“I just hated myself when I was Hillel president.”
“I was singled out among the staff because I’m Israeli.”
“Sometimes I feel like there’s no standard of what Jewish is.”
These are just a few quotes, pulled almost at random, from interviews I conducted over the past year with current and former staff and students at Hillel, the world’s leading Jewish campus organization. They reflect a kind of disorder that has beset the organization in which I’ve spent countless working hours as an education director.
Spotlit by the dumpster fire of campus anti-Semitism, Hillel may now be the most recognizable Jewish organization in the United States. Represented on 800 campuses across four continents, with tens of millions of dollars in its operating budget, it is the gold standard of Jewish campus institutions. Yet it is an institution in crisis, farther from its roots than it has ever been.
Those roots are in the American Midwest, where I live. For decades, Hillel reflected a sunny American Jewish heartland identity, basking in the promise of the Goldene Medinah as well as the Altneuland. That confidence has been undermined by the excesses of progressivism, which chipped away at American Jewry’s sense of self and its basic will to survive. Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the campus aftermath, helped to restore some of that will among some American Jewish youth. Since that day, passionate, committed young Zionists have shown up at Hillel centers across the country—only to be offered muddled objectives and self-defeating strategies.
This fumbled response partly stems from what Ruth Wisse calls the “politics of accommodation,” embraced by Diaspora Jewry. Stripped of their own defenses, government, and land over two millennia of exile, Jews instead sought to excel in their adopted home countries, often at the expense of their Jewishness. America offered Jews something different, the chance to be wholly Jewish and wholly American—to leave the politics of accommodation behind. In its early years, Hillel celebrated this. But as academia became increasingly hostile—to the American project, to religion generally, and to Jews in particular—many Hillel leaders accommodated their peers on campus by embracing their ideas. Being unabashedly Zionist, pro-America, or religious came to seem gauche.
Of course, Hillel does a great deal of good, too. I’m fortunate to have worked with brilliant and committed people during the Israel–Hamas war in particular, and I wouldn’t have chosen to be anywhere else. But while the good has received plenty of airtime, the only reported criticisms of Hillel are the ravings of the anti-Israel crowd, and so the natural response of those who wish Hillel well is to circle the wagons in its defense. But that is a mistake, and it fails to diagnose a critical ill in the Hillel ecosystem. The truth is that the ideas animating the anti-Israel movement—social justice, decolonization, DEI—have become entrenched among Hillel’s top staff and made the core of its organizational outlook. This is Hillel’s tragic flaw.
This article is an SOS, a message in a bottle, a call to action. The crisis at Hillel—both within the national organization and at countless campus locations—reflects a crisis at the heart of American Jewry. The average American Jew remains reflexively progressive while also attached to the Zionist project and Jewish life itself. These ideals are increasingly at odds. Hillel has an opportunity to rise to the moment, to meet its students’ needs by restoring a coherent and robust vision of American Jewish life. To do so, it must clarify what exactly is worth defending against the campus hordes.
FROM CONCORDIA TO ELIAS RODRIGUEZ
In May 2025, a young couple—Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim—was shot to death while leaving a Jewish networking event in Washington, D.C. That same week, a classmate of some of my students posted a video endorsing their murderer. “I want to urge you,” huffed a sweaty, blue-eyed young man draped in a red keffiyeh, “to support Elias’s actions.” Elias Rodriguez, the 30-year-old Chicago man identified as the shooter, had been arrested at the scene of the crime, shouting, “Free Palestine!”
Zionist students are acutely aware that many of their peers want them dead. In an October 2024 essay for the Atlantic, actress Mayim Bialik sketched the state of American Hillels, noting, among many examples, that Hillel students at Manhattan’s Hunter College found a sign reading “HILLEL GO TO HELL,” with a red upside-down triangle—the symbol used by Hamas to indicate a target. At a Baruch College Hillel event for incoming freshmen, Jewish students were accosted by protesters gleefully calling out the names of hostages who had recently been murdered by Hamas.
While such stories have proliferated since October 7, the problems for Jewish students started long before. At college in the 1990s, Bialik reported how she had felt that she had “to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state.” Her friendly and very American attempts to debate or even talk about Israel led to shunning or worse.
Not long after Bialik’s college experience, the hostility toward Israel on North American campuses reached an apogee in the Concordia University riots of 2002, in Montreal, Quebec. Hundreds of demonstrators showed up at a Hillel event featuring Benjamin Netanyahu during the second intifada against Israel. Rioters shattered windows and hurled furniture from the mezzanine floor toward attendees in the lobby; outside the building, they threw coins and bottles at anyone seeking to participate. The Holocaust survivor Anthony Hecht recalled being kicked in the groin and spat on.
THE ISRAEL FELLOWS
In response to experiences like those of Bialik and to the Concordia attacks, in 2003 Hillel International launched its Israel Fellows program, in collaboration with the Jewish Agency. Young Israelis are brought to campuses across North America for one- to two-year stints to “humanize” life in Israel. Campus Hillels vie for the best candidates, those who can pick up American social cues and connect easily with students. Some Hillel leaders screen fellows for their political leanings on exactly those grounds, and accept only those on the left. Despite a selection process that disproportionately favors critics of the current Israeli government, Israel Fellows are among the only people on campus who are informed about the Jewish perspective—or really either perspective—on the Palestinian–Israeli divide. When keffiyeh-clad influencers start spouting talking points about the Middle East, students can turn to Israel Fellows for deeper explanations.
While a good idea in theory, the experiences of many Israel Fellows attest to the moral weakness endemic to Hillel and to the gulf between American and Israeli habits of mind.
Long before 10/7, I became aware of a troubling whisper network among the Israel Fellows. Sitting in the audience during an awards ceremony at the annual Hillel International General Assembly (HIGA) some years ago, I was taken aback when an Israel Fellow leaned over and whispered “sonei Yisrael”—Israel haters—in referring to the awardees on stage. Launched in 2014, HIGA brings together more than a thousand Hillel professionals each year, from entry-level employees to top executives. A handful take the stage as presenters or recipients of much-touted awards. Among these luminaries of the Hillel movement, the Israel Fellow at my elbow insisted, were people who despised the State of Israel, or perhaps Zionism as an idea.
A quick look at HIGA awardee lists from recent years helps explain his frustration. HIGA’s highest honor is the Richard M. Joel Exemplar of Excellence Award, which goes to individual employees “whose remarkable passion and outstanding devotion to the Jewish campus community sets a standard for all to emulate.” In 2024, recipients included Rabbi Jessica Lott of Northwestern University Hillel, a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College whose professional bio includes coordinating “Jewish social justice education programs” and investing in pluralism. In October 2024, to mark a year since the 10/7 Hamas attack, Lott penned a reflection for Hillel International’s website, lamenting the losses of the war and the troubled college environment without ever directly criticizing Hamas or campus agitators. It hits the soft, equivocal note of many Hillel publications:
As I look back, I see college students at their best and at their worst: living out their values and casting them aside, building strong relationships and having friendships fall apart. I see myself and my fellow Hillel professionals feeling like we are in over our heads and holding our heads high. I see rabbis and Jewish community leaders guiding their communities through uncharted waters and calling on the richness of our tradition and experience to show them the way.
What that “way” is, exactly, has remained a mystery to Northwestern Hillel educators and students alike. Zach Kessel, a 2023 Northwestern alum who joined National Review as a reporter out of college, extensively covered his alma mater’s failures to confront pro-Hamas protests in the aftermath of October 7. One of many such reports by Kessel notes that, in May 2024, Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, acceded to demands of pro-Hamas protesters, including “a promise to offer full-ride scholarships to Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics,” as well as to provide a “house for MENA/Muslim students.”
Instead of denouncing these rewards for campus violations, Hillel’s Rabbi Lott took to the pages of the Daily Northwestern in May 2024 to bemoan the fact that “many Jewish students… are feeling forced to take one side or the other in a conversation about a conflict that is not just two-sided.” She insisted that “more than one party needs to cease their fire—of actual weapons, of psychological manipulation, of hateful words and of destructive actions.” Lott underscored the “critical work [of] trying to understand and respect an opinion that’s different from your own and to hold as true a story that conflicts with your truth.”
This appeal to progressive mantras—about subjective “truths” and discomfort at being asked to “take a side” in an existential conflict—is worse than saying nothing at all. It offers no moral clarity, no resolve, no purpose to students staring down genuine peril and seeking basic justifications for Jewish civilizational will. And it is coming from one of Hillel’s most celebrated leaders.
It is also worth noting that Lott was part of the focus group that produced Hillel International’s 218-page document Jewish Sensibilities: An Interactive Guide. Meant to serve as a kind of manual or loose curriculum for Hillel educators, its chapter titles include “Jews and Social Justice: A Covenant of Responsibility”; “Tikkun Olam: Can We Repair a Broken World?”; and “Ritual: What’s the Point?”
The guide reflects the sugary brew offered by Hillel: light on substance, flavored by popular notions of social justice, lacking coherence. With a rhetorical wave of the hand, it suggests that Jewish rituals might be beneficial and encourages journal-writing and “soul sessions” for students considering taking on more practices. But it never makes a forceful case for Jewish traditions or laws on their own terms. It is a sadly typical example of Hillel’s mix-and-match approach to Jewish life: Everything is optional. In the aftermath of 10/7, this seems to include Jewish existence itself.
On December 3, 2023—not even two months after the Hamas massacre—Goucher College Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Josh Snyder, published an op-ed along similar lines, challenging his students to “find a way to listen,” to assume that “each of us [has] good intentions” and to take “the time to read different views than our own.” It was later featured on Hillel International’s website. Snyder shares the assumptions of many of his colleagues: that any dispute, no matter how profound or bloody, can be chalked up to a failure to “hear another’s truth.” Israelis cannot afford to indulge this suicidal empathy, and neither, in the long run, can American Jews.
A former Israel Fellow told me that new Israel Fellows all ask each other the same questions when they start at their respective campuses: “How’s your Hillel? How’s your director? Are you there as a token?” One insisted that she “was a trophy to show off in front of donors to prove they had someone [on staff] from Israel,” but that she was prevented from actually offering any substantive Israel education, such as a history class or a “Cafe Ivrit” for students who wish to practice Hebrew. Pro-Israel Hillel directors encourage Israel Fellows to contribute to daily Hillel work; elsewhere, the Fellows are treated as awkward encumbrances to an American-Jewish project, rolled out as occasional props but otherwise ignored.
After October 7, Israel Fellows exchanged irate text messages about such treatment. As a safety measure, the Jewish Agency had placed severe restrictions on their movements. Fellows were not allowed to attend events on campus or, in certain areas, even leave their apartments. Some Hillel staff sought earnestly to support the Fellows, who were already lonely and aching for home and were now prevented from accessing normal community life. Other Hillel staffers didn’t seem to miss them at all, rarely if ever contacting them; in those cases, several Fellows quit.
All this reflects my own professional experiences, captured by four brief anecdotes. First, at a gathering of some 20 senior Hillel educators, several colleagues expressed outrage at the recent blistering critiques of anti-Zionism by essayist and novelist Dara Horn. A representative from Northwestern Hillel sneered that Horn “needs to stick to fiction” and should “shut her mouth.” Several at my table nodded. Second, at another such event, I watched as 20-odd colleagues burst into derisive laughter at the mere mention of the organization Mothers Against College Antisemitism.
Third, while working at Ohio State Hillel, I was surprised one day by the impromptu appearance of the right-leaning Knesset MP Simcha Rothman, who had stopped for bagels at the Hillel café while in town for a podcast interview. As I would with almost any public figure who visited the Hillel, I asked for a selfie and later posted it on Instagram. Within 20 minutes, my boss informed me that Hillel higher-ups had ordered that the story be taken down. They claimed that the picture was “political.” Of course, Hillel often hosts politicians; Ohio State Hillel itself featured Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres at an event not long after this, and Torres appeared in countless Instagram stories that day. What bothered Hillel leadership was Rothman’s politics, despite the fact that he belongs to a party voted into power by a plurality of Israelis.
Finally, at another professional gathering, this time for select Israel educators in D.C. just six months after October 7, a senior employee at American University’s Hillel suggested that the war in Gaza was in fact a genocide and asked if we were allowed to “have that conversation.” An Israel Fellow offered a swift rebuttal, and the conversation switched tracks. But the fact that one of Hillel International’s hand-picked “Israel educators” was so ill-informed on the nature of the war and the IDF’s approach reveals a deep ignorance, combined with a reflexive progressivism, that has served to alienate Israel Fellows from their American colleagues. It has also alienated Hillel from its original purpose.
THE SUBVERSTION OF HILLEL’S PURPOSE
Hillel was founded on a simple premise: that Jews needed to take responsibility for Jewish flourishing. The Peoria-born Rabbi Benjamin Frankel established the first Hillel in a small room above Kandy’s Barbershop, as a part-time program for students at the nearby University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He had been spurred to do so (and initially funded) by a Christian English professor at the college, Edward Chauncey Baldwin, who had been appalled at how little his Jewish students knew about the Bible or the Hebrew language.
Frankel was only 26, and the year was 1923. He knew that the University of Illinois was no City College, which was buoyed by New York’s rich Jewish infrastructure and able to support myriad sub-communities. It needed a Jewish center of gravity. Frankel wanted Hillel to serve as a kind of religious ministry and not merely a cultural club; Hillel would provide serious classes and high-level seminars on Judaism, aimed at guiding Jews in the Midwestern wilderness. At the time of his sudden and tragic death from heart disease at the age of 30, in 1927, Hillel branches had already opened at the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State, and the University of Michigan. Funding from the then-leading Jewish philanthropic organization, B’nai B’rith, turned Hillel from a part-time student program to a full-time organization. Frankel wanted Jews in middle America to have a real and proud presence. In his original appeal for funding from B’nai B’rith, he said of the average Jewish college student:
As a rule, he is passively Jewish and he is not sure of his Jewish learning. When he enters the university and finds what he interprets as anti-Semitism, he ducks his head in the sand like an ostrich and thinks he has solved the problem. When a student affiliates with Hillel, he in effect declares, “I am a Jew,” and this declaration, when he makes a name for himself on the campus, receives the respect of the campus for all Jewish students.
As Susan Roth, a scholar of the Hillel movement, pointed out, this perception probably motivated Frankel’s choice of namesake. It was the first-century sage Hillel the Elder who asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
This question now seems to be on the minds of many Jewish undergrads. In recent years, Ithaca College students have discovered multiple swastikas on campus, with the last reported in early 2024. The Ithaca Hillel Instagram account noted that the person believed to be responsible was “referred to the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards” but offered nothing further regarding the person’s identity or any repercussions. A Berkeley student recently informed me that the school’s pro-Israel club isn’t even Hillel-affiliated; rather than pro-Israel volunteering opportunities, Berkeley Hillel’s website instead offered parents a guide to console their children about the war in Gaza, with comically passive and equivocal lines: “I know you want the violence to stop; I do too,” reads one sample sentence. My favorite was the robotic “I am sad too about the losses families are experiencing.” These subdued and yielding responses sharply contrast with Frankel’s injunction that Jews stand tall and demand respect in the face of threats to Jewish civilization. Today, Zionist students often must turn to outside organizations, such as Students Supporting Israel, for help. One outspoken Zionist student leader, who was recently invited to the White House, told me, “My Hillel kind of hates me.”
Some revisionists claim that Hillel was always this way: deferential to progressive mores and inclusive at the expense of any meaningful attachment to Israel or substantive Jewish identity. In a 2014 essay for the New Republic, John Judis criticized Hillel for seeking to prevent campus chapters from hosting anti-Israel events, arguing that Hillel did not have a “political orientation” at its founding in 1923, nor did support for Israel “become part of Hillel’s official credo” upon the establishment of the state in 1948. Until the 1967 War, in Judis’s telling, Hillel remained a banal social club serving Friday-night dinners.
Following 1967’s Six-Day War, and especially during and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Judis claims, “Hillel chapters and the national organization (which rapidly expanded and even established overseas branches) became increasingly focused on educating young Jews about Israel.” Judis notes that Hillel helped institute the Birthright tour program that brings young Jews to Israel, which began in 1999; he also cites a 2002 Hillel retrospective, “The Road to Renaissance,” that includes the claim that “Israel has always been at the heart of Hillel’s work.” Judis asserts: “That wasn’t true for Hillel’s first 50 years.”
Judis’s article was at best farcical and at worst astoundingly deceitful. That same 2002 retrospective features Hillel students from Queens College demonstrating for the “Jewish resistance movement” in British Mandatory Palestine in 1947. The historian Abram Sachar, who became Hillel’s first national director in 1933, wrote a “credo for survival” in his 1939 book, Sufferance Is the Badge, identifying Zionism as a “technique for the courageous.” In addition to a safe haven for its inhabitants, Israel offered “inspiration … to conscious, self-respecting Jews in every other part of the world.” In 1967, as president of Brandeis University, Sachar briefly ceased all fundraising for the university and directed would-be donors to buy Israel bonds instead.
Sachar’s Zionism was the norm among early Hillel leadership. A handbook issued in 1941 highlighted the activities of Hillels across the nation, including “a Balfour Day program, a White Paper protest meeting, Palestine night at the Cosmopolitan Club, and a Jewish National Fund campaign” organized by students at Cornell. A 1945 brochure lamented that too many students, “unguided, give themselves to every cause, except that of their own people,” and it highlighted Hillel’s serious Jewish seminars and Hebrew classes, many offered by “students who have been reared in Palestine.” In 1969, Hillel’s national director, Rabbi Benjamin Kahn, backed a program to bring students to Israel to help them combat anti-Israel propaganda on campus. The list goes on. But the goal of critics like Judis is to muddy the waters around Zionism and American-Jewish identity, to divorce American Judaism from the Zionist project. Today’s beleaguered anti-Zionists, he suggests, can look to Hillel’s early years for solace.
People like Judis have effectively won the battle for Hillel’s soul. The organization has learned to waffle. Across its more than 200 pages, Hillel’s recent guide on “Jewish sensibilities” does not mention the words “Zionism” or “Zionist” even once. Frankel hoped that Hillel would push Jews to be prouder and more forceful; today, Hillel’s message is feeble and confused.
THE ‘PROFESSIONALIZATION’ MISTAKE
“Hillel was always progressive,” Richard Joel tells me as we sit in his tidy home office in Cleveland. From 1988 to 2003, Joel served as president and international director of Hillel, before going on to lead Yeshiva University from 2003 to 2017.
Rabbis who gravitated to Hillel never wanted “to be in a traditional setting,” Joel told me. “Many of them were freethinkers. They wanted to be in an academic environment.” This is undoubtedly true; Hillel leaders of the 1920s and ’30s cherished the independence of campus work, in contrast to pulpit positions or formal communal leadership. They were “of campus,” as Joel put it.
It is true that Hillel had long encouraged freedom of thought and programmatic leeway; local Hillel chapters were largely left to their own devices. But Hillel still had a vision. The 1945 Hillel brochure I mentioned charged each Hillel director with being “a kind of sentinel, stationed in a strategic center, commissioned to guard the integrity of Jewish life.” Key to this duty was the capacity to answer the campus anti-Semite. As the brochure explains,
It is important to remember that in European lands, anti-Semites never failed to utilize the universities. These became hotbeds of fanatical race hatred and nationalist terrorism, often stimulated by the professors themselves. . . . The lesson must not be lost here. There is no more important service rendered to Jewish life and, in the larger sense, to American democracy, than through the vigilance of Hillel representatives on the American campus.
In short, Hillel saw itself as protecting Jewish students as well as the American project. The same Hillel brochure lauds Jewish students who served in the American armed forces, recognizing in their service a mortal and material counterpart to the director’s duty to stand strong on behalf of American ideals.
But Joel’s tenure as president coincided with a transformative change in the institution, one that inadvertently tipped Hillel from an organization that attracted some progressives to a progressive organization. Rather than standing up to radicals in the university, Hillel began trying to appease them.
When Joel entered Hillel, B’nai B’rith’s finances were troubled, and many Hillel directors sought independent funding. Given the laissez-faire approach of Hillel’s national office toward individual campus chapters, this made the quality and resources of Hillels across the country highly uneven. Joel sought to change that, severing Hillel’s relationship with B’nai B’rith and instituting accreditation processes for Hillel chapters—which led to many local directors resigning or losing their jobs. Joel also sought to shift Hillel’s identity away from the kind of religious ministry Frankel had started; being a rabbi was no longer a prerequisite for running a Hillel. As Joel put it years ago, “We’re not the synagogue on campus, we’re the provoking infrastructure.”
Joel also sought to give more authority to students. To be sure, Hillel had long championed the two-pronged “Hillel technique” of maintaining a consistent professional staff at each Hillel (as opposed to ad hoc volunteers), while simultaneously promoting student initiative and self-government. But Joel pushed this further, arguing that the “students are owners with rights and responsibilities. The professional staff is not the owner. They’re supposed to be gifted impresarios, who work together with others.” Hillel began scouting for talented nonprofit administrators, rather than spiritual leaders, to run local chapters.
Hillel rabbis were further supplanted by the rise of often-radical Jewish Studies Departments on campuses, which attracted interested Jewish students with the added draw of college credit. Throughout this time, Hillels became more polished and corporatized and effectively run but, in many respects, less forcefully Jewish. The new accrediting model, with its centralization of authority in an international office (Hillel International), turned Hillel into a top-heavy organization, vulnerable to ideological takeover.
And it has been taken over—by a confused progressivism that is basically supra-Jewish. Local Hillels are more indebted to the centralized authority than they have been in the past, but that authority lacks a coherent Jewish vision. Berkeley Hillel, for example, describes itself as a “community garden for the spirit” in which “students continually redefine their relationship with Judaism.” It is “student powered,” and so students are given little meaningful direction.
But in his credo for survival, mentioned above, Abram Sachar said that a serious Jew “must steep himself in his tradition so that he may understand its survival value.” I take “survival value” to mean both the value of Judaism as a civilizational treasure and as an aid to literal survival for Jewish people. Times of crisis, such as the late 1930s when Sachar was writing, underscore the urgency of this call, and institutions of Jewish life must recognize their responsibility.
A CRISIS PLAYBOOK?
Yet Hillel appears insensitive to threat. To an extent, I can sympathize; I was a progressive, too. I speak as a rank stereotype, the liberal Jew “mugged by reality.” When I first became a Ph.D. student of English literature, I wouldn’t have been willing even to speak to a Hillel employee. A lifelong leftist, and in college a member of the International Socialist Organization, I was never prouder than at a Howard Zinn memorial event I organized. Things changed in October 2018 when, well on my way to full-blown radical English professordom, I received a message while standing in a co-op bookstore at the University of Chicago: “Are you still in touch with anyone in Pittsburgh?”
Many American Jews remember the moment they learned of the mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In my gormless shock that day, scrolling the news, I recognized a soul-deep gullibility. I had known that anti-Semitism existed beyond micro-aggressions. But I had failed, profoundly, to believe it. Deadly attacks soon felt almost routine: an April 2019 shooting at a Chabad in Poway, California; a December 2019 stabbing spree at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York; a December 2019 shooting at a New Jersey kosher grocery store, in which three people were murdered.
After each such attack, I would scour my favorite left-wing sites and, when the attacks were mentioned at all, the word “anti-Semitism” was conspicuously absent. Friends, mentors, and fellow leftist organizers, who otherwise stood at the front lines of fights against “hate,” offered token sympathy at best. I took to wearing a kippah and keeping kosher, and decided I had better things to do than debate my colleagues on the merits of Jewish existence. The English Department was no place for a Jew.
Perhaps it was foolish to believe that some Jewish institutions wouldn’t bear the marks of progressive callowness and hypocrisy that I had witnessed in the academy. Haredi Jews like to wear the Gentile fashions of a bygone Europe; left-leaning American Jews absorb academic habits of mind and soul, to the point where many have learned to despise themselves.
This hit home for me at another HIGA gathering, this one in December 2023. I had stumbled on a panel with the word-salad title “Jewish Text, Pluralism, Conflict, and How to Have Dinner with People with Whom We Disagree,” during which 40-odd Hillel staffers were asked what had drawn them to that session. Most replied with some version of the same story: Their coalition-building efforts had failed. Despite all the anti-racism training and open letters, dialogue sessions and prayer events with Muslim students, their so-called allies had vanished. An hour of soul-searching, hand-wringing, and mea culpa-ing ensued. Participants lamented that their woke peers did not realize how much the participants hated Bibi, too. What might they do to tamp down “right-wing” expressions of support for Israel before anyone got the wrong idea? Was anyone getting through to his local imam?
These otherwise smart, talented people had lost the thread. Rather than strengthen their own communities, they simply sought to be welcomed back into the fold of progressive advocacy. In her Atlantic essay on the state of Hillels following the 10/7 attack, Mayim Bialik remembered Hillel for the vibrancy of Jewish life it fostered: “Hillel is where I learned to define my Judaism not by my immigrant grandparents’ experience and the Holocaust, but by the joy and beauty of Jewish culture as it is unfolding to this day.” Hillel’s priorities have changed since then; in internalizing the worst of academic progressive mores, Hillel leaders seek to secure an acknowledgment of themselves as perennial victims in oppressor-oppressed paradigms, while also feeling sheepish at the idea of Jews fighting back or even making concrete arguments for Jewish continuity.
I suspect that many of my colleagues across Hillel do not know whether they are Zionists. Rather than being ardent anti-Zionists, they are simply of the left and therefore feel obligated to cart around habitual shame regarding their genetic makeup and moral instincts. The confusion is the point; the goalposts around progressive etiquette are always shifting. However they might feel about Israel, they cannot fully endorse its defenders or wholly denounce its enemies. But many of their progressive peers—those whose approval they seek—have endorsed and denounced with gusto.
This is why Hillel’s Israel Fellows—many of whom have served their country through force of arms—often make Hillel employees uncomfortable. The difference in cultural disposition is striking. Put bluntly, Israelis want to preserve Jewish civilization—which includes, among other things, continued material existence. American Jews are more inclined to consider Judaism as an abstract cultural or ethical project rather than a human reality. The consequences of that disposition are well expressed by Wisse in her 2007 book, Jews and Power, when she describes prewar European Jewry: “Jews had concentrated on their moral improvement with no political structure in place to defend Jewish civilization or the children who were expected to perpetuate it.” By contrast, Israeli society has been distinguished, since before the establishment of the State, by realpolitik and the defense of Jewish lives against present existential threats.
A few centuries of apparent stability and progress in the West have rendered American Jews unable to face a critical question posed by the historian Christopher Lasch in his study of progressives: “How should nations conduct themselves under sentence of death?”
To answer this question, Hillel must first properly acknowledge the threat, which was made manifest on North American soil in the violence at Concordia University in 2002 and that has since repeatedly emerged at American institutions. Hillel leaders need not abandon Democratic politics wholesale to acknowledge that Jewish students are perennial targets of harassment and intimidation by the left. The accommodationist response—which includes bringing Israel Fellows to campuses to humanize the state—is not sufficient. A crisis playbook is in order.
There was some attempt to create one in 2010, when Hillel International’s then-CEO, Wayne Firestone, established formal guidelines for Hillel regarding Israel. Among them is the injunction that Hillel will not partner with or host any groups or individuals that espouse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, deny Israel’s right to exist, or “exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior toward campus events or guest speakers, or foster an atmosphere of incivility.” Berkeley Hillel offers a good model for how these guidelines might be clearly applied, through its more detailed document titled “Israel-Related Programming Guidelines.”
But Hillel requires more than a generally friendly approach to Israel to meet the needs of its students. It must also be prepared to respond to attacks. After 10/7, Hillel International showered us with “learnings” and “resources,” but a Hillel-wide email on planning public responses—coordinating with law enforcement to arrange counterprotests, prayer nights, rallies, memorials—never appeared. We were constantly assured that these were horrible times and that Hillel’s top executives were grieving with us. But nobody at Hillel International seemed to have any idea what to do next. We ought to have known how to act, and we did not. The campus activists intimidating Jewish students, meanwhile, were well-prepared and well-funded.
Campus intimidation is nothing new; there are countless examples prior to 10/7. As America’s premier Jewish campus institution, Hillel should be prepared with a conduct guide to confront the threats communicated by slogans like “Globalize jihad” and “From the river to the sea.” Hillel should also discourage wishy-washy op-eds by Hillel leaders catering to an already hostile progressive crowd; a shift in orientation is due, so that such work is not celebrated. Any conduct guide ought to emphasize Jewish survival and community strength, as well as support for American ideals, over accommodationist gestures. This is what past Hillel literature sought to communicate—that to be proudly Jewish was to provide a service to both Jews and Gentiles, as well as to bolster the American experiment in self-governance. During his tenure, Richard Joel encouraged the resignations of dozens of Hillel directors who could not execute his vision for a more professional Hillel; the same should be true for Hillel directors who, for example, cannot support Hillel’s Israel guidelines.
Such a guidebook could show American Jewry what it looks like to take survival seriously. And it could teach a generation of young Jews that their communal institutions can have diverse ends but unity of purpose in a time of danger.
THE SERENITY OF CHABAD
There is already one Jewish organization that conducts itself according to such a playbook. Near the end of last spring semester, I visited the Chabad at one of the liberal arts schools my last Hillel served. It was a Friday afternoon, with the sun descending. Inside, some 50 place settings lay on a set of tables snaking through the living room. Plastic cutlery gleamed in the sunlight like the silver of a bygone era. Children raced around the house and onto the porch, while students filtered in.
After saying goodbye to the students I had come with, I walked back the way I came and watched as pairs and groups of students came strolling up the sidewalk in my direction. Long skirts swished below midriffs. Bootcut jeans covered high-tops. Studs and nose rings gleamed aggressively from shy faces. It felt like a street in Jerusalem with Shabbos coming on.
On one of the most woke campuses in North America, Chabad thrives. Students who are queer, trans, disabled, femme, poz, anti-Zionist, diasporist, Yiddishist, Marxist, atheist—you name it, they’re there, hosted by a family that believes in God, family, the Rebbe, and traditional gender roles.
How does Chabad do it? According to the Hillelian big-tent approach, you must make everyone feel welcome. To achieve this, the educational materials from Hillel International suggest, you must be as flexible as possible. The result is that we are as noncommittal as possible, and by way of this good intention, Hillel is emptied of content. By contrast, Chabad is Chabad. Chabad families aren’t insular, but they have standards and beliefs and do not compromise. They are happy to have friendly and thoughtful conversations, but not because they think everyone’s truth is equally valid; they want people to arrive at the truth as such. And, by the litmus test of America’s (Jewish) campus radicals and bohemians, that approach seems to be working.
As part of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s aim to increase religious observance, Chabad on Campus was formed in 1969. Its goal is to kindle in Jewish students a desire to live a life of Torah and mitzvot. Despite post-dating Hillel by half a century, this campus-focused arm of the larger Chabad movement is Hillel’s undisputed rival in the college space. To judge by their interactions with the Chabad families, known as shluchim, or “emissaries,” who now represent the movement on nearly 500 college campuses, students seem to find the pitch persuasive. Ask a Jewishly involved student where to go for an authentic Shabbat dinner on campus and most will say Chabad. Some will say their own apartment. Few will say Hillel. In fact, many Hillels don’t offer the most basic Jewish services, a Shabbat meal or service every week, blaming “low attendance.” When they do offer a Shabbat experience, it might be Repro Shabbat, also known as Reproductive Justice Shabbat, sponsored by Jews for Abortion Access.
All the qualities I suggest that Hillel could gain by having a crisis playbook, Chabad comes by naturally. The organization and its representatives are, first and foremost, authentically Jewish. At a time when their sense of self is in formation, young men and women are drawn to people who are confident in themselves. Being countercultural with conviction (as is any Chabad family on a typical college campus) is an easy way to display that kind of confidence. Chabad is also supportive of Israel and pro-Israel activism on campus, even though, theologically, Chabad is at best non-Zionist. That ability—to meet students where they are at—is a remarkable sign of internal strength.
Because of this confidence, there was little awkwardness or fumbling in Chabad’s response following October 7. There were rallies and vigils across the country, events featuring IDF reservists and Nova Festival survivors, and an unflinching sense that Chabad supports the mission to protect the Israeli people.
Most fundamentally, though, Chabad is united in its focus on Jewish thriving. Whatever the debates that happen behind closed doors, campus shluchim send the same message: Jews should live rich Jewish lives, raise big families, and grow in joy through mitzvot until Moshiach comes. Chabad knows that this can be accomplished only by thinking generationally, beyond the appeal to current fashion and diktat.
THE REAL THREAT
What keeps me up at night is not the campus hordes. As I have tried to explain, I worry mostly about Hillel’s reaction to them. That is, I worry about the internal slackening of the Jewish attitude toward survival.
The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observes that humankind is passing through a civilizational bottleneck. AI, social media, and accelerating digitization, alongside the deleterious social consequences of these phenomena, put all of what has passed for human culture at risk. The digital age “is killing us softly,” he writes, “by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.”
What if we looked at the rise of campus anti-Semitism not as a threat but as a measure of internal strength in the fight for human culture? On the surface there are plenty of successes, in large part thanks to the efforts of the current administration to hold universities accountable. Internally it’s a different story.
The equation of Judaism with social justice is a key spiritual failing of Hillel. It has the unforgivable consequence of tying Judaism’s significance to Jews’ adherence to ever-changing moral litmus tests du jour, up to and including hatred of Jews. But Judaism as a civilizational project has survived in large part because of the steadfastness of its moral vision, often despite being in opposition to mainstream cultural mores. Its enduring teachings, including the gifts of hospitality and charity and profound respect for one’s parents, are not modeled after what is normal or popular at any given moment.
In 1924, the year after Hillel was founded, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, limiting immigration. The number of legal Jewish immigrants dropped from 119,000, in the year before the bill’s passage, to 10,000 the following year. The gates were closed. Instead of the status quo of mass immigration, which for 40 years led American Jewry to believe that its native-born population would be continually renewed and replenished from abroad, now the existing population was all that Jews could practically rely on. American Jewry would have to renew itself.
Hillel, then, didn’t just provide young Jews with social and spiritual community in an era of incipient assimilation; it gave American Jewry a tool to fashion new generations to lead and sustain the community. In those years, Hillel believed in the future. Today, still, Hillel is uniquely constituted to lead American Jewish youth, the rising generation.
But to do so, Hillel must embrace the gifts of the past, and recognize that civilizations can die; history is littered with the corpses. The Jews are a small people, vulnerable to destruction along with their ideas. That is not to say that extinction is their fate—but, to borrow a line from Charles Krauthammer, “only that it can be.”
Hillel has a decision to make. Whether to face not only Lasch’s question, but Hillel the Elder’s—If I am not for myself, who will be for me?—as well as the choice Moses put before the People of Israel long ago, as recorded in Deuteronomy: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live.”
Photo: Image capture ©2020 Google
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