Rebecca Cherniak Goes Viral with Pro-Israel Video. As Chair of Israel Affairs and Advocacy for the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students (CFJS), McMaster student Rebecca Cherniak has played a key role in organizing a ground-breaking if provocative pro-Israel campaign, changing the Israel Apartheid Week conversation for thousands of university-age youth—Jewish and non-Jewish—who know little about Israel and the Middle East. Welcomed by many on campus and in the community, and controversial for some, the material is unquestionably effective in engaging the target audience. The now-viral campaign, developed as part of a new comprehensive engagement strategy by CIJA (Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy), has already garnered kudos from across Canada, Israel and around the globe.

Below, see the editorial fromThe Canadian Jewish News discussing the Jewish response the Jewish Apartheid Week. 

There’s no denying it. The web-based advocacy campaign on behalf of Israel organized and launched last week by the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students (CFJS) called Size Doesn’t Matter was provocative and – let’s admit it – for people well past their student days, perhaps even uncomfortable.

As reported in The CJN, the centrepiece of the campaign is a sly, cheeky video that shows a Canadian woman in bed with her Israeli boyfriend conversing with overtly sexual allusions about a subject that eventually turns out to be the size of Israel. At the end of the suggestive banter between the two, the camera pans to a map of Israel. The map is an
entry point to a website address that offers listings of cultural and other events from 23 Canadian university and college campuses regarding film screenings and a speaker series that highlight the many accomplishments of the tiny Jewish state – for example, in that the medicine, technology, science, business and humanitarian aid – organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) do not want other students to know about.

And that is the whole point of the CFJS campaign.

It brings the broader, more accurate message about Israel to a very wide swath of students who otherwise might simply accept the IAW calumnies unchallenged as truth, or simply not care to know anything about the Jewish state. Thus far, the campaign has been very successful. It is working. In merely its first five days, there were some 25,000 viewings of the video and more than12,000 entries from across the country into the comprehensive information site about Israel.

Rebecca Cherniak, chair of Israel affairs and advocacy for the CFJS, told The CJN that the campaign “is for the 80 per cent [of students] in the middle, not for students who love Israel or hate Israel, but for the students who can’t even point out Israel on the map. It causes people to be a little bit curious. That leads them to click on the link. Once at the website, there’s access to a huge amount of resources.”

“Students were not satisfied with the way Israel was represented on campus, Cherniak added. “We took it into our hands to show the Israel that we know. It’s a different way of looking at Israel.”

Deborah Mechanic, a third-year kinesiology student at York University, may have spoken for a great many students when she told The CJN: “I’ve been at York three years and my experience with Apartheid Week is lots of fighting and lots of culture clashing. [The CFJS campaign] feels a little more refreshing than the traditional campaigning to defend our country… [it shows] not just how Israel isn’t wrong, but how it’s good.”