy or hostility. Yet a strategy trained to measure success by whether Jews obtained the chair can fail to notice that most of the table was constructed without them. They may arrive negotiating inside somebody else’s definition of the problem while treating admission to that negotiation as evidence of power.
Institutional access matters enormously when the person occupying the seat can still change consequential decisions, and much less once those decisions have largely been made. The institution may also need something it cannot credibly provide for itself: acquiescence, an end to litigation or public pressure, continuation of a valued relationship, relief from reputational damage, or Jewish confirmation that conduct identified as antisemitic should no longer be understood that way. Once the invitation has been accepted, the seat itself tells us very little. What matters is what had already been decided, what could still be changed, and what the institution itself stood to gain from putting Jewish representatives in the room.
Where the starting position is set
The decisions taken by Dutch universities after October 7 to reconsider, suspend or end ties with Israeli institutions make this sequence visible because one can watch the table being set before the affected institutions are invited to sit at it. At Radboud University, an advisory committee had devised the framework, assessed Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University, and recommended suspending both relationships before the Executive Board spoke with either. Radboud later recorded that those conversations produced “no different weighting.” Erasmus University Rotterdam froze relations with three Israeli universities and announced in the same decision that it would contact two afterward. Tilburg kept Hebrew University in dialogue, but required it to address its relationship with the IDF, academic freedom and its distance from Israeli government policy, and made a public response part of that process. Hebrew University complied and issued such a statement, but Tilburg judged it insufficient and later restricted cooperation while making future structural relations conditional on active, explicit and credible public efforts. Across these cases, dialogue took place after the criteria by which the Israeli institutions would be judged had already been established. They were invited to answer within the framework, not to participate in setting it.
By the following spring, the consequence of that sequencing had become visible. A delegation of senior Israeli university representatives came to the Netherlands seeking discussions over academic relationships that had already been curtailed. Some Dutch universities received them, while others declined. For the universities that did engage, the meetings had institutional value even where they changed little: they could demonstrate that dialogue had taken place after the framework and much of the outcome had already been set. The asymmetry became clearer in the way the visit was subsequently described, with the Israeli academics presented as “lobbying” in the Netherlands. Institutions that had once dealt with one another as academic partners had been recast into different roles: one side as decision-maker willing to listen, the other as an interested party seeking to persuade it. Dialogue remained possible, but on terms that confirmed who was judging whom.
For Jewish actors confronting such decisions, the costs of resistance are immediate and visible. Litigation can fail, allies can disappear and publicity can isolate. The costs of accommodation are less obvious because they appear later. When an institution imposes a restriction, absorbs the resulting criticism and still preserves the relationships it values, it learns something important: what that restriction actually costs. Other institutions can observe the same result. Dialogue is only one possible response to such a decision. Litigation, pressure on boards, political intervention, funders, legal exposure and public reputation are alternative arenas through which the decision may still be contested. A strategy centered on preserving access can discount those alternatives precisely because using them may endanger the relationship that dialogue is meant to preserve. Partial recovery may be entirely rational. The calculation is incomplete, however, unless it includes what the settlement teaches the institution, and everyone watching it, about the price of doing the same thing again.
At Maastricht University, protesters disrupted a 12 March 2025 lecture organized by Jewish students featuring Rawan Osman until the event was terminated. The regional Jewish congregation sought a wider inquiry, then declined to participate in the university’s reconstruction after challenging its independence. The university nevertheless completed the process, with its conclusions focused largely on venue, access, moderation and response. Before it was complete, the university introduced special caution for Israel/Gaza events with external speakers because it had failed to guarantee safety at the Osman lecture. The immediate casualty was another Jewish-student invitation, to Shabbos Kestenbaum, while other, anti-Israel programming continued. Kestenbaum eventually spoke elsewhere in the city, in a private home. The congregation did not stop the university from acting, but it did refuse to lend its participation to the account the university produced.
Three months later, that missing Jewish reassurance arrived from elsewhere. By then, the controversy at Maastricht extended well beyond one disrupted lecture, encompassing wider concerns about Jewish safety, the treatment of Jewish events and the university’s institutional choices. A senior Dutch Jewish leader who serves on the advisory board of a Europe-wide Jewish network visited with national and local communal figures, described the meeting with the university leadership as warm, and expressed “every confidence” in its commitment. The reassurance supplied external Jewish validation at precisely the point when those living with the consequences had withheld it. The relationship proved durable. When the university chair later became education minister, the access remained. Months later, the continuing relationship was publicly visible in a visit together to the Anne Frank House. The university obtained Jewish reassurance, the representative retained access, and that access became more valuable when the person across the table acquired considerably greater authority.
What the other side needs
What happened at Maastricht was not the only way an institution could respond when disruption made an event difficult to protect. A year earlier, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, one of Europe’s most prominent classical music venues, initially cancelled two Jerusalem Quartet concerts because of threatened disruption. The decision produced substantial public, media and political criticism, including questions in parliament. Within a day, the Concertgebouw changed course, tightening security and altering visitor flows so the concert could proceed. The controversy remained and the musicians had not changed. The Concertgebouw took cancellation off the table. There was no need for a Jewish communal intermediary to negotiate whether the musicians should be allowed to perform. The remaining question was how the venue would make the concert possible.
A year later, the same institution began from a different premise: in 2024 the obstacle had been security; in 2025 the Concertgebouw itself objected to the performer. It considered cantor Shai Abramson’s ceremonial role as Chief Cantor of the Israel Defense Forces incompatible with its mission and asked the organizing Chanukah Concert Foundation to replace him. When the Foundation refused, the Concertgebouw ended their agreement. The decision produced a broad backlash in Jewish public life, including protests, public criticism and accusations of antisemitism. The Foundation called it an infringement of religious freedom and announced legal proceedings. The dispute then moved into further negotiation, now with the involvement of CJO, the main umbrella body of Dutch Jewish organizations.
CJO entered a dispute in which antisemitism was already part of the public argument. On 9 November, a senior CJO representative placed the Concertgebouw among contemporary examples of anti-Jewish exclusion. Three days later, after its representatives met the Concertgebouw’s director, the CJO publicly cleared the institution of antisemitism. Abramson nevertheless remained outside the public concert. Two private performances were created and the threatened litigation ended; the joint settlement left the public restriction in place.
Whatever produced this reassessment, the sequence is clear. The restriction remained while its meaning shifted. The Concertgebouw could defend its conduct, but it could not confer independent Jewish credibility on that defense. Critics now faced not only the venue’s account but exoneration by a recognized Jewish body.
Who gets to settle
Because that intervention carried weight, the scope of the CJO’s role matters. It represents Jewish communal interests before government and society, but a general mandate to represent communal interests does not automatically confer authority to settle every dispute involving Jewish actors or to turn its own judgment into the communal judgment. An institution’s invitation can transform general standing into authority over a specific controversy. At the Concertgebouw, that allowed the CJO’s judgment to clear the venue publicly.
The issue becomes sharper when those directly affected have knowledge and strategies of their own. A broad post-October 7 study of Jewish and Israeli students and staff in Dutch higher education documented social exclusion, hostility linked to Jewish visibility and the blaming of Jewish and Israeli students for Israeli policies. Living inside these institutions also teaches which assurances disappear after meetings, which procedures absorb complaints, which administrators move only under pressure and what professional risks attach to speaking.
Those living with such experience may rationally conclude that another round of dialogue will consume leverage without changing enough. They may choose litigation, public confrontation, refusal or continued internal pressure instead. When an outside interlocutor accepts a partial accommodation and clears the institution, management acquires a new argument against its own Jewish critics. People who have spent months or years inside the institution can then find their judgment displaced by representatives who may have attended a single closed-door meeting, without those directly affected in the room and without sharing the consequences of the settlement. The negotiator leaves with a statement, while the people inside remain to live with what it has made harder to contest.
There is also a reason institutions may prefer this arrangement. Competing Jewish positions leave questions unresolved. One recognized interlocutor capable of returning with a settlement simplifies the problem. Inside the community, that capacity can acquire the language of responsibility. The person who knows the minister, rector or cultural director also learns which demands will meet resistance. Over time, knowing what the institution will accept can become authority to define what Jews should ask for. The boundary between understanding institutional limits and adopting them as communal limits is easily crossed.
What dialogue teaches
At Loods 24 in Rotterdam, the table itself became part of what was at stake. Political actors demanded that Israel’s ambassador be excluded from the annual commemoration of Rotterdam’s deported Jews and urged Mayor Carola Schouten to stay away while he remained on the program. Schouten said she understood concerns about the “dignity” of the commemoration because of his presence and would consult the organizers. Hearing the objection did not require reopening their guest list, and making it a subject for consultation gave the demand institutional standing it had not previously possessed. Once the mayor contemplated making her own participation conditional on the removal of another invited guest, however, her invitation should no longer have been treated as guaranteed. The organizers could just as legitimately have reconsidered whether a mayor who regarded their choice of speaker as negotiable should herself remain part of the ceremony. That would have reversed the direction of pressure: instead of asking what the Jewish organizers must change to retain municipal participation, it would have required the mayor to decide whether she was prepared to participate on the organizers’ terms.
Three Rotterdam Jewish organizations rejected the demand and defended the invitation, but then offered dialogue elsewhere. That instinct weakened the position they had just defended. Once the demand to exclude the ambassador had been rejected, there was little in that demand left to negotiate. If anything, the question should have shifted to whether those conditioning their participation on his removal, including the mayor, should themselves remain invited. By offering dialogue, the organizations did not concede the substantive demand, but they nevertheless gave its proponents something politically valuable: access. Its proponents became interlocutors to be heard, consulted and kept within an ongoing relationship. That is the precedent communal leadership needs to notice. The ambassador stayed, but those who had sought his exclusion were given “a seat at the table”.
Once the table itself matters, so does which Jewish voices are given a seat on it. The Dutch government’s national Taskforce on Combating Antisemitism, created to advise on antisemitism in higher education, included established Jewish organizations alongside university leadership, public authorities and police, but no structural representation of Jewish or Israeli academics working inside the universities it was examining. That distinction matters because the presence of recognized communal representatives allowed the process to say that Jewish voices were at the table, while those with direct knowledge of how university decisions affected Jewish life on campus had no comparable seat. A Jewish chair was present; the question was whose experience it was authorized to carry.
The price of access
The seat has now acquired a different meaning. A meeting in which nobody present can change the decision is access without bargaining power. A negotiation entered after every alternative has been surrendered begins with part of the outcome already conceded. If authority lies elsewhere, the arena has to move. Before entering, leadership should know what was lost, what it may trade and what remains if agreement fails. It should also ask what the institution needs: the controversy ended, litigation withdrawn, a relationship preserved, a damaging headline neutralized, or recognized Jewish figures willing to validate its conduct. These are assets whether or not anyone calls them bargaining chips. A settlement may exchange some of them. What matters is knowing what was exchanged, who had authority to exchange it, and what remains afterward.
What leadership learns in these rooms eventually becomes what ordinary Jews anticipate outside them. The first controversial speaker produces an unexpected security negotiation; later organizers know that negotiation will precede the invitation. A complaint remains formally possible, but the person considering it already understands the meetings, explanations and exposure likely to follow. Safety includes the ability to conduct ordinary life without repeatedly reorganizing it around anticipated hostility.
At first the conflicts remain visible because somebody still behaves as though the earlier position applies: invites the cantor, maintains the affiliation, files the complaint or insists that the institution absorb the cost of hostility. The dispute reveals where the new boundary lies; the dialogue that follows can help make it durable. Eventually fewer disputes are necessary. Invitations are never sent, affiliations are avoided and demands are narrowed before an institution has to reject them. Relations with Jewish leadership can then genuinely improve, meetings become calmer, and both sides can sincerely regard that calm as evidence that engagement is working. By then, part of what looks like institutional peace may consist of the disputes that no longer reach the table.
