When emails have to be sent repeatedly in order to encourage students to do something, it's usually because the students aren't already doing the something in question.

So those emails imploring students to attend soccer games two weeks ago probably had something to do with a lack of student attendance at soccer games, or even university sporting events in general.

But I think that indifferent attitude extends beyond University athletics to the University in general. Students here may enjoy and appreciate the Brandeis experience, but we're not quick to exhibit too much passionate Brandeis pride beyond campus. That lack of school spirit is mostly treated as some sort of problem in need of repair.

But perhaps it shouldn't be.

Just because we're not out there cheering and roaring about our love for this university doesn't mean we don't care for Brandeis. We do love it, though maybe just a little more quietly than students at other colleges. It's possible that we appreciate our Brandeisian identity in a different way than most other schools appear to do.

Perhaps, though, our apparent apathy articulates something meaningful about Brandeis' Jewish identity. And perhaps it conveys a difference between two very different models of Jewish sovereignty—Brandeis and Israel.

When Jews think of 1948 (irrespective of whatever post-identity label they may self-apply), they think Israel. When Brandeisians do the same (provided that they have their facts in order), they think Brandeis.

Aside from the year, the respective foundations of Israel and Brandeis share something else: They constitute outcomes of a Jewish effort to solve a perceived problem through the creation of a new entity.

Now, it's true that nationalism isn't exactly something that comes to mind when you think of college. But the pride that students feel toward their universities is in some way a kind of nationalist sentiment—although obviously this is a rather loose use of the word "nationalist" since there's no literally national element involved. However, school pride nonetheless represents a way in which people at an institution share and express an associated identity. I don't mean to craft some fictitious equivalency between the struggle of Jews in less-than-amiable foreign countries and that of Jews that faced unfair challenges in dealing with top-tier American universities.

However, the processes behind the two were similar, at least conceptually. In each case, Jewish groups adopted a previously un-Jewish model of some type of sovereignty and found some way to, well, give it a Jewish twist.

The precise nature of the model they adopted is where the founding of Israel and Brandeis diverge.

The upper hand in Zionist politics during and especially after the Holocaust belonged to those who embraced the nation-state as the ideal model for Jewish sovereignty, as opposed to a binational state or a homeland of sorts. Thus, in 1948, the Jews of Palestine established the State of Israel, embracing as Jewish the nation-state model, as well as the state-based nationalist notions that accompany it.

In terms of Brandeis, the story is a bit different. Its founders adopted the model of a nonsectarian American university and decided to add some notion of Jewish control. To the founders, Brandeis would be like any other university, except that those supporting and overseeing it—most explicitly from a financial perspective—would be Jewish.

You might argue that the Brandeis model doesn't really count as a form of Jewish sovereignty, but I think there's something to be said about a university with an overwhelmingly Jewish board of trustees that has thus far supported hiring only Jewish university presidents.

It's true that now, well over 60 years since their respective foundations, each enterprise continues to grapple in some way with the precise nature of its Jewish identity—Israelis with defining their state's Jewishness by something slightly more salient than an ethnic majority and a law of return, and Brandeisians with addressing any nature of our university's Jewish character at all.

But more important than a shared identity struggle is perhaps what is most clearly different about the state and the university: their modes of nationalism as it relates to that Jewish identity.

So what of Brandeisian nationalism? What does it look like? Our athletic situation captures part of it—some form of apathy instead of any exciting, boasting attitude about facets of our college as compared to others.

And maybe—just maybe—therein is the truest manifestation of our university's Jewish character. In response to Zionist discussions, various Jewish intellectuals have presented the ways in which statist sovereignty and nationalism can or cannot be adopted as truly Jewish concepts.

For instance, some Jewish thinkers opposed adopting any potentially nationalist model as the model for Jewish sovereignty because they saw something inherently un-Jewish about nationalism—that Judaism and nationalism cannot truly go hand in hand.

Similarly, there are also arguments from Jewish intellectuals concerning the elegance of Jews as outsiders. Such views may hold that Jews flourish when living on the periphery of society rather than in the spotlight of civilization, that it was from the sidelines rather than the parliament that Jews best offered something to the world.

Maybe these types of fears concerning mainstream Jewish nationalism have incidentally manifested themselves in the nonsectarian college model that Brandeis constitutes: formal Jewish control via actual leadership but openness and tacit pride among students.

Do we have some viable alternative to mainstream Jewish nationalism to share with the world? Well, we're a college, not a country, so I'd say probably not. But it wouldn't be the worst thing if we acknowledged what we have and more openly embraced it as our own.