"It's clear that this University absolutely does not a have a policy of secularism," he says. Although Memorial Church may be a multi-use space, Feldman says, it's primarily oriented for Christian service.
The toaster issue was indicative of a larger debate about Judaism: whether it is an ethnicity or religion, Feldman says, When he fills out "ethnicity" on questionaires, he says he often looks for the little bubble that says" Jewish." It is ironic, he adds, that Jews spent so long getting that little bubble, once dangerously called "race," removed.
If Judaism is an ethnicity, and the University wants to help encourage expressions of ethnic difference on campus, Feldman says, "from the perspective of kosher-eating people, a toaster oven costs a lot less than Cultural Rhythms," the annual Harvard festival celebrating cultural diversity.
Feldman says Ignatiev's attacks on the kosher toaster oven suggest a subtext that "these people have an unreasonable request."
It is a suggestion that Feldman finds fundamentally problematic because it distances one side from the other, and refuses to understand their position.
This approach to "the other side" is particularly evident in Feldman's response to Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter's recent letter to The Crimson about news coverage of race and ethnicity on campus.
"The letter read to me like it was written by someone who had a real concern that bias existed and that part of that bias was that many Crimson. writers were Jewish," Feldman says. this is a reading that Feldman says is "not by nature anti-Semitic."
Many Jews too quickly respond to such statement with accusations of anti-Semitism, Feldman says. Feldman will not take a position himself on whether the Counter letter was anti-Semitic. It is, he says, a distinction he does not find useful.
"It's very rarely functional to attack the person who wrote the letter," he explains, adding, "calling for somebody's resignation is always a mistake," referring to the few calls for Counter's resignation which followed the publication of his letter in The Crimson.
Feldman terms this kind of action typical of the Jewish response to the African-American community. "It's a public expression of power," he says. "It says we're going to assert our authority over you."
When Leonard Jeffries was invited to campus by the Black Students Association (BSA), Hillel as a whole protested his speech, calling him anti-Semitic. Feldman has been an active member of Hillel for a long time, even before he came to Harvard, and he has chaired the Orthodox Congregation, and several committee over the years.
Despite his loyalties to Hillel, however, Feldman says he thinks the protest sent the wrong message to the Black community.
To tell the BSA that it should not have invited Jeffries established a power dynamic that "takes on the terms of a lecture, and that's wrong," Feldman says.
In the Jeffries conflict, Feldman says he heard many in the Black community saying, "don't tell me who to invite," which he found an understandable reaction.
Daniel J. Libenson '92, former chair of the Hillel coordinating committee, says Feldman has often tended to assert an individual rather than group position.
"He has the feeling that simple group identifications aren't particularly constructive," Libenson says.
Feldman says he thinks that each side must recognize that it may experience the very foundations of a debate on totally different terms. For instance, Feldman says, he fundamentally trusts The New York Times and, thus, also its accounts of the Jeffries incidents in New York. However, he spoke with one Black woman at a meeting on campus who said she sees the Times as the epitome of false reporting.
Given these differences, Feldman says, "I don't feel I can sit where she is sitting and tell her what to think."
And moreover, Feldman might explain, it's just not functional.