Pipe Dream is celebrating its 60th year as Binghamton University’s independent student newspaper. It started as the Colonial News in fall 1946, and has been going strong twice a week ever since. So we’re taking a look back into the paper’s archives, at the people and events that have made the news over BU’s past 60 years.

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 1988:

Jewish students protested the on-campus presence of Jews for Jesus, saying that it and other campus Christian groups were targeting them for conversion. The actual protest, though, was directed off campus at the First Assembly of God Church in Downtown Binghamton — Jews for Jesus was holding an event there.

“There has been unprecedented missionary activity on campus this year,” said then-Jewish Student Union representative Steve Kaplan. “I think there is a growing effort on campus to grab and re-educate ‘confused Jews.’”

A representative of another Christian group said that, yes, proselytizing on campus had increased, but there wasn’t any conspiracy in it, as some of Binghamton University’s Jewish leaders inferred.

“Individually, groups have decided to try to raise the overall Christian consciousness, but this is not a collective effort of Christian groups,” said Carla Jones, of the Campus Bible Fellowship. “The attitude is definitely not, ‘OK, let’s go out and get those Jews.’”

Even so, she added, “Our basic goal as a Christian group is to bring all people to God. We have a moral responsibility to save them from suffering.”

In particular, James Oppenheimer, the then-president of the JSU — which would eventually dissolve and then later reform as Hillel — denounced Jews for Jesus as a “cult.”

“They are manipulative and they don’t educate, only confuse,” he said.

A representative of the Christian group — which exists “to make the messiahship [sic] of Jesus an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people worldwide” — uses Jewish symbols and phrases while striving to convert Jews to Christianity.

“We’re not in the business of deceiving,” said Jews for Jesus representative Susan Perlman. “One thing the JSU president is missing is a sense of humor.”