Selected Press Clips

Selected

Press Clips

& Ghost Writing

Jeff Rubin 10627 Millet Seed Hill, Columbia, MD 21044 Phone: (410) 241-1326 Email: jerubin@hillel.org, rubinink@gmail.com

The Wall Street Journal Monday, April 29, 2002

Colleges Court Jewish Students In Effort to Boost Rankings

By Daniel Golden As other exhibitors hawked prayer shawls and skullcaps at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Convention in Boston last December, Rabbi David Davis was selling something not generally associated with Judaism: Vanderbilt University.

From a corner booth, Rabbi Davis handed out Vanderbilt brochures and buttons, spreading the message that the Nashville, Tenn., institution – the only university represented at the conference – was looking for Jewish students. “I was surprised,” said Harvey Weiner, a Boston lawyer active in the reform Jewish movement, who pocketed a Vanderbilt pencil.

“I never knew a Jewish student who went to Vanderbilt.”

Vanderbilt is far from the only U.S. university seeking to boost Jewish enrollment. In fact, competition for top Jewish students is prompting a flurry of new Jewish cultural centers and Judaic Studies programs at universities across the country. But at Vanderbilt and a few other universities, including some officially Christian campuses, the unabashed wooing of the Jewish community has struck some Jews and non-Jews alike as a questionable new form of ethnic profiling – even though it’s based on a seemingly positive stereotype.

Although other ethnic and racial groups, notably blacks and Hispanics, have been targeted by many universities, that effort has been largely to promote diversity or to increase opportunity for the economically disadvantaged. Something else is driving the quest for more Jews – about which Vanderbilt is unusually forthright. It wants them to raise its academic standing.

“Yes, we’re targeting Jewish students,” Chancellor Gordon Gee told a March 17 board meeting of the Vanderbilt affiliate of Hillel, the nonprofit national Jewish campus organization.

“There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not affirmative action. That’s smart thinking.”

Mr. Gee, who left the presidency of Brown University for Vanderbilt two years ago, says niche marketing to Jewish students is part of its “elite strategy” to lift Vanderbilt to Ivy League status. “Jewish students, by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a

much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life,” he said in an interview.

Some Jews welcome the efforts by Vanderbilt and others as a refreshing change from the days when Jewish enrollment was capped by quotas at many of the best U.S. colleges. But it leaves others unsettled. They say it perpetuates an unfounded perception – of Jews as an intellectual elite – that demeans other groups in comparison and has been used over the years to stir anti-Semitic resentments. Because Jews tend to perform well on college-entrance tests, administrators “may expect that Jews will bring a certain wit and cleverness and discernment,” says Jacob Neusner, a professor at Bard College and noted Judaic Studies scholar. “But we may not be able to give them what they want.”

Scott Allen, Vanderbilt’s Baptist chaplain, says the strategy of recruiting Jews to improve academic stature denigrates the Southern white Christians who dominate the school’s student body. If he were told that Jews were better students than other groups, he says, “my first reaction would be, ‘Wait a minute. I want to see factual research that would support this. Because I don’t believe it.’”

According to the nonprofit College Board, which administers the SAT college-entrance exam – a major component of most college rankings and admissions decisions – last year’s college-bound Jewish seniors averaged 1161 out of a possible 1600. That was second only to Unitarians (who averaged 1209) among 35 religions. The national average was 1020.

According to the College Board, some 27,120 students identified themselves as Jews; 2,354 said they were Unitarian. The board says it asks test-takers about their religious affiliation so it can sell their names to colleges seeking specific denominations. The board declined to identify colleges that buy Jewish names.

At Ivy League schools, about 23% of students are Jewish, even though Jews comprise just 2% of the U.S. population, according to Hillel. These universities say they seek top students regardless of ethnicity. As a result of federal-court rulings against racial preferences in college admissions, it’s considered dicey for a non-denominational college to recruit students of a particular faith. Specialists in affirmative-action law say that, while Vanderbilt as a private school has more leeway than public universities, it could be vulnerable to an anti-discrimination claim from an equally-qualified Christian student turned down in favor of a Jew. Vanderbilt officials say they are simply trying to recruit more Jewish applicants, not to use religion as a factor in admissions. They say that bringing more highly qualified Jews into the applicant pool will naturally yield more admissions of Jewish students. “We’re about broadening the applicant pool, not about quotas,” Mr. Gee says. He says Vanderbilt is also trying to increase enrollment of blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

Avid Pursuit

Despite their names, schools such as Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University are also avidly pursuing Jews. TCU, affiliated with the Protestant denomination Disciples of Christ, hired its first Jewish Studies professor last year. It has also initiated merit scholarships specifically for Jewish students and a Jewish lecture series featuring Nobel laureate Elie Weisel and others. Admissions dean Ray Brown says the main goal is diversity, but an academic upgrade would be “one of the wonderful sidebenefits.”

At SMU, the first Judaic Studies professor arrives this fall, and the first Hillel house opened in January. Like Vanderbilt, SMU acknowledges the academic aspirations underlying these overtures: “There appears to be a strong correlation between the quality of your student body and the size of your Jewish population,” says Ellen Jackofsky, associate provost at SMU, which has 300 Jews out of 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

Susquehanna University, a Lutheran school in Selinsgrove, Pa., a small town without a synagogue, started a Jewish Studies program three years ago and now offers a minor in the field; a fledgling Hillel group has now also been formed.

Susquehanna, where Jews comprise just 2% of the 1,800student body, also runs a Jewish cuisine class, offering bagels, matzo and gefilte fish. As of February, applications from Jewish students had more than doubled to 45. Chris Markle, director of admissions, says he has seen the College Board’s data on Jewish test scores, and Susquehanna’s outreach to Jews is part of “increasing the quality of our applicant pool.”

Vanderbilt, once a popular destination for Southern Jews, has seen Jewish enrollment dwindle to 2% to 4% today from 7% to 9% in the 1970s. That’s the second lowest Jewish enrollment, based on Hillel data, among the nation’s top 25 universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. Of those, only the University of Notre Dame, a Jesuit institution, has a lower percentage of Jewish students.

In the U.S. News rankings, Vanderbilt has lagged behind two of its main rivals, Emory University in Atlanta and Washington University in St. Louis, in part because of lower average SAT scores. Vanderbilt stands at No. 21 in the latest list, three spots behind Emory and seven behind Washington. At least 35% of Washington students and about 30% of Emory students are Jewish, according to Hillel and other sources.

Washington’s admissions director, Nanette Tarbouni, says Washington doesn’t track applicants by religion, bit it does recruit at private Jewish high schools in Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and other cities. Emory, which also recruits at private Jewish high schools, says its application form contains an optional question about religious preference so campus religious groups can notify incoming freshmen about their programs.

Vanderbilt’s new recruitment strategy originated in an effort to broaden the university’s reputation beyond its regional base. At first, Vanderbilt concentrated on drawing students from outside the South. Then, in 1996, Vanderbilt assigned Greg Perfetto, now assistant provost, to identify other ways that Vanderbilt could bolster its national standing.

Mr. Perfetto discovered that Vanderbilt was competitive with Emory, Washington and other peers in every demographic sector but one: Jewish students. Jews were spurning Vanderbilt, the school’s surveys showed, because students and parents were concerned about Vanderbilt’s limited facilities for Jewish students, as well as Nashville’s Bible-belt image.

Mr. Perfetto soon had an ally in Ettore “Jim” Infante, a mathematician who arrived as dean of arts and sciences in 1997. Mr. Infante says he had learned as a faculty member at Brown University that Jews “are very good students who contribute to a campus’s intellectual vitality.” Adds Mr. Infante, who retired in 2000, “I was after the kind of intellectual ferment that frankly is characteristic of New York City.”

Like Mr. Perfetto, Mr. Infante scrutinized data on Jewish applicants. He also examined how Ivy League universities ramped up Jewish enrollment. For example, he says, Princeton in the 1980’s cultivated ties with predominantly Jewish high schools by offering merit scholarships to their graduates. Princeton declined comment. Mr. Infante’s conclusion: Vanderbilt needed a Hillel House to reassure Jewish parents. In October 1999, Vanderbilt agreed to lease a prime parcel across from the gymnasium to Hillel at a nominal cost.

The issue of stereotyping, Mr. Perfetto says, never crossed his mind. “It isn’t that we were targeting Jewish students,” says Mr. Perfetto, “If we were doing anything, we were targeting Vanderbilt. We were saying, ‘How does Vanderbilt need to change to be attractive to this population?’ ” The arrival of Mr. Gee, who helped build a Hillel house at Ohio State University during a stint as president there, accelerated the pace. Mr. Gee, who sees affinities between his own Mormon faith and Jewish culture, decreed that contributors to the Hillel project would receive “donor credit” from the university as a whole, entitling them to various alumni benefits. Awarding such credit for gifts to outside groups is unusual. The Hillel facility is expected to open in May, and Vanderbilt is seeking donors to endow two chairs in its Jewish studies program, once considered a pioneer in the field but long neglected.

Mr. Gee also hired Rabbi Davis from a Nashville synagogue.

The 65-year-old rabbi has a history of increasing the Jewish presence at unlikely places, having helped establish a Jewish Studies chair at the University of San Francisco, a Catholic school. Rabbi Davis, who says the university needs a “pro-

Jewish message to counter the perception that Vanderbilt is not interested in Jewish students,” has crisscrossed the country, pleading with fellow reform rabbis to promote the university to their congregations.

The lone vocal dissenter has been Vanderbilt’s dean of admissions, William M. Shain, who came to Vanderbilt in 1988. Mr. Shain, who describes himself as “technically” Jewish but wouldn’t elaborate further, says Vanderbilt shouldn’t aspire to be “another Penn.” One-third of the University of Pennsylvania’s student body is Jewish, according to Hillel. Mr. Shain also says a heavy-handed approach is likely to backfire. Several guidance counselors at predominantly Jewish high schools, he says, have told him they find that any singling out of Jews for recruitment to be “self-serving and reprehensible” with “overtones of antiSemitism just by virtue of the concept of targeting the group.”

Mr. Shain has resisted urgings from colleagues to restore an optional religious-preference question on the student application form for admission, which could help identify Jewish applicants. It was dropped by Mr. Shain’s predecessor, who felt it might be perceived as a tool to weed out nonChristians. Mr. Perfetto says he would “love” to include the question. Mr. Shain says it is “useless” and “would alienate some people.”

Puzzling Presence Mr. Shain also rejected Rabbi Davis’s request to accompany him on a recruiting foray to suburban Maryland high schools.

The dean says the rabbi’s presence “would be puzzling” to non-Jewish students and cut into the time needed to give an overview of the entire university. In addition, Mr. Shain says, high-profile outreach of the sort Rabbi Davis favors may antagonize top Jewish students who want to be judged on their own merits, and attract weaker ones hoping for an admissions break. Mr. Shain says he supports Jewish recruitment – as long as it’s “done with wires invisible.”

Some of Mr. Shain’s reservations are shared by officials at Roslyn High School in Roslyn, N.Y., a heavily Jewish suburb.

During the last two decades of the 20th Century, no Roslyn High graduates enrolled at Vanderbilt; now three Roslyn graduates, all Jews, go there. The Roslyn officials say they weren’t aware that Vanderbilt was specifically targeting Jewish students for academic merit but would be deeply offended by such a notion.

Spokesman Barry Edelson says Roslyn High students are taught that “a positive stereotype is just as pernicious as a negative one,” though role-playing games in which a black or Hispanic student asks a Jewish classmate for homework help based on the stereotype of Jewish intelligence. “We have to attend to the individual needs of students and move society

away from recruiting based on backgrounds,” Mr. Edelson says.

Now non-sectarian, Vanderbilt opened in 1875 as a Methodist school, the faith of its founder, steamship magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Its first Jewish student enrolled the following year, and more soon followed, primarily from Nashville itself – such as the late singer and TV host Dinah Shore, who graduated in 1938.

Still, Jewish students were marginalized. The late Daniel May, a 1920 alumnus, once recalled that “everybody belonged to a fraternity except for the Jews,” who had to start their own.

Beginning in 1950, Mr. May occupied what he called the “Jewish chair” on the board of trustees. Today, two of Vanderbilt’s 51 trustees are Jewish.

After World War II, as Ivy League schools lifted quotas, Nashville’s Jewish students left home. A Jewish sorority once headed by Ms. Shore closed in 1965. “Since have been at Vanderbilt, there have been very few Jewish girls enrolled,” its president wrote sadly. “I do not care to elaborate on possible reasons for this.”

In the ensuing decades, while other top colleges opened Hillel houses and kosher kitchens, Vanderbilt attracted an influx of evangelical Christians. One Jewish freshman in 1980 was proselytized so relentlessly by dorm-mates that she converted to Christianity. After talking to her parents, she soon recanted, transferred to a state university, and chronicled her Vanderbilt experience of being “fed the New Testament for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks” for a Jewish newspaper in Miami.

Last year, 23.7% of Vanderbilt freshmen identified themselves as born-again Christians in a national survey, nearly twice the proportion at elite private universities. “ ‘What do you mean you don’t believe in Jesus?’ is a question I get often,” says Vanderbilt junior Daniel Bar-Nahum, who belongs to Vanderbilt’s only remaining Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi. Although most AEP chapters are overwhelmingly Jewish, Vanderbilt is so short of Jews that half the pledges it admits there are Christians.

The lead donor to Vanderbilt’s new Hillel project, Ben Schulman, a businessman from Carlsbad, Calif., and 1938 Vanderbilt alumnus, says he and his wife once vowed never to contribute money to his alma mater. In the 1960’s, Vanderbilt declined to admit their daughter, who enrolled at Stanford University instead; Mr. and Mrs. Schulman blamed anti-Semitism. “I wouldn’t give this money if there wasn’t a change in attitude,” says Mr. Schulman, who last year pledged $1 million of the $2.2 construction budget.

Vanderbilt officials say they believe their recruitment efforts have already boosted Jewish applications. Freshman Brett Sklaw, a graduate of Roslyn High, says he chose Vanderbilt over Cornell and Colgate Universities because it offered the

most financial aid, and he was impressed by its resolve to increase Jewish enrollment.

“I don’t want Vanderbilt to get too Jewish, because then it would be too much like my hometown,” says Mr. Sklaw, who scored 1410 on the SAT, 90 points above the average for last year’s entering class. “A little more Jewish – that wouldn’t be so bad.”

The Wall Street Journal DE GUSTIBUS

Reviving Judaism Consultant-speak goes religious.

by NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY Friday, January 5, 2007 A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton got started on a new "listening tour." Her first one, during the 2000 Senate campaign, was aimed at soliciting the ideas of New York voters on what legislative issues were important to them.

This one is aimed at hearing the thoughts of Democratic strategists on the subject of her presidential run. But the idea behind the tours remained the same: Find out what the people want--and, if possible, give it to them.

In politics, such an approach has an irrefutable democratic logic. But is it well suited to religion? Arnold Eisen, the chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary, has spent the past few months on a "listening tour" of his own, holding town-hall meetings around the country to figure out how to reinvigorate Conservative Judaism. Mr. Eisen is looking to find out what Jews want--and, if possible, give it to them.

Trying to make Judaism more popular is not a new idea.

Jewish leaders have worried for decades that high rates of intermarriage and assimilation are causing the Jewish population to diminish dramatically. And they are right.

Between 1990 and 2000, the American Jewish population declined to 5.2 million from 5.5 million. With Jewish women getting married later in life and having fewer children, this trend is likely only to accelerate.

But the most recent response to this crisis has been less than inspiring. The Jewish Week recently published "17 Seriously Cool Ideas to Remake New York's Jewish Community." These included creating a Jewish culinary institute, building a kibbutz in the Big Apple, providing high-quality Jewish toddler care, hosting a hipper Israeli Independence Day parade, and baking better kosher pizza.

Perhaps these ideas were meant to be a little tongue-incheek, but other ideas are not--and probably should be. Take a new project called Synaplex. Sponsored by the Star Foundation, Synaplex is, according to its Web site, "designed to provide people with new reasons to make the synagogue the place to be on Shabbat." About 125 synagogues are already "enabling people to celebrate Shabbat the way they want to."

What does that mean? Instead of attending a traditional service, Rabbi Hayim Herring, Star's executive director, tells me, some people would do "Medi-Torah" or "Torah and Yoga." Others might attend a lecture or go to a musical service followed by a "latte cart." And still others might prefer to attend a Friday night wine-and-cheese reception.

Rabbi Herring says that some of the participating synagogues double or triple their attendance on the day of a "Synaplex" Shabbat, but it's not clear whether such one-day surges result in long-term membership gains. Religious groups that have grown the fastest in recent years (including Orthodox Judaism) are the ones that demand the most of their adherents, not the ones that offer religion (and refreshments) cafeteria-style.

Rabbi Herring acknowledges this trend when I mention it to him. But he is not sure that it applies to the people he is trying to serve. He believes that "one failure of some of the Jewish movements is bludgeoning people with the notion of mitzvah [commandments], as opposed to taking people where they are and being patient enough to not impose their own vision of spirituality."

As it happens, the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, whose mission is "to inspire a renaissance of Jewish life," gives money to the Synaplex project. Adam Bronfman, the foundation's managing director, tells me that "each individual accesses meaning differently." He himself was "born a Jew and decided to live a Jewish life," he says, and he wants "others to access that if that's what they choose."

This way of thinking is making its way onto college campuses, too, where Jewish leaders hope to persuade students to remain Jews and not drift into the surrounding secular culture. Wayne Firestone, the president of Hillel, the Foundation for Campus Jewish Life, says that the "millennials," the members of today's college generation, have "many different options" on campus. Their identity is "similar to a Windows operating system," with many programs running at once. The Jewish "program," in other words, has lots of competition.

After extensive surveys, Hillel has concluded that many unaffiliated Jews, in Mr. Firestone's words, "don't feel welcome" by the Jewish offerings on campus. I was surprised by this claim, having always thought that college was probably the easiest place to practice Judaism. At big universities particularly, services of all types are easily accessible. Kosher food is not hard to come by. Religious celebrations abound.

But if the surveys are correct, some Jewish students are still feeling left out. The problem, according to Mr. Bronfman (whose foundation also gives to Hillel), can be thought of in terms of ice cream: "Some people want rocky road and some people want vanilla and some want strawberry. But Hillel was only able to provide one aspect, one flavor."

So Hillel is expanding, hoping to double the number of students involved in campus Jewish life. It is offering community-service trips with Torah studies; hosting its activities in non-Hillel buildings; even reaching out to American Jews studying abroad.

There is nothing wrong with these ideas or anything else in Hillel's "five-year strategic plan," and they may result in greater numbers of students taking Jewish ideas and culture seriously. Indeed, the other outreach efforts, however tacky or trivial, may also strengthen Jewish life in America. Still, there is something strange about all this consultant-speak.

Listening tours, marketing gambits and strategic plans may be an inescapable part of modern life, even in the realm of religion. But in the end, for a particular faith to thrive, God can't just be for dessert.

Ms. Riley is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's Taste page.

checkpoints on the quad, pretending to be Israeli soldiers as they search backpacks? Or if the Muslim Students Association stages a mock war-crimes tribunal, with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, as chief defendant?

Jewish Collegians Prepare to Defend Israel on the Campuses

''You have to be physically present,'' Bracha Brumer of the University of Toronto suggested. ''Submit to the checkpoint yourself. People could write on their shirts, 'No bombs, no checkpoints.' ''

By JODI WILGOREN

Though Arab and Muslim students have no parallel leadership boot camp, they too are preparing for the fall. They plan to have vigils on scores of campuses in connection with the anniversary of the current intifada's start last Sept. 28, and to spread the checkpoint idea -- tried last year at the University of California at Berkeley, among other campuses -- far and wide.

As they do every summer, Jewish student leaders flocked to a mountain retreat here this week to trade ideas, hone leadership skills, meet potential mates.

But this year for the first time, the 400 students, from 155 colleges and universities, also spent an entire day training to defend Israel, arming themselves for the public relations war over the Middle East raging on campuses from Berkeley to Boston.

As the first anniversary of the onset of the current Palestinian uprising approaches in September, leaders of Jewish organizations are anticipating a surge in campus protests over Middle East politics, part of a broader growth in student activism. After a year of increased demonstrations, ArabAmerican groups plan a campaign this fall, modeled on the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980's, to urge universities to divest themselves of holdings in companies doing business with Israel.

And so the message at the conference, sponsored by Hillel, the leading Jewish campus organization, is be prepared, be positive, be proactive. ''As much as we are counting on our soldiers back in Israel to protect Israel, we are counting on you,'' Giora Becher, Israel's consul general in Philadelphia, told the students, many in Tshirts with Hebrew lettering. ''You are our soldiers, you are our commandos, in the public campaign we are having here.''

Like similar seminars for Israeli diplomats, the program urged students to stay focused on the issues of sovereignty and security, and not to let well-organized, impassioned proPalestinian groups frame the debate as one of human rights.

Acknowledging that even students active in Jewish life often have weak connections to Israel, the Hillel classes also tried to impart facts, with a spin, about the history, the politics and the culture of the Middle East. Along with rabbis and Israeli politicians, the roster of speakers included P.R. professionals schooled in hasbarah, Hebrew for what literally translates as ''explanation'' but in common usage means propaganda.

In one workshop, ''The A B C's of Zionist Legitimacy: How to Feel More Secure About Discussing Israel on Campus,'' students pondered responses to scenarios imagined from the campus headlines of last year. What if Arab students erect

Berkeley will also be host this fall to a conference where students hope to start the divestment drive, complete with mock refugee camps like the shantytowns of another era of campus protest. ''South Africa was the 80's; Israel, for 50 years, has been an apartheid state,'' said Altaf Husain, president of the national Muslim Students Association. ''Even if the Jewish kids are to wake up and try to counteract this Muslim, pro-Palestinian, pro-Jerusalem effort, the facts will speak for themselves.''

Jews far outnumber Arabs on most campuses, but are often less united in opinions on the Middle East. Hillel is an umbrella group most concerned with Jewish identity broadly, not Zionism in particular; students may join for religious fellowship, bagel brunches or kosher-hot-dog-eating contests -- or to get dates. (''The point of the experience is to make Jewish marriages,'' the philanthropist Michael Steinhardt told students here, only half-joking.)

But as violence flares in the Middle East, Hillel leaders become de facto advocates, and they are frequently no match for Arab students whose relatives live in the occupied territories or the refugee camps. ''These Muslim kids know so much about what's going on, they know their arguments,'' said Mitchell Shankman, 19, from Ohio State University. ''We just know we're Jewish and we enjoy being Jewish.''

So Hillel sent 40 students, including Mr. Shankman, on a three-week mission to Israel this summer for a crash course on the conflict.

The one-day seminar here at Camp Moshava, a religiousZionist summer camp on a tree-rimmed hill about 150 miles from New York, had similar goals. It also reflected a growing attention to Israel within Hillel, which has helped send 10,000 college students on 10-day trips there since January 2000.

Lenny Ben-David, a consultant on Israeli affairs, urged the students here to plan demonstrations for 100 days dating from the bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria on Aug. 9. Brian Jaffee, director of Hamagshimim, a campus Zionist group, suggested events on behalf of Israeli soldiers missing in action.

As the sun set on students dancing with Israeli flags around a makeshift paper Western Wall and singing ''Am Yisroel Chai'' - ''The Nation of Israel Lives'' -- the challenge facing the Hillel leaders was clear. In small groups reviewing the sessions, many students complained that the seminars had been onesided rather than a source of unbiased information. ''I'm here to relax and learn things -- I'm not here to become an activist,'' said a young man in a football jersey, who escaped the workshops to pass much of the afternoon listening to Ozzy Osbourne. ''They're preaching how they want us to act; I don't want to be told how to act.''

Another student admitted that she had known little about Israel that morning, but was unsure about what she had learned. ''I want to be informed,'' she said, ''but I wanted to be informed on both sides.''

Photos: The campers sorted through beads with Hebrew lettering.; Jewish student leaders devoted one day at this camp to training for the public relations war on the Mideast.

(Photographs by Christopher Barth for The New York Times)

said Padraic Bartlett, a sophomore at the University of Chicago who works with the Episcopal group on campus, based in Brent House. "We don't bellow, Cotton Matherstyle, the perils of damnation at our classmates."

Peer Ministers Lead Search for God in College Dormitories

By MAREK FUCHS Although it has long been common for a college student with a problem or a question to amble down the floor into the room of his resident assistant, a growing number of students have the option of dropping in on a campus peer minister.

Unlike the resident assistant, trained and deputized by the university's housing department, peer ministers get their training from the campus minister and most often deal with the spirituality of their fellow students.

Picture a resident assistant for the soul.

At many colleges, like the College of New Rochelle in New York, peer ministers, just like the resident assistants, arrive on the campus early for a weeklong orientation. They practice listening and counseling skills and, to varying degrees, receive religious education.

At some colleges, individual religious groups run their own peer ministry programs; at others, like the College of New Rochelle, the program might be based in a particular religion (in this case, Roman Catholic), but are also ecumenical in spirit and open to many comers. New Rochelle, which had about a half-dozen peer ministers in 2000, has 19 today, including two who are Buddhist and four who do not identify themselves with any denomination.

At the orientation of the group, which promotes a large amount of charity work, Helen Wolf, the director of campus ministries, spent time trying to balance a strain of secular humanism among the peer ministers with more traditional threads of religious thought.

The forms of peer ministering abound, although the names sometime vary. Hillel, a Jewish student organization, runs several peer-minister-style programs. One places recent college graduates at about 70 campuses, including places like the University of Kansas, to help students discover their Jewish identity. Another involves pairing Jewish students who have more religious education with those looking for it.

Peer ministers sometimes play an evangelical role for their faiths.

"Being a peer minister here isn't about tallying up baptisms or proselytizing the incoming freshman on the way to chem lab,"

More commonly, Mr. Bartlett said, peer ministers lend an open ear to classmates who are discovering themselves spiritually. And even if they bring no one new to the flock, the Rev. Stacy Alan, chaplain at Brent House, said the church was well served.

With clerics and lay leaders aging, a new generation of leader is being groomed in the form of the peer minister. At Brent House, they have the option to give sermons.

Mariel Fernandez, a sophomore who also works as a peer minister at Brent House, said fellow students approached her not only on everyday issues like homesickness, but also on religious ones.

When a fellow sophomore spoke to her recently about how she was a Christian who observed the holidays but did not see faith playing a large role in her life, Ms. Fernandez urged her to attend services.

"A lot of students deliberately see college as a place to cut off everything from home, which means religion, too," said Ms. Fernandez, who sees part of her role as encouraging a reconnection. This frequently involves answering questions from students who see her strongly held faith as a bit of a curiosity and encouraging them to try a service.

Ed Franchi, executive director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association in Cincinnati, said the wide use of campus ministers represented a flattening of hierarchal structures since the 1960's, within religious organizations, on college campuses and in society at large.

Mr. Franchi, who said there had been a sharp rise in the number of peer ministers in the last decade, described their prevalence as part of a recognition by many faiths that "for the college-age group, peer relationships are important in everything, particularly in faith."

"Even the schools that are icons of Catholic education are realizing that large professional staffs of campus ministers can only go so far," Mr. Franchi said.

Iona College, a Catholic institution in New Rochelle, has about a dozen peer ministers, each of whom has at least one opendoor night in his or her dormitory room each week.

"For 18- to 22-year-olds, there is a countercultural element to the search for God," said Carl Procario-Foley, director of the Center for Campus Ministries at Iona. "Students have to know what other students are doing - and not just the religious geeks, but others, too."

There are also more pedestrian reasons for the turn toward peer ministers: a professional campus minister might not be available 24 hours a day, but a peer minister living in a dormitory most often is.

For Catholics especially, peer ministers have been picking up some of the slack in religious education among students who are less likely than their parents to have gone through Catholic grammar and high schools. There are about 11,000 Catholic ministry sites on college campuses around the nation, Mr. Franchi said, with about 5 to 12 peer ministers in each.

Even at the University of Notre Dame, where there are about three dozen campus ministers on the staff and priests and nuns living in dorms, there is a form of peer ministering. Brett Perkins, director of Protestant Student Resources and Catholic Peer Ministries, said the admissions office passed along to him the names of 150 to 200 incoming freshmen who had shown leadership in religious settings.

"They flag them," Mr. Perkins said, "and invitations go out.

They are already seen as leaders, so we don't need to procrastinate."

The added hands and eyes on the spiritual life of college students has shifted the role of campus ministers and clerics, Mr. Perkins said, making them freer to concentrate on sacramental life, as well as administration.

It is all quite a way from the lone resident assistant, parsing out rules on overnight guests.

At the College of New Rochelle, Kathryn Tyranski, a senior, became a peer minister in her freshman year after working as one in high school. Initially, however, she felt insecure about counseling older students in any way. But with a year under her belt, Ms. Tyranski said, she began to play a larger role in other students' spiritual lives by her sophomore year.

On the Chicago campus, Ms. Fernandez said she was delighted with what she saw.

"These days," she said, "girls can be acolytes and college students can be ministers. Whatever the world is coming to, I have to say that I like it."

“We don’t mind that there’s not discussion. What we really mind is the fact that they target us and they come after us specifically. We don't come after them. We stick to our events," Khalid said.

On Israel, Shifted Ground

Fraidlin, while agreeing that the climate is “not so good,” otherwise disputed that characterization of pro-Israel students at Emory. “We don’t put down the other side ever.

We’re just pro our side.”

March 6, 2009 The ground seems to have shifted, activists on all sides say.

What they make of it varies.

A shift toward more visible pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiment has been profound on some campuses, prompted, in part, by the winter war in Gaza. Where some describe a corresponding disintegration of civil discourse or a scapegoating of Israel for a complex set of problems, others celebrate a newfound space in which to be critical of Israel -to mount a challenge to what they see as a dominant discourse, so to speak.  The two perspectives don't have to go hand in hand, but at times, they seem to.

Take Emory University, for example, where about a third of undergraduates are Jewish. “The situation’s very interesting because in the past Emory was not a political school at all,” said Jessica Fraidlin, a sophomore involved with several Israel advocacy organizations, including Emory Students for Israel.

“We’ve always had a very strong Jewish community, but we’ve never had an opposing side.”

For the first time this year, Emory hosted several events as part of "Israeli Apartheid Week," an annual, international campaign that ends Sunday. The slate of events included a rally, a talk titled “Understanding Apartheid: From South Africa to Israel,” and a lecture Thursday by Norman G. Finkelstein, a political scientist known for his harsh critiques of Israeli policies and "the Holocaust industry" (and, in higher education circles, for being denied tenure at DePaul University).

Saba Khalid, a junior involved with Israeli Apartheid Week and a member of Emory Advocates for Justice in Palestine, said the group has not been well-received since its founding last spring. “We’ve actually had a lot of opposition, which is understandable, but very negative opposition,” Khalid said.

Last semester, for instance, the group’s chalkings to promote “Week against the Apartheid Wall” were crossed out and replaced with anti-Arab scrawls like “Arabs Go Home," she said.

“If there’s an open forum and we go it turns into a shouting match,” said Khalid, adding that it's a small handful of students who get the rest going.

Of the chalking-related incident, she said, “I’m not going to say it’s not true. There are radicals on both sides. But we have condemned the people who did it, and EAJP continues to highlight those people and say they’re representative of the Jewish community, and they’re not representative of the Jewish community.

“It’s become a propaganda war; it’s kind of who can scream the loudest. EAJP wants their voices heard and it doesn’t matter how they get their point across. They’re going to get it across and to me that’s not academic. You need facts, figures, you need intelligent conversations. ... I'll even hand it to them, Norman Finkelstein coming to campus, at least they're bringing a scholar to campus. To me, that's OK,” said Fraidlin, who on Wednesday was wearing a blue shirt with white lettering that read, “Stand for Israel.”

She added that students on all sides are still in an adjustment period. “We haven’t really sorted out our feelings yet. We know that we don’t agree with their side and we don’t know how to handle it, really. Both sides are really at fault.”

Student Activism “I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen a more shrill tone to much of the criticism of Israel. Whether it’s in the campus quad, whether it’s rallies with signs, whether it’s blog postings to articles in the campus press, whether it’s question and answer sessions at academic fora about Gaza or about American policy toward Israel, it’s safe to say in all of these things we’ve noticed a trend – a reduction of civility of this dialogue, and that’s deeply troubling,” said David A. Harris, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition (which is affiliated with Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life).

For example, Harris said, “We see dozens and dozens of examples of 'die-ins' and [displays of] tombstones and public displays that are intimidating to some and don’t exactly foster an understanding of what is happening in the Middle East, or any kind of dialogue.”

He continued, however: “There’s plenty of not civil dialogue and dialogue that’s not what you'd want as the hallmark of academic discussion … but the clear majority of those cases are ones in which students on either side, neither of them feel that they are threatened or that they cannot express their views.”

Even relatively innocuous campus displays have caused tensions. At Cornell University last month, students involved with the Islamic Alliance for Justice lined pathways with 1,300 black flags to commemorate the violence in Gaza. The display was later vandalized, and hundreds of flags were rearranged into a Star of David, according to university police.

Cornell announced on Tuesday that two students had been charged with disorderly conduct and criminal mischief in connection with the incident. “There was no indication they were acting under the guise of any group’s motivations,” the deputy police chief, Kathy Zoner, said in a statement. “Groups were blamed for the action. They were the easiest and most convenient target for blame, but apparently that wasn’t the truth of the matter.”

The Palestinian cause has also risen to the top of many student groups' agendas. Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Rochester recently demanded that the institution divest from companies that "profit from war"; provide "necessary academic aid" and organize a day of fund raising for Gaza; and set up scholarships for Palestinian students. (University officials declined on the scholarships and direct aid, but promised to provide the group the same fund raising advice it would any registered student organization and forward the divestment request to the Board of Trustees' investment committee. That's standard protocol for such requests.)

At New York University last month, the "Take Back NYU" protesters presented a litany of 11 demands, including tuition stabilization, collective bargaining for student workers, public release of NYU's budget and endowment -- and scholarships for Palestinians and the donation of excess supplies for the rebuilding of Islamic University of Gaza, which came under attack by Israel during the recent war. The group's building take-over ended with suspensions and without any of the student demands being met.

Take Back NYU's frequently asked questions Web page offers a response to "What does Gaza have to do with NYU and transparency?" A protest organizer wrote: "I demanded that our surpluses be donated to the Islamic University of Gaza (as opposed to any other impoverished school) because our school very likely helped destroy it. Although we obviously can’t say for certain where our money is invested while the endowment holdings remain secret, it’s a fair bet that some of it is invested in companies that support the Israeli military."

This week, NYU has also been a site of Israeli Apartheid Week events. However, Arthur Samuelson, executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU, said that he hasn't seen an erosion of support for Israel on campus. "It is a marginal voice which has gotten some attention and the other is a much bigger and not changing base of support for Israel," he said.

'Forceful Push' At Columbia University on Thursday, the Columbia Palestine Forum held a rally to present what's by now a familiar set of demands, including that Columbia provide scholarships for Palestinians and academic aid for a partnering Palestinian university. The group called too for an open forum on investments to initiate a "[u]niversity-wide conversation about divestment."

Meanwhile, the University of Massachusetts' Student Government Association took up (but tabled) the divestment question on Wednesday, according to the student newspaper. The movement to divest from Israel has been gaining rhetorical momentum at least among student and faculty activists (although not among administrators -despite student claims to the contrary, no college has divested).

An organized campaign for an academic boycott of Israel also emerged in the United States in January. Proponents of the boycott argue that it will put non-violent pressure on Israel to respect international humanitarian law. However, the idea of boycotting Israeli academics raises questions of academic freedom and has many opponents, among college presidents but also among some liberal, even (self-identified) "radical" faculty. On the "Tenured Radical" blog, for instance, Claire B. Potter, a professor of history and American Studies at Wesleyan University, wrote she is "profoundly opposed to boycott and divestment" for a number of reasons. Among them: "It does not address the real problem in the region, which is that states -- primarily the United States, Russia, and former Soviet-bloc countries -- continue to cynically pour weapons into the Middle East, as if it is possible to arm resistance fighters and the Israeli government to the teeth and also negotiate for 'peace,' " she wrote.

“Where we’ve really seen some of the more heated kinds of discussion and debate has been around attempts to pressure universities into really examining their own support for the occupation … so the different divestment and boycott campaigns,” said Bruce Braun, an associate professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and a member of an organization that started this semester, Teachers Against Occupation, which now is assembling and developing pedagogical materials for use in high school and college classrooms. (Although individual members are involved with the boycott campaign, Teachers Against Occupation as a group has not taken a stand.)

“One of the things that’s really interesting on campuses right now is students are beginning to ask, ‘How are we connected to what’s happening in the Middle East? How do we transform our institutions?’ ” Braun said. “Having a debate on those kinds of questions is going to be emotional and it’s going to be one that raises uncomfortable questions.

Sometimes we can point to civil dialogue as a way of sort of domesticating any kind of protest. And I think people feel

very strongly that there’s an ongoing injustice that needs to be addressed and that continuously having a dialogue about this without taking steps to transform the institutional framework that allows what is perceived to be an unjust situation to be continued is something that people simply aren’t willing to abide with any longer.

“To put something on the agenda,” Braun explained, “actually takes sometimes a sort of forceful push. And I think that’s what we’re seeing at different points on campuses right now.

"I think there's a much stronger sense that sort of an unquestioned support of Israeli policy by the American government is something that we can no longer simply follow blindly or support," Braun continued, adding that the shift he sees isn't limited to college campuses. "I'm seeing that expressed at all kinds of different levels, among students, among faculty."

Questions of the faculty role in all of this have been at the forefront. Members of Teachers Against Occupation, for instance, “take quite seriously the fact that we are teachers. …As teachers, how do we respond by thoughtfully bringing these ideas into the classroom in ways that are constructive, or at least putting together materials for that?” Braun asked.

Meanwhile, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel organization, recently asked professors to report anti-Israel or anti-Semitic events or propaganda on their campuses, for a compendium of sorts. “We’re the people on campus. We’ve got our fingers on the pulse, we’re stakeholders, we’re faculty members. We live on campus longer than students, longer than most administrators and longer than most Hillel directors or Jewish education professionals,” said Edward S. Beck, president emeritus of the organization and professor in Walden University's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

“It’s our feeling that nothing is going to happen to reverse this trend of anti-Israelism [on campus] until the faculty absolutely say, ‘Look, some of these behaviors are unacceptable and inconsistent with behavioral codes on campus and some of what’s being taught here is incitement as opposed to free speech,' " Beck said.

"Many people have contacted me — and some have even written news articles — to express profound disappointment over what they believe was the panel's unbalanced presentation and a lack of decorum during the question-andanswer period," Chancellor Gene Block said in a statement, which referenced a number of talks at UCLA that involve Israeli representatives and stressed a need for civil discourse.

"The UCLA campus, with its diverse population and many points of view, is one of the most invigorating intellectual campuses in the world, and the university strives overall for scholarly balance."

"I guess what I would say is what we try and do is present a varied program on issues related to the central themes of our centers," said Nick Entrikin, acting vice provost of UCLA's International Institute, which is comprised of more than 20 centers, programs and research institutes (including an Israel Studies Program and the Center for Near Eastern Studies). "I think the argument that every program has to represent all sides of an issue, although it's something that we work towards in the aggregate, I just don't think we can really say we can do that for every particular event."

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has written on these topics, said that when it comes to scholarly endeavors, the issue of balance "is a smokescreen."

But that doesn't mean she's not concerned by events like the one at UCLA, which she thinks are "nearing epidemic proportion" on campuses. It's not balance but the possibility of indoctrination -- which she believes represents an abuse of academic freedom -- that concerns her. "Scholarship is not about balance, scholarship is about truth. The antithesis of scholarship is political indoctrination. You don't balance political indoctrination with equal and opposite indoctrination," she said.

"If a course or if a conference has clear political motivations and calls to political action ... the question is, 'Is this scholarship?' Is it scholarship to call on people to divest from Israel? Is that considered a scholarly statement?" RossmanBenjamin asked.

Scholarship and Balance One sub-strand of debate has been the faculty role when it comes to convening scholarly panels on Middle Eastern matters. As one high-profile example, a recent panel on "Human Rights and Gaza" organized by the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, attracted attention for its perceived one-sidedness. Judea Pearl, a computer science professor at UCLA and father of the killed Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote in the Jewish Journal of the panel of "four long-time demonizers of Israel" who bashed the Jewish state, "portray[ed] Hamas as a guiltless, peace-seeking, unjustly provoked organization," and encouraged the audience in a "Zionism is Nazism" chant.

In the case of the UCLA panel, Sondra Hale, a professor of anthropology and women's studies and one of the organizers of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, wrote a letter to the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, defending the quality of scholarship presented (Hale did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview).

"Clearly, these are scholars who are very well-informed on the subject of the symposium and whose scholarship is beyond repute," Hale wrote. "They are scholars who bring pride to the University of California. This was a group of highly informed and qualified Jews, Israelis, Arabs and Arab Americans examining and trying to make sense of the human

disaster of Gaza and criticizing the state policies that have lead to this calamity.

"Simply because some in the audience (from all perspectives) were out of line in some groups’ sloganeering, the problems should not reflect on the excellent symposium itself. No one on the panel exempted Hamas or suicide bombers from charges of human rights abuses or violations of international law. All clearly condemned the Hamas rocket attacks. ... No one on the panel chanted 'Zionism is Nazism,' " Hale wrote.

Of course it is the validation of fellow scholars that determines what scholarship is in the academy. More broadly, Rossman-Benjamin argued that academic senates need to do a better job of protecting the professoriate from indoctrination masquerading as scholarship.

"Things can deteriorate rapidly and come to a place where there really is a hostile environment for some students and faculty and staff because people aren't doing their jobs, because there are abuses that are not being routed out and taken care of," she said.

When Questions Can't be Asked or Answered Student-sponsored events run on different rules. But at San Jose State University in early February, one event, open to the public and featuring an Israeli consul general, Akiva Tor, deteriorated rapidly. While it was an atypical incident, the case is described by some as a warning sign of sorts.

“During Mr. Tor’s speech he was, I guess you could say, heckled. People in the audience were not polite. They didn’t sit and politely listen. They catcalled and booed and one woman kept making remarks, but other audience members actually tried to deal with those people. Members of the proPalestinian faction got up and talked to these folks. I think that the pro-Palestinian faction, most of the people there had an interest in hearing what he had to say,” recalled Frances Edwards, director of San Jose State’s master's of public administration program and the moderator for the event.

It was during the question and answer session that things disintegrated. A woman read from a statement for several minutes before finally getting to her question: "Why do you lie?"

Tor began to answer but some audience members stood up and cat-called; one woman yelled, “Why did you kill my family?” Edwards related.

“He said, ‘mistakes were made in war,’ and they erupted.

They absolutely erupted," Edwards said. Police escorted Tor out of the room, cutting the question and answer session short. (The student newspaper, The Spartan Daily, also published a video account.)

“I’m kind of neither on one side or the other, if you want to look at in terms of sides,” Edwards said. “My concern is for the university and what the university means to a community. We’re not intending to be an advocate for any particular point of view but rather to serve as a speaker’s corner, a common ground, where people of different opinions can get together and at least hear each other.”

Jon Whitmore, San Jose State's president, sent a letter of apology to Akiva Tor on Feb. 23, and another letter expressing regrets to a faculty adviser involved with the event.

A university spokeswoman, Pat Lopes Harris, said that she’s not aware of anyone being disciplined as a result of the event. “The approach that we have taken is that we understand that the event was less than ideal. To go back and to try to pull apart what happened and to start to try to blame one party or another doesn’t seem like it’s going to help us move forward,” she said.

She added, too: “One of the reasons the story has come to light – well there are many reasons, it was a significant event no doubt about that – but it has been utilized by some parties as an example of perhaps an increase in anti-Semitic activity on college campuses nationwide. And that concerns me a little bit because I haven’t seen a really comprehensive set of data that shows that is in fact the case. There are a lot of anecdotes, certainly anecdotes that pertain to our campus.”

Sue Maltiel, executive director of Hillel of Silicon Valley, said that at San Jose at least, the climate has shifted. “There are a lot of Jewish students who are really afraid now, who are afraid to identify as Jewish,” Maltiel said, who recalled hearing a faculty member threatened at the Akiva Tor event, as well as the chant, "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want your racist state."

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the level of so many students being afraid. I’ve never heard a faculty member threatened before.”

After winter break and the start of war in Gaza, “We went to school, the atmosphere was really tense,” said Diana Nguyen, a San Jose State junior and vice president of Spartans for Israel. “I would be tabling and there would always be someone who had to ask me loaded questions or try to make me answer for what Israel did, which was fine. … Toward the [Akiva Tor] event I started getting anti-Semitic comments. I’m not sure those people knew I was Jewish,” said Nguyen, who heard, for instance, “Jews are murderers."

She added, "Everyone’s reluctant to call out any anti-Semitic comment when it’s anti-Semitic because it’s like the new race card or something. They’re out there.”

Omar Mutwakil, president of the Muslim Students' Association at San Jose State, agreed that the Akiva Tor talk

“just went out of control; it wasn’t too civilized at the end.”

But he objected to the notion that it heralded a broader break-down in civil dialogue.

Though he has heard people say that “this is why things like this can’t be held on campus," Mutwakil strongly disagreed.

"Come on, that’s bogus. There are debates all over the place and there’s nothing wrong with this. This thing *the Akiva Tor event+ was opened to people who aren’t on campus and that‘s part of the problem. It was open to everyone," said Mutwakil.

“In general, yeah, I think discussions can be held. I don’t see why not. We’re all humans. We’re not animals.”

San Jose’s Muslim Students' Association sponsored a couple of talks on the Middle East this semester -- a forum on “The U.S.-Backed Israeli War on Gaza” and a talk by Barbara Lubin, director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, in Berkeley.

As of this week, the group had no more events planned on these issues, said Mutwakil. "Unless something else happens again in the news. Maybe something else would occur due to that."

They’re a religious organization, he explained; all this is not really what they're about.

— Elizabeth Redden

described getting grief from the Minnesota hog industry, when he was president of the University of Minnesota, because he doesn't eat pork.

People of the Book (and the University) May 23, 2006 Morton Owen Schapiro gets asked questions all the time, as president of Williams College, as a professor, as an economist. One question no one asks (at least not directly) is what it means to be a Jewish college president.

The realization of that unasked question was one reason he was prompted to help organize a meeting in Washington this week on "The University and the Jewish Community," sponsored by Hillel. Schapiro -- and a number of his presidential colleagues, from different religious backgrounds and at very different kinds of institutions -- have been trying to answer that question and many others. Hundreds of attendees, from student life offices, local Hillel chapters, and Jewish organizations, are also considering the role of Jews in academe today in sessions that mix intensity, humor and quite a bit of debate.

The subject matter has been a mix of the deeply philosophical to the very practical, and has had presidents talking about God and faith far more than is the norm in secular academic gatherings, trading stories of awkward situations, keeping the faithful satisfied, and protecting their rights to have their own religious identities.

On Sunday night, John J. DeGioia, Georgetown University's president, talked about how he faces tough scrutiny because he is his university's first non-Jesuit leader. Asked if he has to prove that he's sufficiently Roman Catholic, DeGioia answered: "day by day, hour by hour." Richard Joel then quipped about the scrutiny he faced in his new job because he too is "not a Jesuit." Joking aside, he does have much in common with DeGioia because Joel's selection as Yeshiva University's president was controversial because he is not a rabbi.

For those who wonder why there is such scrutiny of the presidents of religious institutions, Joel said that "these are not the most secure times for people of faith," so some of the questioning is to be expected. He said that he hoped that he could build trust over time, and thought he was already seeing that.

Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of Texas System, said he thought the key to balancing one's faith with one's responsibilities at a secular institution was "to be authentic to yourself," and to be unafraid to follow your beliefs. He

More substantively, Yudof said that he was worried about a "problem in the modern secular university" that many professors engage in the "systematic demeaning of the role of religion in public life." Many scholars, he said, think that if you take your faith seriously, "you are something of a yahoo."

Students -- even those who want to embrace spirituality -can provide other challenges, the presidents said. DeGioia said that at a meeting with Georgetown's various clergy members, a priest said that most students were arriving without "command of the fundamentals of their faith," and suggested that the university needed to do more to offer basic religious training. The clergy of other faiths quickly said that they had the same problem.

Yudof said he was surprised and bothered when many presidents -- including many Jewish presidents -- did not sign an open letter circulated in 2002 by the late James O. Freedman, former president of Dartmouth College, opposing the intimidation of Jewish students. Yudof said that he realized that taking a stand on a controversial issue wasn't something to do lightly, but he said that just as faculty members have academic freedom, "so does the president."

He added that "being moral means to take positions."

Figuring out when to take positions isn't always easy, though.

Joel said, however, that there were some issues on which his religious identity almost mandated it. He said that Yeshiva University helped send hundreds of students to Washington this month for a rally to call for more action to stop the genocide in Darfur. The students watched the film Hotel Rwanda on monitors on their buses while en route to Washington and received instruction on the Talmudic views of intervening against terrible acts on the way home. On speaking out against what is taking place in Darfur, Joel said that on issues related to genocide, Jews should be "first out of the gate."

In interviews during the meeting, other presidents said that they too were influenced by their faith in the way they make decisions -- even if it's not always visible. Shirley Strum Kenny, president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that her name doesn't identify her as a Jew, nor does her Texas accent. But she said that her religious identity is still a part "of everything I do." Specifically, she said that the experience of growing up Jewish in Tyler, Tex. taught her something about being a minority that she recalls when trying to promote a welcoming campus to members of all groups.

Not all of the talk at the meeting was about broad issues of faith -- much of it focused on the specifics of campus politics.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, led a discussion about how colleges should respond to incidents of "hate speech" against Jewish students. Lipstadt, who is considered one of the world's leading experts on Holocaust deniers, noted that she is a strong supporter of unrestricted speech and that she opposes laws in some countries that limit the ability to argue or publish Holocaust-denying materials. "We have history on our side," she said, and bans on Holocaust deniers turn them into "martyrs." For similar reasons, she said she was very skeptical of attempts to regulate campus speech.

In some sense, everyone on the panel agreed, with all endorsing free speech. But some focused on other issues.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor known for his fierce defense of the First Amendment and his equally fierce devotion to Jewish causes, said in a video presentation that he is pretty close to being an "absolutist" on free speech issues on campuses. He said that he applauded the idea that campuses needed to have a "circle of civility" for discussion of tough issues. But he said that there needed to be "ism equity" when talking about which kinds of criticism would be tolerated in what way.

university found that a pro-Palestinian student group interfered with a pro-Israel event by shouting phrases like "death to the Jews" at the rally. The Palestinian group accused the pro-Israel students of also being inflammatory, but a university investigation found more serious violations of campus rules and civility by the pro-Palestinian group. In the wake of that incident, Corrigan organized a series of campus discussions designed to promote better ways getting along.

Corrigan said that the 2002 incident and others have left him convinced that presidents need to be active players to minimize the damage that can be caused by hateful speech and to promote a "culture of tolerance."

For example, he talked about planning to deal with a visit by Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the Nation of Islam speaker whose comments about Jews and others sparked anger at many campuses in the 1990s. While affirming his right to speak when a student group invited him, Corrigan said that he prepared a letter denouncing the hateful ideas of the lecture (which ended up being similar to those given on other campuses) and had the letter handed out to students as they left the talk.

"Presidents need to respond immediately," he said.

Dershowitz said that on many campuses, criticism of Arabs would be labeled harassment while equal criticism of Jews or of Israel would be considered protected free speech. He said that this "double standard" was wrong -- and that campuses needed to treat all groups the same way. "You can't have affirmative action on free speech."

Several speakers expressed concern over incidents in which campus groups went beyond criticism of Israel to actions that are considered to be hateful. Last week was "Holocaust in the Holy Land" week at the University of California at Irvine, for example, with events designed to compare Israel with Nazi Germany. A speech at Carnegie Mellon University last year was largely devoted to attacking Jews -- and Jewish students were asked to leave the event, even though university rules bar religious based discrimination.

A general theme at the meeting was that universities are quick to defend the free speech rights of such speakers, but not to do anything else. Wayne L. Firestone, president-elect of Hillel, said that campuses "set the bar too low," by talking only about whether events were consistent with the First Amendment. He asked why more presidents aren't speaking out against intolerance or organizing programs that promote discussion of Israel -- criticism included -- in ways that aren't hateful.

One president with extensive experience in handling such situations is Robert A. Corrigan of San Francisco State University, a campus notable for its diversity, a prominent role in the creation of ethnic studies programs in the wake of the 60s protest movements, and periodic flare-ups among various groups of students and faculty members. In 2002, the

At the same time, he said that people needed to be realistic about what response was appropriate for a university. He described a call he received from the parent of a student, who had told his parents that he was sometimes shouted at for wearing a pro-Israel button or for wearing a Star of David.

In an interview after his talk, Corrigan talked about his own experiences as a child growing up, being bulled on Ash Wednesday, when his Catholicism was literally visible on his face. The idea that a student was shouted at for wearing a Star of David struck him as harassment that should be prevented.

But wearing a pro-Israel button (or pro-anything button) was different, he said. If you wear a button proclaiming a political stance, you are making a choice and may need to defend your position, he said, and that's different from being harassed for your religion or ethnicity.

"Trying to completely protect students from everything is not only impossible, but unwarranted," he said. — Scott Jaschik

April 27, 2001 The New Hillel: It's Not Just About Praying Anymore

By JENNIFER JACOBSON The Jewish campus organization is growing rapidly and trying to change its image It's been more than 30 years, but Barbara Jacoby hasn't forgotten her introduction to Hillel, the Jewish student organization, at the University of Maryland's College Park campus. She remembers the "little, white clapboard house on Yale Avenue," the bowl of tuna salad and crackers on an old table, and the people -- oy vey.

"Only nerds went to Hillel," she recalls. Not her. She told her mother, "I'm not staying. I'm not eating the food." She left.

So just what is she doing back at the university in 2001, hawking for Hillel, no less?

"I've been impressed with the way any student who is Jewish is made to feel there is something for them at Hillel," says Ms. Jacoby, who sits on Hillel's board of directors and is director of commuter affairs and community service for the university. "Hillel is not aimed at a specific, narrow segment of the Jewish population. It's broad culturally, artistically, and gastronomically."

As if to emphasize her point, she takes a bite of her tossed salad on this recent afternoon in Hillel's kosher dining room.

Sunlight streams in through its bay windows, gently warming the pastel murals of gigantic flowers and Jerusalem that line the walls. Jewish students, the Orthodox wearing yarmulkes, others sporting baseball caps, sit near her and eat in a room that holds more than 200 people. It could be any dining hall, save for the sign above the cafeteria-style bins of hot food that says Roz's Place is "a nosh above the rest."

Welcome to the the Ben and Esther Rosenbloom Hillel Center for Jewish Life, where rock music pours from the lounge, students watch a midday soap opera on a big-screen TV, and Andy Salsman, a sophomore, sits working on a crossword puzzle -- something he could do anywhere on campus, but chooses to do here.

Mr. Salsman, a Conservative Jew, says that Hillel is an "ethnic thing" that makes him feel at home. "It's a comfort to know it's possible to meet other Jewish people here," Mr. Salsman says. "It's nice to know on Yom Kippur I'm not the only one missing class."

Indeed, creating a comfort zone for religious Jewish students is what Hillel was all about when the group was born in 1923.

Since then, 153 Hillel foundations, 110 in North America, have sprung up throughout the world, with another 350 affiliated groups. A decade ago, though, with assimilation on the rise, the world's largest Jewish student organization decided to retool to broaden its appeal.

Now, it's not only about better food and better facilities. It's about appealing to Jewish students of all backgrounds.

The new slogan could be "Hillel: It's not just about praying any more."

But the most striking element of this movement toward inclusion has been the Hillel building boom that began eight years ago and continues, unabated, today. In place of rickety old houses, far removed from campuses, stand such buildings as the Rosenbloom Center, million-dollar structures that look like ultra-modern student unions complete with pool tables, rooms for meetings and studying, coffeehouses, and computer workstations.

It's a $200-million investment, according to Hillel's national headquarters. In the last eight years, the organization saw 12 new buildings go up at colleges and universities nationwide and four renovations of antiquated structures. Sixteen new Hillel facilities are now in the planning stages, and each project typically costs more than $2-million.

The Wexner Jewish Student Center at Ohio State University, in Columbus, may be among the most state of the art of the new centers. The 27,000-square-foot, $5-million structure has a kosher dining hall, a 400-seat auditorium, and a fitness center. Within a year, it will also have a laundromat.

The building boom is the brainchild of Richard M. Joel, the group's president and international director, who took the helm at Hillel 13 years ago.

Mr. Joel, along with a team of savvy marketers and donors with deep pockets, turned around the once-stagnant organization, whose budget today is $45-million, up from $14-million in 1990.

Each new building, Mr. Joel says, is a "point of pride" among Jewish students who go there, many of whom participate in Hillel activities such as a cappella choruses, newspapers, Israeli-dance groups, and free trips to Israel.

The new buildings, Mr. Joel says, will change Hillel's image of being the "campus synagogue" and send the message that Hillel looks toward the future rather than the past.

The future isn't about Jews being cloistered -- even if in a spacious building, Mr. Joel says. It's about celebrating Jewish life outside the building. About "maximizing the number of

Jews doing Jewish with other Jews," he says, rattling off Hillel's newest slogan.

pray, but I thought, if I'm part of this, I should know what's going on."

The culture change, complete with Jewish Service Corps Fellows -- new college graduates who work for Hillel recruiting students for its activities across the country -- has left some cold.

So Ms. Kay, who returned to college more observant but refuses to label herself as Orthodox or Conservative, now eats her meals at Roz's Place and studies Jewish texts, along with 20 other students, with a rabbi once a week.

These critics contend that Judaism is not a product to be marketed and that Hillel has no business proselytizing, since the religion strictly forbids it.

For other students, though, Hillel is about the food -- initially, at least. That's how it began for Gabe Cohen, a senior, who came for a Shabbat dinner four years ago and hasn't stopped coming since. "It signifies the end of my week," says Mr. Cohen, a Reform Jew who represents the "independent Hillelgoer." He adds, "I don't necessarily know all the prayers.

I just appreciate the community that's here."

"[Hillel] gets students who are no longer with their parents, in their normal communities, and it seems like a good opportunity when they're looking to find themselves, ... which is not necessarily a bad thing," says Joshua Haber, a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University. But what is bad, says Mr. Haber, who sits on the organization's campus board, is that Hillel misses the point: Judaism is a religion, not a social club for the culturally Jewish, he says.

Others see not a social club but a "social stigma," says Patrick Morrow, a junior at Maryland who was raised as a Conservative Jew. Mr. Morrow, a member of Pi Kappa Alpha, has never gone to a Hillel-sponsored event, nor does he plan to. "It's exclusionary," he says.

Mr. Joel insists that Hillel, founded by a chaplain and a rabbi at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, desperately needed to change its image as the campus ministry for Jews.

"We recognize that the silent majority of Jews are too intimidated to be caught dead at a Hillel," he says.

All the customs and prayers, the Hebrew they once learned and forgot or never learned at all -- many students simply don't understand, Mr. Joel says.

So, at the college or university where they successfully competed for admission, he says, "Hillel is the only place where they can't get an A." Now the organization all but guarantees a good grade, with, for example at Maryland, 20 different Jewish groups, including Eco-Judaism, the Greek Jewish Council, and Kol Sasson, a Jewish a cappella group.

Hillel also sends students to Israel, in the Birthright Israel Program. Since the program started five years ago, Hillel has sent 10,000 students from more than 100 universities on the 10-day trip to the Jewish homeland.

Michelle Kay, a sophomore at Maryland, took the trip during her freshman year and says it strengthened her ties to Jewish culture. "I was at the Wailing Wall, and I felt this feeling of belonging," she says, while checking out summer courses on a computer in the Rosenbloom Center. "I didn't know how to

At some campuses, the idea of community has expanded to include those who have been historical enemies. By next fall, Jewish and Muslim students at Dartmouth College will be able to share a halal and kosher dining area. Rabbi Edward S. Boraz, the executive director of Hillel at Dartmouth, says students came up with the idea last year to help them "develop friendships and a depth of understanding between peoples that have had a history of being separate and often in conflict."

But even as Hillel tries to be more inclusive, there are signs that it is having a difficult time leaving its old image behind.

At Duke University, a debate over a mikvah -- the ritual bath used for purification and conversions -- sounded like the old Hillel.

The mikvah, which the university will begin building this summer, will be located in the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, which is a 15,000-square-foot, $3-million structure that was built two years ago.

When the idea of constructing a mikvah was introduced more than 10 years ago, it reinforced the view that Hillel was too Jewish even for most Jews.

Though debate has since died down, its construction promises to raise anew "serious concerns" that the mikvah, which is used primarily by women, is "a step toward Orthodoxy" and "says something negative about women, that they're unclean," says Harold Kudler, a psychiatrist at Duke University Medical Center who is a member of the center's board and a mikvah supporter.

Not true, continues Dr. Kudler, who explains that "it's a way of sanctifying women's bodies."

Hillel's attempts at transformation are not occurring in a vacuum. Across denominations, students are returning to traditional religion as a way to reconnect with their roots. W. Bruce Johnston, chairman of the religion and philosophy department at the College of Saint Rose, a Catholic college in Albany, N.Y., says Hillel has parallels on college campuses.

The Cardinal Newman Centers and the Campus Crusade for Christ are similarly recruiting Catholic and evangelical Christian students, respectively.

"For a long time, we went through the idea that we ought to have organizations everyone could belong to," he says. "A lot of programs on campuses were billed as interfaith. Now, it's a lot more respected to say we ought to have programming just for 'us.'"

Joshua Rubin, a junior at Maryland who is Orthodox, wouldn't think of hanging out anywhere else. "In a campus of 30,000, you need to find your niche," he says, as he munches on kosher hot dogs and potatoes in Roz's Place. "This is more than a niche. My friends are my family down here."

Even one student who says he is "religiously confused" agrees. "Hillel is where people come to talk, shmooze," says Aaron Schneider, a senior. "It's where you can find your potential Jewish soulmate."

It's where Mr. Rubin found his. He and Joanna Katz, now a junior, noticed each other while both were singing the Birkat HaMazon, the prayer after meals, one Friday night last year.

After the songs, he asked her to go for a walk. They talked for two hours and have been together ever since.

"Maximizing the number of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews" also includes romance. Just ask Mr. Rubin and Ms. Katz.

June 2, 2006

At Hillel Summit, Some See a 'Golden Age' for Jews on Campuses, Not an Era of AntiSemitism

By JENNIFER JACOBSON It's a good time to be a Jewish student at an American college.

So said Jewish leaders who gathered in Washington last week and declared that a golden age of Jewishness on campuses — and not the apocalypse of anti-Semitism — is upon us.

At the first college summit sponsored by Hillel, a national organization for Jewish students, members of prominent Jewish groups did not deny that anti-Semitic incidents have occurred in academe.

They lamented what they called bias against Israel in Middle East-studies programs and cited last year's controversy at Columbia University, where professors of Middle East studies were accused of intimidating pro-Israel students. They advocated creating Israel-studies programs to provide a more balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But they lauded the rise of Jewish-studies programs and the number of Jewish students who want to learn about Israel.

"The troubling question for me," said Chaim Seidler-Feller, executive director of the Hillel chapter at University of California at Los Angeles, is, "'Why can't we hear the good news? Why are many Jews hysterical?' We seem to be junkies for anti-Semitism."

He reminded the 40 or so people who attended the session that there is a significant number of Hillel chapters; that many college presidents and professors not only are Jewish but identify themselves as such; and that a plethora of Jewish periodicals and books is published by university presses.

Speakers at the conference noted that some campuses have experienced more clashes between pro-Israel and proPalestinian students than others.

Robert A. Corrigan, president of San Francisco State University, explained how he has dealt with such conflicts.

"Presidents have a significant responsibility to ensure that there is a culture of tolerance and support on the campuses," he said. "I'm not suggesting that presidents decide for themselves what is free speech and what is hate speech." But it's "important for presidents to respond to hate speech as it occurs."

http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 52, Issue 39, Page A30

September 28, 2007

The Rankings Rainbow

By ERIC HOOVER Bruce Hunter has seen them many times: the wide-eyed students and gaping parents, frozen in the aisles of the bookstore. They come looking for college guides and find rows and rows of choices, a growing number of which cater to students of speci-fic backgrounds, beliefs, and identities.

"There's this massive shelf about the size of the Green Monster, and they have no clue where to start," says Mr. Hunter, director of college counseling at Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, in Salt Lake City.

In 1994, Mr. Hunter decided to help confused consumers by writing a guide to (what else?) college guides. The project almost turned into a commercial book. Had it been published, the project may or may not have made Mr. Hunter a rich man, but it surely would have given him a lifelong hobby.

Over the last decade, the library of third-party information about colleges has grown exponentially. U.S. News & World Report's annual college guide may get the most attention, but it's a general-interest dinosaur in an ever-expanding realm of niche evaluations of colleges. Now students of all faiths, ethnic origins, and interests can find a guide or a set of rankings carefully compiled — or thrown together — just for them.

For instance, Hispanic magazine ranks the top 25 colleges for Latino students. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has introduced a list of the 10 most vegetarian-friendly campuses (Indiana University at Bloomington's sesamenoodle-and-peapod casserole earned it the No. 1 spot last year). And for students who care about things like morality, the John Templeton Foundation maintains a list of colleges that encourage character development.

In academe, diversity is a good thing, but what about in the hyped-up precollege marketplace? Does this rainbow of resources have any real value?

Well, some. Mr. Hunter thinks guides and rankings that cater to specific groups are useful for students, at least as starting points in the search process. Teenagers, he says, usually appreciate materials that allow them to "train the prism" through which they view themselves onto colleges and universities.

So a student who fancies herself a feminist might read The Young Woman's Guide to the Top Colleges: What You Need

to Know to Make the Best Choice (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), which profiles 200 institutions. Or she might thumb through CosmoGIRL! magazine's top-50 list of colleges for women, which is based on Princeton Review data, student-survey results, and gender-specific information. That's assuming she can get past the list of kissing tips.

As with any other consumer product, the quality of guides and rankings for specific groups varies widely, as do their methodologies. Some, like Black Enterprise magazine's "Top 50 Colleges for African-Americans," are based on a quantitative process. For nearly a decade, the magazine has evaluated hundreds of institutions by using a formula it describes as a "regression-based, weighted, multiplicative index." It combines four variables: a college's percentage of undergraduate black students; its five-year graduation rate for black students; and its average scores in a survey that asks some 2,000 black college administrators to rate the academic and social environments for black students on other campuses. The most recent list put Florida A&M University in first place, above Harvard University, which ranked fourth.

Thomas A. LaVeist, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, says he created the list after observing that many of the top colleges in the U.S. News guide had a relatively small number of black students. "We really needed a resource where African-American students could see where black students were having the best outcomes," says Mr. LaVeist.

The list was an instant hit. The January 1999 issue in which it made its debut sold out. A diverse list of colleges — including Babson College, Cornell University, and Morehouse College — have publicly touted their inclusion on the list. Some colleges that were not ranked, or that did not make the top 10, took notice. "We get lobbied," Mr. LaVeist says. "I tell them it's impossible to game the system."

By contrast, the new Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students (Alyson Books, 2006) gives administrators advice on how to make their campuses more accommodating of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. If followed, the tips just might improve a college's "gay-point average" in the guide's list of best colleges. (Colorado State University, Grinnell College, and Lawrence University are among the guide's diverse list of 20 "best of the best" institutions, which "boast the most outstanding accomplishments in LGBT progressiveness across the United States.")

Some administrators get tired of phone calls from so-called guidesters and ranksters, who are eager to make a buck or drum up publicity for respective groups. "A couple have popped up that said they're going to write a guidebook, and for only $19,000, we can be in it," says Monica C. Inzer, dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton College.

It's no wonder that some college officials take special-interest resourceslike Princeton Review's Colleges With a

Consciencewith a huge grain of salt. And it's tempting to liken narrow, subjective guides to political talk-radio programs: full of words that appeal to a limited audience and mean almost nothing.

But Jason Mattera, a spokesman for the Young America's Foundation, says his organization's annual list of top-10 conservative colleges fills a crucial informational void. The foundation created its guide in response to numerous requests for college recommendations from families who seek a conservative-friendly campus and a traditional education (read: no courses on lesbian authors). It's based partly on input from students and faculty members at different colleges.

"We look for schools that don't have these high levels of political correctness, schools focusing on the great books," Mr. Mattera says.

It's hard to imagine that someone would need a guide to tell him that Liberty University, an evangelical Christian institution in Virginia, is welcoming of conservatives. Still, making the list has cachet.

Glenn Dillard, assistant vice president for admission at Harding University, in Arkansas, says officials there are proud that the university appears on the list, an honor it has promoted in press releases. And that can't hurt recruiting.

"It's a good thing if it does cause students to put us on their long list," he says, "and maybe after they get more information about us, they'll put us on their short list."

The other end of the political spectrum is well represented among publications. Mother Jones magazine ranks the top-10 "activist schools," for instance, and High Times magazine ranks the top-10 "countercultural colleges." Yet these cursory lists are mere entertainment and won't tell a student much.

An applicant couldn't use them to determine if, say, the University of Iowa is more accepting of liberals or marijuana enthusiasts than Iowa State University is, since neither appears on the lists.

As opinionated lists of colleges proliferate in the information age, the cumulative effect seems to be confusion. Amid all the guides and rankings, many students say you still can't learn much about a campus unless you visit it. Elisheva Layman, a senior at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, in Rockville, Md., has little use for the dozens of brochures she's received from colleges, or for heavy guidebooks. "I'll flip through them, but they're not insanely helpful," she says.

Instead, she sought out Hillel's "Guide to Jewish Life on Campus," an online database that lists the estimated population of Jewish students at about 700 colleges, as well as information about religious services and kosher dining options at each institution. While determining which colleges she wanted to visit, Ms. Layman used the database to see what Jewish-studies classes a particular college offered and

what types of social activities were available to Jewish students.

The database is the most-visited part of the organization's Web site, according to Jeff Rubin, associate vice president for communications at Hillel. It was designed as an antidote to sales pitches. "Students," Mr. Rubin says, "have very sensitive noses to marketing materials."

Where does all that marketing stop?

Mr. Hunter, the counselor who compiled the guide to guides, sees no end in sight. Only his book is one that's not coming to a Barnes & Noble near you.

A while back, Mr. Hunter met with a half-dozen publishers who were interested in his project, but there was a snag: They wanted assurances that he would write nice things about the college guides in their product lines.

Mr. Hunter wasn't interested in that approach, so he decided to scale down his guide to a short, annotated bibliography — a handy reference that still circulates among high-school counselors throughout the nation. "I'm happy I killed the book when I did," he says. "As labor intensive as it was to do all the research 13 years ago, it would be substantially more so now."

http://chronicle.com Section: Diversity in Academe Volume 54, Issue 5, Page B12

April 25, 2008

Nonprofit Groups Offer Genetic Testing for Jewish Students

expensive. Organizations like Hillel provide a hub for a group that will soon be quite dispersed, since many young Jews do not join synagogues until they have children. And getting tested young takes away much of the pressure a couple would probably feel on the cusp of deciding whether to marry or to have a child.

"The goal is to get people before they are married or even trying to have children," says Johannah R. Lebow, outreach coordinator for the Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases at the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, which provides free screenings for Ashkenazic college students and couples in their first year of marriage.

By BECKIE SUPIANO Laura D. Rosenblatt hadn't given much thought to her genes.

But then a member of her sorority at the University of Pittsburgh e-mailed her about an on-campus screening for hereditary diseases. Ms. Rosenblatt makes an effort to support her sorority sisters, so she got screened.

And, as a 19-year-old freshman, Ms. Rosenblatt found out she is a carrier — a healthy person with the recessive genes for a disease — for Canavan disease, a life-threatening illness that may cause blindness and impair motor skills.

Most people don't even consider genetic screening until they are planning to have a baby or at least get married. Yet organizations like Hillel are encouraging Jewish students to get tested long before they are even thinking about having children.

At least one in five Ashkenazic Jews, who make up the vast majority of American Jews, is a carrier for at least one of the 11 commonly screened Jewish genetic diseases. (See box below.) If both members of a couple are carriers for the same condition, there is a one in four chance that any child they conceive will have the condition.

Genetic diseases common in this population range from TaySachs disease, which is fatal, to Gaucher disease, which can be managed with lifelong and expensive treatment.

At a growing number of colleges, including Pittsburgh, Brandeis University, and Columbia University, groups are offering students free or reduced-cost screenings for those diseases. Jewish leaders and public-health professionals say getting tested early will help students make informed decisions in the future.

"You can make an argument that perhaps college students are the ideal population to test," says David N. Finegold, a biomedical geneticist in Pittsburgh who is familiar with the testing offered at the university there.

Once students are 18, they are at the age of consent for medical purposes. Students can be grouped together to take advantage of discounts for screenings that are normally quite

Offering tests to students might seem strange to someone from outside the Jewish community, says Angela M. Trepanier, president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors. The African-American community, for example, also has a higher rate of some genetic diseases, but this larger, more genetically diverse population has been less active in organizing testing. One reason testing is so popular among Ashkenazim is that the desire to provide testing originated within the community, not from outside pressure, Ms. Trepanier says.

"As long as there is proper informed consent and there isn't pressure, there are no ethical issues," she says.

The only ethical concern, she says, is to ensure students are tested because they want to be, not because everyone else is doing it.

Far from feeling pressured, students often feel more comfortable being screened on their campuses, says Shoshana M.R. Rosen, a Pittsburgh student, who organized a screening there.

"It's so good to be in a setting like Hillel," she says. "If you have ethical questions, you have resources available."

Campus screenings require students to meet with genetic counselors before being tested to discuss the process and give informed consent. Students also meet with counselors after receiving their results to discuss what they mean.

The High Cost of Knowing The biggest obstacle to testing college students is cost. While the enzyme test for Tay-Sachs costs a few dollars, the DNA testing required to screen for the other diseases is expensive, says Adele S. Schneider, a geneticist and director of the Victor center. The screening for each disease usually costs several hundred dollars, and most people choose to be tested for either nine or 11 diseases. The screening is not always covered, even by private insurance.

The Victor center has been doing free testing on college campuses since 1999. The center exists through the

philanthropy of Lois B. Victor, who lost two children to a genetic disease common among Ashkenazic Jews.

The center has screened college students in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, particularly at the Universities of Pittsburgh and of Pennsylvania. A satellite, the Victor Program at Tufts Medical Center, has also held screenings on several campuses in Boston. The Boston site does not provide free testing but offers it at a sharply reduced cost. The center's goal is to keep expanding, with Philadelphia as the hub, Dr. Schneider says.

The Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases at the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, and the Victor Program at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, screen college students for nine of the 11 most common genetic diseases in the Ashkenazic Jewish population. Most American Jews are Ashkenazim.

"It would be great if we could be everywhere, but in terms of funding and staffing it isn't possible," Ms. Lebow says.

Bloom syndrome increases susceptibility to infections and respiratory illness and increases the risk of leukemia and other cancers. Many with the disease die at early ages, though some live into their 40s. About one in 100 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

For about a year, the Victor center has had a partnership with the Human Genetics Laboratory at the Jacobi Medical Center, in the Bronx. The lab is philanthropic, which has allowed the center to further reduce its costs. Students also hold fundraising events on their campuses to help cover costs.

Canavan disease causes babies to lose motor skills and visual attention before they reach six months of age. They may become blind or have trouble swallowing. Many with the disease die in childhood, though some live to be young adults. About one in 40 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

The Victor center has recently expanded to Miami, and other philanthropic groups are providing testing on campuses in New York and Arizona.

Cystic fibrosis causes a buildup of thick mucus in the lungs, leading to trouble breathing and increased risk of serious lung infections. The symptoms can be treated, but the disease has no cure. About one in 25 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier — the same rate as in the wider Caucasian population.

But such opportunities do not exist everywhere. There is "nowhere to get Jewish genetic testing in Louisiana," says Yonatan Platt, a senior at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, who has considered getting screened while on a trip to the Northeast. "It's very important to get to schools with smaller Jewish populations," he says.

While philanthropists, Jewish students, and community leaders support testing, it may not be for everyone. Some students express concern that being a known carrier for a disease, while it has no effect on their health, could somehow hurt them in terms of insurance or employment. Others simply may not want to know.

Familial dysautonomia causes malfunction of the autonomic and sensory nervous systems. A common symptom is lack of tears even with emotional crying. There are treatment options, but life span is still shortened. About one in 30 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier. This disease has not been found outside the Ashkenazic population.

Fanconi anemia (Type C) causes bone-marrow failure, leading to a high rate of cancer. There are treatments, but those with the disease rarely live to adulthood. About one in 89 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

Dr. Schneider recalls a student at the University of Pittsburgh who told her he wanted to be tested but didn't want to hear his results. She told him he might not be ready, and the student, who was 19, did not get tested that day.

Gaucher disease causes enlargement of the spleen, anemia, and a low white-blood-cell count. It can be treated, but treatment is expensive and lifelong. Life expectancy may be shortened. About one in 14 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

But for this generation of Jewish students, the idea of getting tested young seems to be catching on. Ms. Rosenblatt recalls her parents' surprise when she told them she planned to be tested. They had been screened for Tay-Sachs in the 1970s — the only screening that existed at the time — and didn't see why she needed testing.

Mucolipidosis IV causes motor and mental delays, and possibly blindness. It ultimately leads to mental retardation and early death. About one in 100 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

But Ms. Rosenblatt, now a sophomore, is glad she learned she's a carrier for Canavan disease. She now knows that down the road, she would want a potential husband to be tested to see if he, too, is a carrier. If so, they'd weigh their options.

But right now, she says, it "shouldn't really affect my lifestyle."

FUTURE RISK DECODED

Niemann-Pick disease leads to buildup of fatty deposits in the spleen, liver, lungs, bone marrow, and possibly the brain. Few with the disease live past the age of 3. About one in 90 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

Tay-Sachs disease causes the progressive degeneration of the central nervous system. Affected children do not progress developmentally past the first few months of life and then regress from that point. They usually die by the age of 4.

About one in 25 Ashkenazic Jews is a carrier.

SOURCE: The Victor Program

http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 54, Issue 33, Page A26

The Wall Street Journal

Hillel the Elder taught us to balance being distinctively Jewish with being universally human. It is a lesson that Hillel the organization strives to teach students every day.

Wayne L. Firestone is the president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

Hillel’s 85th Birthday

Press Clips

Spread the light!

Hillel at 85: Celebrating in Cyberspace Jun. 16, 2009 REBECCA BASKIN and SAM GREENBERG , THE JERUSALEM POST Hillel, the world’s largest Jewish student organization, chose a unique way to celebrate its 85th anniversary. In lieu of its annual black-tie gala dinner, the organization invited friends of Hillel around the world to host their own parties on Sunday night.

The dinner was canceled in light of the international economic crisis.

On Monday, the US House of Representatives introduced a resolution commending Hillel on its accomplishments.

Sunday’s parties were all connected by a live webcast from the home of Hillel President Wayne Firestone in Rockville, Maryland. A second webcast, aimed mainly at North American Hillel supporters, featured distinguished Hillel alumni who discussed the organization’s impact on them.

The celebrations were held in 25 cities, on four continents — from Anchorage, Alaska, to Montevideo, Uruguay, and from Jerusalem to Moscow.

The event was “fun and celebratory, and technologically a new way to reach out to people,” Firestone said.

In his webcast, he said the important thing was “not just when can we all physically be together, but also how can we connect and validate each other... [and] what different campuses and universities are doing to bring alive the organization’s values.”

At the Washington celebration, Lynne Harrison, this year’s honoree and a member of the organization’s board of governors and board of directors, said, “There is the ability to participate in the party for many people who otherwise would not have come to a New York gala.”

Over the past decade, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life has expanded around the world.

“We see a future trajectory on the global platform. This is one of the major significances of celebrating the 85th in a way that South American, Russian and Israeli Hillel supporters could participate,” Firestone said.

Heli Tabibi, director of the Hebrew University Hillel, said

“[Hillel is] one big organization, that Jews from Israel and from abroad are a part of. We celebrate together because Hillel is international.”

Supporters of Hillel throughout the world were invited to leave birthday messages on the organization’s Web site. A message from Hillel of Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, some 30 km. from the Chinese border and the most eastern Hillel in the world, sent best wishes: “May Hillel in the entire world go from strength to strength and keep building the Jewish future for Am Yisrael ledor vador [from generation to generation].”

Firestone said each party was meant to be meaningful, emphasizing values of charity and study. Others served as fund-raisers for the organization.

Firestone said the event was telling of Hillel’s plans for the future.

“The globalization trend” is Hillel’s next big step, he said, mentioning long-distance videoconference study sessions as an example of something “to make our encounters not only more frequent, and not merely chatting or twittering, but actually about something of Jewish depth and exploration.”

Eighty-five balloons were released in a park in Moscow, a study session was held at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and students at Virginia Tech University pledged 850 volunteer hours. Students at Tufts University, near Boston, distributed 85 children’s books to orphans in Rwanda.

Hillel consultant Josh Kram said the event was extremely successful — not only did the organization exceed its fund-raising goal, it also allowed friends of Hillelstudents, alums, and lay leaders — to connect.

“This is the way to do it, using technology in new and innovative ways. We learned lessons from the presidential campaign... We saw the impact of technology in bringing people together,” he said.

In discussing the importance of Hillel, Firestone said that “we live now with a generation of searchers, as opposed

to people who join or affiliate. This generation on campuses searches via search engines, processes their identity while they process information.”

Hillel, according to Firestone, is the first opportunity for young adults to seriously wrestle with adult questions on the relevance of Judaism and Jewish identity in their lives.

“We have taken the view that it isn’t a question of competing with universal trends, but establishing what are the traditions and values associated with Jewish life,” he said.

The House measure recognizes Hillel for its involvement in the US civil rights movement, the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, the Save Darfur movement and interfaith relations. The resolution also commends Hillel’s contributions to Israel education on campus and to combating anti-Semitism.

The resolution was co-sponsored by Rep. Tim Johnson (R-Illinois) and Ron Klein (D-FL). Johnson’s district houses the University of Illinois, Hillel’s birthplace.

Hillel’s mission is to enrich the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students on each of the 500 campuses around the world on which it operates, so that those students may enrich the Jewish people and the world, Firestone said.

The organization’s leaders took this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on Hillel’s accomplishments.

One of its most recent endeavors was expanding to 10 campuses in Israel. “[The move helps] Israeli students who have never taken seriously the idea of exploring their Jewish identity with peers,” Firestone said. “It’s basically included a generation of young Israelis in a conversation about Jewish identity.”

Many alumni at the event in Washington told how Hillel impacted their lives.

With participants virtually connecting to other Hillel supporters worldwide, “We were able to give everyone the feeling that they were part of one big party,” Hillel development associate Rachel Tranen said.

Hillel celebrates 85th June 15, 2009

WASHINGTON (JTA) — An Obama administration official joined more than 100 young adults celebrating the 85th birthday of Hillel.

Danielle Borrin, who works on Jewish engagement for the White House and is also a special assistant for intergovernmental affairs for the vice president, was part of the gathering Sunday evening at the Hillel International Center in Washington.

Dozens of parties were held around the world celebrating the milestone.

Among other ways the celebration was marked was a trip by the newest member of the Hillel board, Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow, to deliver 85 books to orphans of the genocide in Rwanda.

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

FUND RAISING Going Going Gala: Charity Cancels Fancy Event and Still Raises Money HOLLY HALL · June 16, 2009 Sometimes cutting back on special events — as many charities have been forced to do by the recession — brings unexpected benefits, even if the organization ends up raising less money.

That’s the case with Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, an organization that promotes community-service and social-justice projects among Jewish students at colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.

This year, its 85th anniversary, Hillel canceled its annual black-tie gala in New York City, an event that last year cost about $200,000 and netted $1.2-million.

Instead, the organization held a virtual international gala, during which supporters held 85th birthday parties for Hillel in their homes, in public parks, and in bars.

The parties, which took place in 25 cities on June 14, were connected by a live global Webcast, reaching many more people than the annual gala, including supporters in countries as far away as Russia and Uruguay.

Students participated in the fund-raising events in varying ways, by donating volunteer hours or money. Each chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, for example, pledged to give $85 in honor of Hillel’s big day.

The event raised more than $850,000 net and cost $75,000. And Hillel saved approximately $125,000 in what it would have spent had the organization gone ahead with the gala. Not bad for a recession.

Global party

D.C. area ground zero for worldwide Hillel fetes

by SUZANNE POLLAK · June 18, 2009 Leave the tuxedos and gowns in the closet. Today’s fundraisers are taking note of President Barack Obama’s successful use of the Internet and its various social networks and are coming up with new ways to raise money.

Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life typically holds a catered gala at a large hotel and “would gross over $1 million and net $500,000,” said Lynne Harrison, Hillel’s 2009 Woman of the Year.

But on Sunday — celebrating Hillel’s 85th birthday — the nonprofit organization went both local and worldwide: Eighty-five small celebrations were held in 40 cities on four continents,with greetings streamed across the Internet to those worldwide events.

The goal was to raise $850,000, almost all of it pure profit, as there were no rooms to rent, caterers to pay or alcohol to be purchased. Instead, there were parties in people’s homes — including locally at Hillel president Wayne Firestone’s Rockville house — in parks and in learning centers. At noon and 7 p.m., speeches and greetings were streamlined to every party with the donate button clearly noted on the webcast. Between the two live broadcasts, a chat room was left open to greetings.

The noon feed originated from Firestone’s home. More than 50 staff members and their families gathered for bagels, fish and egg salads and fresh fruit, and mingled with their co-workers as their children played together outside.

But for 15 minutes, beginning at noon, everyone was quiet as Firestone spoke into a microphone, his words sent throughout cyberspace. “Eighty-five years ago a group of students, professionals and community leaders met together in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, to create Hillel. That was high-tech community-building then. This is high-tech, community-building today,” Firestone said.

Jerome Rubin, Hillel’s former director in Tel Aviv, sent greetings in Hebrew, and Yasha Moz, program assistant with the international division, spoke in Russian. “It’s really a global party,”Moz said. He was very excited that in Russia’s far east, where there is a 15-hour time difference, people there were still part of the same celebration.

The noon broadcast was intended for Russia and Israel.

The later broadcast, which was originated from a young professionals party that drew 125 people, including Danielle Borrin, who works on Jewish engagement for the White House, to Hillel’s D.C. headquarters, was geared to the remaining parties.

Many of the get-togethers were fundraisers, including the one at Firestone’s house. But some were just plain celebrations, like the 200-plus Taglit-Birthright Israel participants in Israel who arranged themselves into the number “85” on the banks of the Jordan.

The Hillel at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver timed its celebration to initiate groundbreaking for its new building.

“I think it’s probably one of the waves of the future,” said Eram Gasko, vice president for institutional advancement.

“It just makes a lot of sense,” said Firestone, who personally paid for the food at his party. “I think it’s great — the idea that people can celebrate in their own homes with colleagues,” said Adam Broms, who is spending a year as a human resources fellow at the D.C. headquarters. “For me, it’s a little more comfortable” than a formal gala.

To Nava Pickman, development operations assistant, Sunday was “not only about the money. Even if now is not the right time to give, it may be that it’s time to plant a seed, to promote” Hillel. However, she quickly added, “We can definitely use the money.”

Lisa Eisen, national director of the Charles and Lynne Schusterman Family Foundation, thought the event was “a nice way to bring people together. I also think in these economic times, we need to maximize every dollar. It makes more sense.”

Joshua Kram, a consultant hired by Hillel to learn how to use the Internet to raise money, said he hadn’t seen anything like Sunday’s in the Jewish community. “Hillel was paying attention to what Obama did — the technology, the grassroots.” And the group exceeded its goal as money continued to pour in throughout the day, ending up at $875,000.

Hillel Pioneers New Approach to Celebrating 85 Years June 5, 2009

At a time when the global economic downturn is forcing organizations and donors to be more thrifty than ever, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is sponsoring a virtual international gala that lowers overhead costs and enables anyone and everyone to participate.

The world’s largest Jewish campus organization has canceled its annual black-tie gala dinner in New York City to host a series of community-based celebrations in 25 cities on four continents.

“There are people around the globe whose lives have been touched by Hillel over the past 85 years, who know personally the value of fostering a vibrant Jewish life on campus,” said Diane Wohl, the organization’s 85th birthday chair, “We want to celebrate with them, to offer them a chance to reconnect with their rich Hillel tradition and to give them the opportunity to play a vital role in sustaining it.”

From Anchorage to Manhattan and on to Jerusalem, Moscow and Montevideo, friends of Hillel will host parties on June 14th in their homes, in public parks, and in bars.

The parties will be connected by live global webcast, broadcast from the Rockville, Maryland, home of Hillel President Wayne Firestone, featuring Hillel leadership and special guests.

“By hosting parties in their homes, Hillel supporters are not only helping the organization’s bottom line, they are demonstrating the impact Hillel has made on their lives,” said Dr. Lynne B. Harrison, recipient of the Hillel’s 85th Birthday Founder’s Award. “Their enthusiasm reflects Hillel’s history as a community-based international organization rooted in one-to-one relationships.”

“Hillel is an organization that has been built from the campus on up,” said President Wayne L. Firestone, “This celebration underscores our effort at lifelong engagement in building Jewish life on campus.”

Wanted: Fund-Raising Ideas

By JACOB BERKMAN · June 7, 2009

NEW YORK (JTA) — Whoever thought you’d see a former U.S. poet laureate singing a kitschy jingle on YouTube asking for funds for a small nonprofit that most of his readers have never heard of?

In today’s great economic meltdown, nonprofits are searching for alternative ways to raise money, even if it means calling a favor from Robert Pinsky.

So in February, there was Pinsky online, deadpanning a little ditty as he picked a few chords on his Casio — and explaining why people should give a little money to jbooks.com.

“They’re businesspeople. Not a bunch of idealistic schnooks,” Pinsky crooned, fighting a smirk. “They understand the time-hallowed first rule of publishing.

Handed down for generations. Jews. Buy books.”

Jbooks, a subsidiary of the struggling Jewish Family & Life online publishing company, had contemplated sending out a straight solicitation letter. Instead, editor Ken Gordon took a page from an offbeat appeal note that he saw from Framingham State College a few weeks earlier saying “We need your help,” followed by the word “Blah” repeated for an entire page.

“It played on people’s exhaustion with nonprofit appeals, and I think they appreciated other people being up front,” Gordon explained. “Frankly, my model here was the street performer. When you are asking people for money, you have to give them something of immediate and concrete value. If you can entertain them, it might inspire them to give.”

Gordon is not alone in searching for something new.

That nonprofits are doing away with the old became clear after the Robin Hood Foundation, which annually holds an uber-glitzy gala in which it raises tens of millions of dollars to fight poverty in New York, ran a more subdued banquet in May. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Philanthropy and philanthropy blogs have noted how nonprofits are toning down and, in some cases,

abandoning such fund-raisers that traditionally are their biggest money makers.

Signs of a similar trend are emerging in the Jewish community.

Some organizations simply don’t have the money to run the full-court fund-raising blitz at chic hotels, while others are afraid donors will find that pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into a posh event is tasteless with so many people hurting for money.

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, for instance, has dropped its annual New York gala, opting instead for an international “virtual gala” that it hopes will open fund-raising avenues to lower-level givers.

In lieu of gathering several hundred people in New York to buy expensive tickets and pay for expensive ads in a journal, Hillel has offered the opportunity for anyone — rich or not — to hold a house party anywhere in the world on June 14 in celebration of the organization’s 85th birthday.

At two points during the day, Hillel officials will webcast short addresses that can be viewed at the parties.

Last year’s actual gala grossed $1.2 million, but the fund-raising goal for the virtual event is a more modest $850,000. Subtract the production cost of the real thing, allow for a natural attrition of donors because of the recession and the number for this year’s falsie is respectable.

And while members of Hillel’s board of governors have committed to raise at least $15,000 at their individual parties, each chapter of the AEPi fraternity has pledged to bring in $85 at its party to go to the Hillel International Center. In total the fraternity hopes to raise $16,000.

“Hillel has always been a grass-roots, bottom-up organization where individuals on campuses had formed Hillel houses and then became part of the network,” said the organization’s vice president for marketing, Jeff Rubin.

This plan, he added, is an attempt to re-energize the grass roots by including anyone anywhere.

Similarly, the New Israel Fund, which contributes about $30 million a year to progressive social projects in Israel, is attempting to energize its grass roots by giving its supporters the tools to set up individualized Web sites through which they can appeal to their friends for small donations.

The NIF’s mainstays are those who give in the $500 range, according to its interim financial development director, Steve Rothman. But because those mid-range donors are hurting, the organization hopes that instead of $500, those donors can find 10 people to give $50 by reaching out to them through the Web sites they set up with NIF’s help.

“This year we’re not publishing an extensive Annual Report or investing in advertising,” the organization wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “We’re depending on you to spread the word about the New Israel Fund.”

The recession has forced the organization to realize that it needs to further diversify its fund-raising strategy.

“I think it is impossible to ignore the Obama phenomenon, and what he did to raise money and get people to be involved,” said Joshua Kram, who was the director of Jewish outreach for Clinton and oversaw outreach to Jews in Virginia for Obama. “He really changed the culture of giving and contributing in America. Jewish organizations and for-profits should take notice and utilize those methods as best they can.”

It was conventional wisdom only a few years ago that Jewish nonprofits could not effectively raise money on the Internet because there was not a critical mass of Jewish small donors. But now even small organizations such as Jewish International Connections New York, which helps internationals integrate into the New York Jewish scene, is using online social media to cull donors.

JICNY, which has a $140,000 budget to run classes, dinners and networking events for foreign Jews who come to live in New York, garners about half of its small to intermediate donations through Facebook, according to the president of its board, Jeff Stier.

“I think that if we can blend different kinds of strategies, we will be better off,” Rothman said. “If there is a specific online campaign, that is the best of new technology we can use to raise money. But if we can connect it with an old strategy such as an event or fund-raising dinner or a specific occasion, it can build and utilize the Internet for what it is good for — making connections.

And this year JICNY will not send out actual invitations to its annual event, a bazaar-themed evening featuring foods and entertainment from around the world. Instead it is using Facebook networking to virally invite nearly 2,000 people.

Hillel and the NIF are trying to replicate the grass-roots success of the Obama campaign, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters and collected millions of dollars in small contributions through social media such as Facebook.

The fund-raising returns for the Pinsky video and the New Israel Fund project were not great, the organizations acknowledge. But there’s no other option but to try to adapt, an increasing number of Jewish organizational officials say.

Hillel even brought in a consultant who worked on the Hillary Clinton and Obama campaigns to help with the project.

“We made some money. Not as much as we would have liked,” said Jbooks’ Gordon of the Pinsky video. “We gave it the old college try.”

The new methods aren’t sure-fire fixes.

Op-Ed: At 85, Hillel mission remains vital

By JONATHAN D. SARNA · May 27, 2009

WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) — Eighty-five years ago, in 1924, two wealthy and accomplished Jewish college students, Nathan F. Leopold and Richard A. Loeb, motivated by Nietzchean philosophy and determined to commit the “perfect crime,” brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago.

Shocked B’nai B’rith leaders in Mobile, Ala., wrote to the national secretary of B’nai B’rith, Leon Lewis, expressing interest in the case and wondering what the Jewish organization’s response would be. The answer, in one word, was “Hillel.”

The new campus organization, whose establishment Lewis characterized as “almost providential,” would henceforward provide Jewish students with precisely the kind of initiation into Jewish communal life that Leopold and Loeb never had. Wisely, B’nai B’rith adopted Hillel in 1925 and sponsored the organization for nearly 70 years.

Hillel, which continues its 85th anniversary year celebrations this summer, began independently in 1923 at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and focused from the start on winning over assimilated Jewish college students.

“The average student is sick and tired of hearing about the glorious past of our people,” a Hillel executive reported in 1928. “He wants to have definite advice as to sex morality, about Jewish home life, his attitude toward his girl, etc. Unless we can give him that conception, make him understand that any sort of Jew is accepted, that we do not classify the Jews as Orthodox or Reform, then we have failed.”

Under the direction of Abram Sachar, later the founding president of Brandeis University, Hillel expanded, growing to more than 100 units at universities across North America. Many of these, significantly, opened during the dark days of the Depression when (as now) higher education seemed to many Jews a more sensible alternative to unemployment. Since Jews faced significant social discrimination on college campuses in those days, Hillel provided them with a refuge, a home away from home. It strove to meet their social, cultural and religious needs.

Following World War II, thanks in part to the G.I. Bill, the number of Jews on college campuses mushroomed. The

American Jewish community’s interest in campus affairs, meanwhile, waned. As B’nai B’rith support for Hillel diminished, Hillel professionals — fatefully — concentrated their attention on the minority of involved Jewish students. For the rest, Hillel became irrelevant.

Underfunded and passive, Hillel was ill prepared to weather the cultural and political storm of the 1960s.

“In an age when students protest against the establishment, Hillel is the symbol of the establishment,” Rabbi Edward Feld, then Hillel director at the University of Illinois, complained.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg characterized the American college campus as a “disaster area for Judaism, Jewish loyalty and Jewish identity.”

By the 1970s, Hillel was admitting defeat.

“We are doing our job poorly in some places,” its national director, Alfred Jospe, confessed. “We continue to have utterly inadequate and sometimes virtually nonexistent program budgets.

Jospe went on to note that with “a staff-student ratio of one to 2,000 or one to 3,000 or even one to 5,000,” Hillel is “cruelly underfunded.”

The 1988 appointment of Richard Joel as international director began Hillel’s modern-day revival. During the course of his tenure, Joel remade, re-energized and repackaged the organization. Exploiting communal concerns over “Jewish continuity,” he reminded Jewish leaders that “the campus is … a key gateway for Jewish continuity and a key definer of the Jewish future.”

Under his leadership, Hillel became an independent organization, reached more students than ever and raised unprecedented sums.

Today, guided by President Wayne Firestone, Hillel has adopted a new mission statement and strategic plan that commits the organization to “enriching the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world.”

Through Taglit-Birthright Israel trips, social justice alternative breaks and on-campus educational initiatives, Hillel strives to infuse Jewish meaning into the lives of the most uninvolved Jewish students. Hillel has returned to its roots as an organization committed to those lacking a Jewish education while still providing outlets for more Jewishly committed students.

Madoff scandal, are dramatically shrinking. As communities everywhere reassess their priorities, the needs of Jewish college students need to be remembered.

Eighty-five years after the Leopold and Loeb case brought the needs of Jewish college students to the community’s attention, Hillel’s mission is more urgent than ever.

Hillel celebrates its anniversary at a moment when the largest group of Jewish students in American history — the children of the baby boomers — is reaching college campuses. Meanwhile, the Jewish community’s funding sources, drained by the economic downturn and the

(Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and author of “American Judaism: A History.”)

Hillel Celebrates its History LEE HERMISTON, Iowa City Press-Citizen · June 11, 2009

The first issue of The Hillel Forum, a publication published by the Hillel Club of the University Iowa, features a story on Rabbi David Philipson of the Rockdale Avenue Temple of Cincinnati.

“The University of Iowa campus would be greatly helped by the establishment of a Jewish center,” Philipson said.

“Such an institution should provide opportunity of all kinds of religious and social activities. I have no doubt that it will contribute powerfully to the promotion of the fine Jewish spirit on the campus.”

That issue of The Hillel Forum was published almost 80 years ago on Nov. 6, 1929. However, Jerry Sorokin, director of Hillel, said Philipson’s sentiment about the importance of a place for Jewish UI students to congregate still rings true today.

“You could literally take the same text and put it in the 2009 newsletter and it would resonate completely,” Sorokin said.

This year, Hillel organizations across the country are celebrating the organization’s birth in a rented room above a barbershop in Champagne, Ill., in 1924. Sorokin said he doesn’t know exactly when Hillel got started at the University of Iowa, but the newsletter indicates that it’s been around for at least 80 years.

“What’s interesting is the organization here at Iowa was operating without permission to use the name,” Sorokin said.

In fact, sometime after the newsletter was published, the University of Iowa Hillel received a cease and desist order from the Hillel organization. Sorokin said the University of Iowa Jewish student organization operated under a different name until it was officially incorporated into the Hillel organization in 1945. Sorokin said

that incarnation of Hillel in Iowa City was founded by 17 business leaders from Iowa and Nebraska. Only one of the men was actually from Iowa City.

“It was really intended to serve as a resource for the state of Iowa,” he said.

In the early days, Hillel was directed by the rabbi in the UI’s School of Religion, who also served as the spiritual leader for Iowa City’s Jewish community. Sorokin said that first established Hillel’s connection with the city and university.

“Right from the start, there was a close integration of these three things,” Sorokin said.

Eventually, Hillel was no longer directed by a UI faculty member or someone affiliated with Agudas Achim synagogue in Iowa City. However, Rabbi Jeff Portman of Agudas Achim, said the synagogue and Hillel still enjoy a strong partnership. Portman said one of the organizations would be weaker without the other.

“I have always said a strong Hillel makes a strong congregation, a strong congregation makes a strong Hillel,” said Portman, a former Hillel director.

Sorokin said that 80 years after Hillel’s first newsletter, its mission remains the same: creating a sense of community among the UI’s Jewish population through religious observance, cultural programming, community service, political advocacy and informal social networking.

Sorokin said the goal is to create new leaders in the Jewish community.

“The idea is we want to help enrich the lives of the Jewish students so they can be more successful citizens of the Jewish community and of the world at large,” Sorokin said.

Kissing the Gala Dinner Goodbye?

By CAROLYN SLUTSKY, Staff Writer · June 18, 2009

When Rabbi Mordechai Suchard began planning this year’s annual dinner for Gateways, the nonprofit Jewish education and outreach organization he founded 12 years ago, he searched tirelessly for an honoree, someone who could make a significant donation and reach out to his or her friends to do the same. But in this worst economy in decades, Rabbi Suchard had so much trouble finding the right person that he decided to cancel the dinner altogether until everyone’s financial straits were less dire.

as well as a new base of support for SAJES. The dinner, which cost around $25,000, netted $100,000.

“We found people, but the problem is they don’t want to be hitting up their friends,” said Rabbi Suchard of potential honorees. “I believe donors really want to help, but at a time like this, when everybody’s scared for their life, everybody’s trapped due to the current financial crisis.”

Deborah Friedman, SAJES’ executive director, said fundraising brings in about 20 to 25 percent of the organization’s annual revenues.

Rabbi Suchard’s Gateways is not the only nonprofit to cancel its largest annual dinner or otherwise employ radically different fundraising techniques this year.

Indeed, as the economy has continued its rocky decline, a number of Jewish charities have found themselves brainstorming new ways to make ends meet and stay in business another day.

SAJES, the central agency for Jewish education in Suffolk County, typically has a major fundraising dinner with an honoree. Sherry Gutes, SAJES’ director of communications and a local religious school principal, said that because the organization could not find an honoree this year, it began a search for different models.

“We were brainstorming what’s good in Jewish education,” Gutes said. It was decided that instead of continuing the search for a longtime donor, SAJES would approach 20 people in their 20s who are making a commitment to Jewish life in various ways. Each young person was asked to help raise money through friends on Facebook and other social networks.

Rather than making typical “adult” donations of $250, $500, $1,000 or more, the 20 young people and their friends gave $18 or $36 each, and the donations added up, with each of the 20 people contacted directly by SAJES raising at least $1,000. The 20-somethings were then honored as a group at a dinner packed with their families and friends, who made up an enthusiastic crowd

"We’ve learned in Jewish education over the last few years that most successful religious schools are looking at new models of Jewish education," said Gutes. "It’s the same in philanthropy; people’s giving is different now. So of course you still go after the large donors, but those large donors may not be your biggest base of support anymore.”

“When we saw the economy readjusting we lowered our expectations [for fundraising], and we met our lowered expectations,” she said.

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life typically holds a gala fundraising dinner at the Plaza Hotel or another swank venue. But this year, as it celebrates its 85th birthday, the foundation decided not to arrange a fancy party, saving itself some $200,000.

Instead, Hillel decided to hold around 30 “birthday parties” across the country, with each party raising at least $15,000 for Hillel. While the galas generally brought in more than $1 million, the expectation for the smaller birthday party dinners was $850,000, another nod to the big birthday. So far, Hillel has exceeded that goal, according to Diane Wohl, a board member and chair of the 85th birthday celebration.

“This is a pretty clean deal to [raise] money without having to hire an event planner or caterer,” said Wohl. “It was really only because of the economy; everybody had to look at different ways of fundraising.”

Many other organizations are lowering financial expectations, as well as changing the format of their largestscale fundraising efforts. The Ramaz School in Manhattan has scrapped its seated dinner in favor of a cocktail reception, as well as producing an online journal instead of a costly printed one.

“This is in response directly to the economy; we want to

continue to do the things we’ve done well, but cut overhead costs of raising those dollars,” said Kenneth Rochlin, the school’s director of institutional advancement.

Birthright Israel also canceled its annual dinner. The free 10-day educational trip to Israel, which depended on big-money philanthropists and foundations, local federations and the Israeli government for the bulk of its fundraising in the past, hired a new head, Robert Aronson, a former Detroit federation executive known for his fundraising prowess. Aronson and his team of fundraisers have made targeting alumni and their families a fundraising priority for the first time in the organization’s 10 years.

Steve Rabinowitz, an adviser to multiple Jewish organizations, said a focus on new ways of fundraising is long overdue in the Jewish community.

“The reason people are canceling dinners is only in part because it’s hard this year to find honorees who don’t mind having all their friends shaken down for a cause they believe in,” he said. “It’s also because the old model of Jewish fundraising of honorary dinners and letter-in-an-envelope direct mail is old, antiquated and of lesser and lesser value every day.”

Reed. ”We are multigenerational, we have little kids up to women in their 80s and 90s, and I think what you find is that different things appeal to different groups.”

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the changes seen in Jewish fundraising are mirroring the secular world.

“Everybody’s trying to figure out how to make sure that galas are done appropriately and are not too lavish if they do them at all,” she said, “and some are canceling.”

Instead of renting prestigious venues, more groups are having toned-down dinners in the board chair’s home, said Palmer. Others are downsizing auctions, turning away from material gifts to things that reflect an organization’s mission, like a science institution auctioning a scientist’s time.

Palmer said even after the recession ends it will take about three years for the economy to bounce back, and that while some organizations will still favor lavish galas, others will stick to more modest means of fundraising.

“I don’t think galas are completely dead,” she said, but in tough times they “may be one of the first things on the chopping block.”

Rabinowitz said that the Jewish community needs to model itself more on the political world, citing how Barack Obama and John McCain raised millions of campaign dollars online, something the Jewish community has been slow to realize is the new and more effective model of raising money.

For Rabbi Suchard’s part, the economy has taken its toll in other ways than fundraising: the Gateways founder has lowered salaries by 15 percent, taken loans and cut back on programming. He said nonprofits too rarely adopt enough of a business mentality, something he urges them to do to weather the economic rains.

One organization that has newly jumped online to reach new donors in different ways is Hadassah.

“The idea is one has to be careful about how one spends every dollar today; you want to be here another day and to dig a hole too deep is not prudent,” he said. “A charity does have to be run like a business. It’s not just that we’re doing good stuff for the world; everything has to be as tight as can be.”

Catherine Reed, Hadassah’s national director of development, said the organization, which lost some $90 million in Bernard Madoff’s fraud scheme, has expanded its grass-roots, online fundraising efforts with Facebook groups and podcasts, as well as a new focus on summer fundraising.

This summer across the country, Hadassah chapters will hold tag sales, host pool parties and cultural events, and even encourage women to donate unpaired earrings and other pieces of old jewelry to be melted down, with the profits going to the organization.

“The economic times are challenging for everyone,” said

As for next year, or whenever the economy resurges, some organizations say they may never go back to hosting big gala dinners.

Sherry Gutes at SAJES said, “We’re already cooking up ideas” for next year.

“We would not go back to the old model because it’s time to move ahead, move forward,” she said. “Times have changed and agencies need to adapt with them.”

Dr Lynne B Harrison: My Family Really Extends to All Jews May 28, 2009 This article is one in a series profiling Achim-level donors to United Jewish Appeal of MetroWest N.J. Together, the Achim donors set the highest examples of what UJA and all its donors stand for: dedication to helping Jews in need, locally or wherever they are, and a firm commitment to building the future of the Jewish community.

Together, they are an inspiration to us all.

Dr Lynne B Harrison of Union is one of the premier Jewish philanthropists, not only in the MetroWest Jewish community but nationally and internationally. A successful and influential scientist and businessperson, as well as president of Harrison Research Laboratories, lnc., she is also a moving force in the Jewish community, both as an Achim-level donor and as an active leader. Dr Harrison is a member of the Executive Board of UJC MetroWest, the Board of Trustees of Temple Sholom of West Essex, Hillel’s International Board of Governors, and the Board of Directors of Hillel: The Foundation of Jewish Campus Life. She has established internships at Buenos Aires Hillel, sponsors Shabbat dinners across Buenos Aires, and much more.

Dr Harrison recently became a Partner on the prestigious board of PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education), one of only three MetroWest residents to be so honored and making the MetroWest community one of the country's best represented communities on the board.

She founded the Dr Lynne B Harrison Science Centers at the NJ Y Camps, to promote Jewish camping by offering science education as a part of the camping experience.

And Dr Harrison will shortly be given another, very rare, and prestigious honor. On June 14, she will receive Hillel's 85th Birthday Founders Award. The event will be marked

by Hillel’s first global virtual gala celebration — a format chosen so that all the money raised will go to Hillel’s student services rather than a costly event.

When asked why she is so actively involved in the Jewish community, Dr Harrison knows the reason well.

“It’s what I learned at my father’s knee, that Jews are part of a worldwide family, that all Jews are one, that my ancestors have passed down a tradition of Jewish morals, values, and code of behavior, and it’s my obligation as a Jew to live up to it, and my obligation to pass this to my children and my to future descendents I would never live to see. I learned that my family really extended to all Jews.”

That understanding of the larger Jewish family and the obligation we have to it has been continued in her own family.

“I am very proud to say that both of my daughters Judi and Debra are lions [Lions of Judah, as is Dr Harrison] in their own communities. In fact, I participated in their pinnings as lions. They are both very involved in their synagogues, and both their families are involved in various Jewish activities appropriate to their ages. One of my grandchildren, Zachary, who is 15 and became a Bar Mitzvah a couple of years ago, hasn’t yet even thought about what college he wants to go to, but he knows that he wants to go on a Birthright Israel trip with the Hillel from his college. Rebecca, who just turned 13, became a Bat Mitzvah at the beginning of April and Adam, who is 8 and goes to Schechter [Solomon Schechter Day School of Raritan Valley], did a prayer at her Bat Mitzvah. This is a tradition we're passing on, I'm delighted to say.”

When asked about her purpose and goals as a philanthropist, Dr Harrison is just as clear. ”All the Jewish agencies that our community and every Jewish community support are important. But we all have limited funds. So, if you focus on particular interests, you can do more good than if you are more dispersed. I’m focused on the three pillars of Jewish continuity: Education, both the day schools and the congregational schools, Jewish camping, and Hillel. In their most significant formative years, 18 to 20 plus, our youth get their own sense of their Jewish identity and how they want to lead their future Jewish lives. I think Hillel is our final hest chance to work with our Jewish youth.”

That orientation on the future of Judaism truly is at the heart of Dr Harrison’s commitment.

“It isn’t just about the Jewish generation that’s going to be reading this article. By virtue of that fact, they already are demonstrating that they are committed to their Yiddischkeit. Our biggest challenge concerns what our children and grandchildren will shape as Jewish community life for the future. I can’t conceive of my Jewish great-great-grandchildren and what their lives will be like. They may be attending a Hillel on a moon base.

However, our Jewish morals, our Jewish values, and our Jewish ethics are universal, and we must see to it that they reach into the times to come.”

Honoring Hillel’s 85th

By ERIC FINGERHUT · June 5, 2009

(JTA) More than three dozen members of the House of Representatives are co-sponsoring a resolution recognizing Hillel’s 85th anniversary on June 14. Sponsored by Reps. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) and Tim Johnson (R-Ill.), the resolution “supports Hillel’s mission of service to Jewish college students and partnership with the campus community; and ”congratulates the students, lay leaders, and professionals of the Hillel movement on reaching its milestone 85th birthday.”

“Hillel has helped transform the Jewish college experience nationwide,” Klein said. “As someone who was involved in Jewish campus life, and as the father of two children who are active in their Jewish communities, I am keenly aware of the benefits that Hillel can provide to young people. I felt it was appropriate that on this anniversary, Congress recognize Hillel’s achievements in giving back to this country and the world.”

“I am thrilled to join with Rep. Klein in this celebration of the Hillel Foundation started many years ago in my hometown of Urbana, Illinois. Hillel has become a center for student life in the Jewish community, a cultural, social and religious home for generations of students. It is truly one of our most valued community institutions,” said Congressman Johnson.

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Since Jews faced significant social discrimination on college campuses in those days, Hillel provided them with a refuge, a home away from home. It strove to meet their social, cultural and religious needs.

Op-Ed: At 85, Hillel mission remains vital

By Jonathan D. Sarna · May 27, 2009 Hillel students at Queens College in New York support the "Jewish resistance movement" in British Mandatory Palestine, 1947. (Hillel) WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) -- Eighty-five years ago, in 1924, two wealthy and accomplished Jewish college students, Nathan F. Leopold and Richard A. Loeb, motivated by Nietzchean philosophy and determined to commit the “perfect crime,” brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago.

Shocked B’nai B’rith leaders in Mobile, Ala., wrote to the national secretary of B’nai B’rith, Leon Lewis, expressing interest in the case and wondering what the Jewish organization’s response would be. The answer, in one word, was “Hillel.”

The new campus organization, whose establishment Lewis characterized as “almost providential,” would henceforward provide Jewish students with precisely the kind of initiation into Jewish communal life that Leopold and Loeb never had.

Wisely, B’nai B’rith adopted Hillel in 1925 and sponsored the organization for nearly 70 years.

Hillel, which continues its 85th anniversary year celebrations this summer, began independently in 1923 at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and focused from the start on winning over assimilated Jewish college students.

“The average student is sick and tired of hearing about the glorious past of our people,” a Hillel executive reported in 1928. “He wants to have definite advice as to sex morality, about Jewish home life, his attitude toward his girl, etc.

Unless we can give him that conception, make him understand that any sort of Jew is accepted, that we do not classify the Jews as Orthodox or Reform, then we have failed.”

Under the direction of Abram Sachar, later the founding president of Brandeis University, Hillel expanded, growing to more than 100 units at universities across North America.

Many of these, significantly, opened during the dark days of the Depression when (as now) higher education seemed to many Jews a more sensible alternative to unemployment.

Following World War II, thanks in part to the G.I. Bill, the number of Jews on college campuses mushroomed. The American Jewish community’s interest in campus affairs, meanwhile, waned. As B’nai B’rith support for Hillel diminished, Hillel professionals -- fatefully -- concentrated their attention on the minority of involved Jewish students.

For the rest, Hillel became irrelevant.

Underfunded and passive, Hillel was ill prepared to weather the cultural and political storm of the 1960s.

“In an age when students protest against the establishment, Hillel is the symbol of the establishment,” Rabbi Edward Feld, then Hillel director at the University of Illinois, complained.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg characterized the American college campus as a “disaster area for Judaism, Jewish loyalty and Jewish identity.”

By the 1970s, Hillel was admitting defeat.

“We are doing our job poorly in some places,” its national director, Alfred Jospe, confessed. “We continue to have utterly inadequate and sometimes virtually nonexistent program budgets.

Jospe went on to note that with “a staff-student ratio of one to 2,000 or one to 3,000 or even one to 5,000,” Hillel is “cruelly underfunded.”

The 1988 appointment of Richard Joel as international director began Hillel’s modern-day revival. During the course of his tenure, Joel remade, re-energized and repackaged the organization. Exploiting communal concerns over “Jewish continuity,” he reminded Jewish leaders that “the campus is … a key gateway for Jewish continuity and a key definer of the Jewish future.”

Under his leadership, Hillel became an independent organization, reached more students than ever and raised unprecedented sums.

Today, guided by President Wayne Firestone, Hillel has adopted a new mission statement and strategic plan that commits the organization to “enriching the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world.”

Through Taglit-Birthright Israel trips, social justice alternative breaks and on-campus educational initiatives, Hillel strives to infuse Jewish meaning into the lives of the most uninvolved Jewish students. Hillel has returned to its roots as an organization committed to those lacking a Jewish education

while still providing outlets for more Jewishly committed students.

Hillel celebrates its anniversary at a moment when the largest group of Jewish students in American history -- the children of the baby boomers -- is reaching college campuses.

Meanwhile, the Jewish community’s funding sources, drained by the economic downturn and the Madoff scandal, are dramatically shrinking. As communities everywhere reassess their priorities, the needs of Jewish college students need to be remembered.

Eighty-five years after the Leopold and Loeb case brought the needs of Jewish college students to the community’s attention, Hillel’s mission is more urgent than ever.

(Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and author of “American Judaism: A History.”)

Jews, individuals whose historic journeys began together at Sinai and whose paths have crossed on campus.

Hillel works hard to break down these barriers. Hillel’s engagement program reaches out to students who have little Jewish background and who might not step foot in a Hillel building — in other words, the students who don’t know Hebrew songs.

Communal Coexistence on Campus

By Avraham Infeld Published July 25, 2003, issue of July 25, 2003.

Did you hear the latest campus calamity?

Interdenominational dating. That’s right, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and even unaffiliated Jews are dating one another without regard to their denomination!

This dangerous trend was brought to the public’s attention by a pair of well-meaning graduate students concerned about the assimilation of Orthodox students in secular universities.

Hillel, it turns out, is actually facilitating contact among these students. As Captain Louis Renault exclaimed about gambling in the movie “Casablanca,” “I’m shocked! Shocked! Pass the winnings.”

Just to prove that no single stream of Judaism has a monopoly on angst, a prominent atheist on Hillel’s board recently turned to me and said, “All those students at the leadership conference, they know all the Hebrew songs. I want to see the students who don’t know the songs.” In other words, Hillel activists are too Jewish for his taste.

As interim president of Hillel, I find myself the steward of this unique, pluralistic institution in Jewish life. I find that the goodwill that has been extended to me has been extraordinary. Everyone wants me to succeed because they want Hillel to succeed. Just as the proud parent sends his child off to college with dreams of fame and glory, so the Jewish community has embraced Hillel and bids it well.

And just as every parent has distinct ideas of what his child should study and how he should spend his free time, so the Jewish community has its own ideas for Hillel. There are those who want more intensive Jewish content and those who want Hillel to be a social magnet. For some, Hillel is too Zionist; for others, Hillel is too soft on Israel.

Hillel’s uniqueness and its strength are to create Jewish campus communities that appeal to a wide spectrum of college students — those with piercings and those with peyot. During their college years, for a golden moment in time, Jewish students lower their ideological and denominational barriers to experience one another as generic

Hillel offers everything from sushi in the Sukkah, to social justice-oriented spring breaks, to arts programming. At the same time, Hillel provides opportunities for Jewish activists to explore Jewish texts in depth and to develop their skills as Jewish leaders. In multiple ways, Hillel is adding value to the lives of Jewish college students.

The Jewish community can learn from its college students.

How many Jewish groups are hobbled by factionalism, even within the same groups? The cliques are familiar: the observant versus the less observant, the synagogue regulars versus the occasional attendees, those with money versus those without. Make your own list.

At the same time, many of us are proud to espouse our commitment to Jewish pluralism and Klal Yisrael. Realistically, how do we put this into practice in our institutions? Does everyone have a seat at the decision-making table? Do we invest resources to reach out actively to every Jew in our community to truly make him or her feel welcome? Do we provide a range of programs and services for a wide spectrum of our community? Hillels do. In this case, the children are leading the parents.

The campus is meant to be a special, almost idyllic place.

Hillel strives to model a pluralistic campus community that can be continued beyond the college years. In the process, Hillel may be accused of being all things to all people. So be it.

We are single-minded in only one thing: not being singleminded.

Avraham Infeld is interim president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

context, can provide an immersive, meaningful Jewish experience that deepens their Jewish identity. The American Jewish World Service, the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, Chabad and other groups all offer students opportunities to do social justice in a Jewish framework.

Building Identity, One Roof at a Time

By Michelle Lackie Published March 24, 2006, issue of March 24, 2006.

To me, a well-constructed roof looks a lot like Jewish identity (“Teach Model Citizenship by Example,” March 10).

Right now, 700 Jewish college students are in New Orleans and i n Biloxi, Miss., cleaning up the damage wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita nearly seven months ago. The chugging of the air compressor, punctuated by the pop of nail guns, provides the soundtrack as students put roofs on dozens of homes.

The students are repairing homes, but they are also building their Jewish identity and their Jewish campus communities.

The same inspiring magic wrought by Taglit-Birthright Israel in the Judean desert is taking hold along the Mississippi. As one student said, “When I stood on a rooftop in Biloxi, that was my Masada.”

Tzedek, or social justice, work is not just an expression of Jewish identity; it also can be an entry point to Jewish identity. For a student with a limited Jewish background, learning to build a roof in one day seems less daunting than mastering Hebrew. It is no wonder that today’s Jewish students, who often hold multiple ethnic identities, would prefer social justice work to religious observance: A recent study by Brandeis University’s Center for Modern Jewish Studies showed that Jewish students are more interested in “leading a moral/ethical life” and “making the world a better place” than are interested in Sabbath observance or belonging to Jewish organizations.

Whether we agree or not, actress Natalie Portman spoke for a large number of her generation when she told journalist Abigail Pogrebin: “To me, the most important concept in Judaism is that you can break any law of Judaism to save a human life. I think that’s the most important thing. Which means to me that humans are more important than Jews are to me. Or than being Jewish is to me.”

Let me be clear: Social justice work is not a replacement for religious observance or for traditional learning. Many Jewish students derive deep satisfaction from traditional forms of Jewish expression and should be supported. For many students, social justice programs, when framed in a Jewish

Hillel recognizes that social justice is not a monolith. The recent Spitzer B’nai B’rith Hillel Forum on Public Policy included a broad menu of approaches.

Students heard from the Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, and his Republican counterpart, Ken Mehlman. They worked to make structural change in society by lobbying on Capitol Hill with our colleagues from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and they heard about grassroots advocacy from Eric Shockman, executive director of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger. They applauded the president of AJWS, Ruth Messinger, for her work in Darfur, and Karen Austrian, who created the Binti Pamoja Center, a reproductive health and women’s rights center in Nairobi, Kenya. And they acquired information and skills that they will bring back to their campuses.

It’s educational to do social justice in a Washington hotel and on Capitol Hill, but it’s not enough. Much more often the face of social justice is not pretty. During a tzedek mission to Israel in January, Hillel students worked in underprivileged immigrant communities and among illegal workers. In New Orleans, one group of students worked and slept in a shelter with the homeless. In Mississippi, students grew to appreciate the convenience of porto-potties.

The Jewish community needs to give students tzedek options.

At this point in their lives, students are experimenting with their identities, their political beliefs and their professions. By exposing them to a variety of social justice opportunities — conferences, internships, service-learning trips — they can learn, test, network and make informed choices, whether it’s with Hillel, the Jewish Funds for Justice, Avodah: The Jewish Service Corps, or another group.

For our part, Hillel is trying to shape a generation that is distinctively Jewish and universally human, proudly engaged in its tradition and in improving the world around it. Our goal is to double the number of Jewish students who are involved in Jewish life and who have meaningful Jewish experiences.

By immersing young people in social justice we will teach them about their heritage, and by immersing them in their heritage we will teach them about tzedek.

Either way, they’ll learn the meaning of tikkun olam, of repairing the world. And they may never look at a roof the same way again.

Michelle Lackie is director of the Weinberg Tzedek Program at Hillel.

Learning From The Hillel Sandwich

by Wayne L. Firestone Special To The Jewish Week As Passover approaches, it is a good time to reflect on the name of our national campus organization and the central role that Hillel plays in the observance of the Passover seder.

For millennia, Jews around the world have partaken of the “Hillel sandwich” — made up of matzah and bitter herbs — which was created by the sage Hillel during the period of the Second Temple to symbolize the bitterness of slavery in Egypt and the hasty Exodus from Egypt.

It’s no coincidence that nearly 85 years ago, the founders of Hillel chose to adopt the name of this first-century rabbi. Not only were his teachings accepted as the prevailing laws for Jews of his day (and ours), but they also appealed to outsiders as well. Hillel the Elder famously told a non-believer that the essence of Judaism is “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

Hillel epitomizes the quintessential Jewish educator who is able to distill the wisdom of the Torah into readily understandable and accessible concepts. And, though he lived at a vastly different period in history, he embraced the challenge of passing on his Jewish heritage to a new generation, in the face of competing practices and beliefs.

Hillel sought new ways to inspire the Jews of his age. Hillel the organization is doing the same.

It is a mistake to think that Hillel has altered its focus in our contemporary efforts to double the number of Jewish students who are involved in Jewish life and who have meaningful Jewish experiences. This is not only wrong, it doesn’t make sense. Hillel continues in the tradition of our namesake.

Four years ago, Hillel undertook a strategic planning process that has provided us with a wealth of information about the young Jews who populate today’s campuses. A national poll commissioned by Hillel revealed that 78 percent of Jewish students feel that being Jewish is important to them. At the same time, 88 percent said they want Hillels to be welcoming environments for all Jews regardless of their background, and 86 percent want Hillels to be welcoming to everyone on their campuses.

These statistics pose a tremendous opportunity and challenge for us: How does the Jewish community leverage students’ Jewish pride to enhance their identity by using authentic Jewish experiences that require little background or learning?

For Passover, Hillels around the world will create educational and celebratory seders that speak to students’ varied interests and backgrounds. Among the offerings are a “Chocolate Seder” at Boston University and a “Sorority and Fraternity Seder” at Indiana University. Students in the former Soviet Union will conduct seders for thousands of families and elderly people dispersed across vast geographic regions. The University of Washington has a range of offerings in addition to the traditional seder: “Jews of the World,” “Interactive,” “Experiential,” “Women’s Seder,” and a social justice-oriented seder called “Egypt to Saipan: Modern Slavery Seder.” Students studying abroad will come together for a Hillel-sponsored Seder in Rome. Meanwhile, the University of Florida Hillel will host, of course, a “Gator Seder.”

Many students will invite their non-Jewish peers on campus to witness and to participate in this ancient celebration of freedom. After all, the Haggadah says, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” They will be immersed in Jewish tradition, they will gain a new appreciation for our Jewish heritage, and they may be inspired with new insights into the human struggle for liberation. Hillel himself would be gratified that his tradition lives on today across the world. He would be equally proud that this year tens of thousands of Jewish college students will celebrate Passover on campuses and in communities worldwide thanks to an organization that bears his name.

However, our primary purpose for holding the seder is to fulfill the Torah’s obligation to tell Jewish students about what happened to their people in Egypt: “And you shall tell your child on that day as follows: It is because of that, which God did for me, when I came out of Egypt” (Exodus 13:8).

The seder is an immersive experience, a multi-sensory lesson in which the students are participants. Teaching young people in this time-honored way is the surest path to strengthen their Jewish identity. Programs like Taglitbirthright israel and alternative social justice activities enable Jewish students of all backgrounds to involve themselves in in-depth Jewish experiences. And it is the role of today’s Jewish educators to put these experiences in a Jewish context and to build upon them when they return to campus. In this way, our foundation’s professionals are following in the footsteps of Hillel himself.

The sage Hillel left the Jewish people, and the world, with a remarkable legacy that still resonates today. He taught Jewish pride at a time when Jewish traditions were challenged by Greco-Roman practices. He made Jewish learning accessible to Jews and non-Jews alike. He taught our obligation to take care of our own needs first — “If I am not for myself, who will be *for me+?” — without forgetting the needs of others — “And if I am only for myself, what am I?”