Author Peter Beinart. Photograph by Guillaume Gaudet.

Peter Beinart, whose latest book predicts a breach between young U.S. Jews and Israel if that country maintains its current policies toward the Palestinians, speaks at 5 p.m. Tuesday, May 15, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Beinart’s talk is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ chapter of J Street U, a national student activist organization promoting peace, security and social justice for Israelis and Palestinians. The event is open to the public at no cost.

Beinart is the author of The Crisis of Zionism, released in March by Times Books. In it, he argues that despite Israel’s many accomplishments, liberal Zionism faces a tremendous challenge. As Israel’s Jewish population continues to expand in the West Bank, the possibility of a two-state solution decreases, and the likelihood of Israel ceasing to remain a democratic Jewish state grows.

Equally concerning for Beinart is the possibility that as Israel fails to live up to its founding values, young progressive American Jews will fail to identify with this state founded to be the national home for the entire Jewish diaspora.

Beinart also offers a groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America’s first “Jewish president,” a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people’s special curse.

Beinart is a senior political writer for The Daily Beast, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the former editor of The New Republic. He has written for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Boston Globe and The Atlantic.

His first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. His second book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, appeared in 2010, also published by HarperCollins.

This October 2010 image shows Mikey Pasek ’12, at right, with Jourdan Fanning ’13 moving furniture in the Office of Intercultural Education, a location that includes space for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Hillel. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Soggy rice in Commons, issues with general education requirements or unjust national energy policies — many of us are content to complain about the issues that irk us on a daily basis.

Not Mikey Pasek ’12, senior class co-president. It isn’t Pasek’s style to grumble while waiting around for improvement. Instead he feels duty-bound to take action and make change happen.

A native of Ardmore, Pa., Pasek has served as class co-president since his junior year, and is a student government representative to both the President’s and Dean’s advisory committees. He was one of four students taking part in the committee that revised the college’s mission statement in 2010. In all these positions, Pasek challenges the apathy that he sometimes recognizes among peers and sees as symptomatic of larger cultural tendencies.

He explains, “We are so lucky to live in a world of democratic institutions — at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ the student has a voice, and if you don’t take up your own voice, you take away part of your own self-determination.â€�

Pasek finds that one of the most effective means of championing issues is to make specific in-person appeals — one-on-ones with peers or campus officials. Creating personal connections, highlighting individual potential and establishing a narrative other people can feel positive about, quite simply, all get results.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he says, “appealing to an institutional framework is often not the most effective way of getting support. Campaigning for a personal cause shows you believe in what you’re working for and makes people excited to help you.â€�

Pasek is just as straightforward with his opinions of the world beyond ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. He has contributed several opinion pieces to various publications in the last four years, including articles in Lewiston’s Sun Journal and Jewish Exponent, a Philadelphia-based weekly newspaper.

Pasek also helped co-found ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ J-Street U, a chapter of the national student activist organization promoting peace, security and social justice for Israel and Palestine. He serves as vice-president for the local chapter and is the national organization’s co-chair for New England.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ chapter is highly regarded by the national organization. With Pasek and President Alex Friedman ’12 at the helm, the chapter collected 500 student and staff signatures that persuaded Maine’s U.S Rep. Michael Michaud to sign the so-called Price-Welch letter encouraging continued U.S-Palestinian aid.

Pasek’s interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shapes his academic experience as well. He is currently gearing up to defend a yearlong honors thesis on American Jewish perception of Israel for his self-designed political psychology major.

Recognizing that not all ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students share his ease in leadership roles, Pasek has also helped facilitate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ communities of interest that he is not as personally tied to. Co-president of Hillel, Pasek does not identify as particularly religious, but is aware that Hillel serves an important role on campus creating a space for a group sometimes underrepresented on campus.

Pasek is well-attuned to the activist’s delicate balancing of self-interest and the common good. For him, it boils down to engaging issues that one is passionate about, but also appreciating that part of effective engagement is removing oneself from the equation. He cites a well-known saying by the ancient Jewish sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And, if not now, when?”

— By Elana Leopold ’12