To the commencement speakers stepping onto stages this spring:

You are about to speak at one of life’s defining moments. Graduates and their families will remember your words long after the ceremony ends. That podium carries weight. It should be used carefully.

And it should be used with moral clarity.

Do not praise the fashionable activism of the moment simply because it is loud, visible, and rewarded by the culture around it.

Do not mistake popular protest for courage. If you want to speak about courage, speak about the students who stood for Israel.

Speak about the students who defended Israel’s right to wage a just war against Hamas after October 7—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Speak about the students who understood that when a terrorist army invades a country, murders civilians in their homes, kidnaps children, rapes women, and openly promises to repeat it, the moral obligation of that country is defense. It is victory. It is the destruction of the machinery of terror.

That is what Israel is doing. And on campuses across America, students who have said so have paid a price.

Speak about that.

Speak about the Jewish students who have walked through hostile encampments and angry demonstrations to get to class.

Speak about the students who removed their kippot, hid their Stars of David, or stopped speaking openly because the atmosphere around them had become threatening.

Speak about the students who stood their ground anyway.

The students who wore hostage pins.

The students who defended the truth of October 7 when others rushed to justify it.

That is moral courage.

Real courage is not standing with a crowd chanting slogans. Real courage is standing when the crowd turns on you.

And that has been the experience of many Jewish students this year.

They have faced harassment, exclusion, intimidation, and hostility—often from classmates and sometimes with the silence or complicity of faculty and administrators.

That reality deserves acknowledgment. It deserves honor.

So if you are going to use your commencement speech to speak about justice, begin there.

To organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, who speak often about academic freedom and the right of educators to speak their conscience: prove those principles mean something.

Stand behind the educators who speak in defense of Israel.

Stand behind those who praise students fighting antisemitism.

Stand behind those who say openly that Jewish self-defense is moral.

Because if you defend speech only when it flatters your politics, you are not defending freedom. You are defending ideology.

Commencement should be better than ideology. It should tell the truth.

The truth of this year on campus is that some of the bravest students were the ones who stood visibly, unapologetically, and often alone with the Jewish people.

If you want to honor courage from the podium, honor them. That would be a commencement speech worth remembering.