I’ve been to many organizational conferences. Typically, I’ve gotten a press pass that allowed me to roam around the conference hall, sit in on sessions that hadn’t been designated as off the record and chat with delegates and sometimes staffers. Not so at the Christians United for Israel Summit. Some 4,000 people attended the summit in Washington, DC, but those of us with press passes had to be escorted from place to place and were not permitted to interview delegates unless arranged by the communications department.
There were about 400 college students there; CUFI arranged for me to interview two of them for this article on campus activity.
CUFI student activists, without ‘obvious self-interest,’ seek to legitimiza pro-Israel message on campus
By Debra Rubin/JNS.org
WASHINGTON, DC—Sam Bain knew that life could be dangerous in southern Israel, with rockets fired indiscriminately across the border from Gaza. But it wasn’t until the Ohio college student visited an Israeli day care center near the Gaza border that the reality truly hit him.
This day care center was a bomb-safe facility. “We don’t have bomb-safe day care centers in America,” Bain told JNS.org.
“It was almost a wake-up call” about the reality of life in Israel, he said.
Bain visited the Jewish state in 2011 as part of a Christians United for Israel (CUFI) campus trip. This week, he was one of 400 students representing 157 campuses at CUFI’s Washington Summit, which drew more than 4,000 people to the nation’s capital. READ MORE
CUFI/Paul Wharton Photography
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