Getting Our Priorities Right about Jewish College Students

Shabbat Emor Sermon, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

About two weeks ago I got a request from a teacher at Immaculate Heart Middle School in Oro Valley: would I be able to come speak to her 7th grade history class about Israel.  They had lots of questions, and she felt unprepared to answer all of them.  Could I talk about Judaism the history of Israel, and perhaps the Gaza-Hamas War as it related to that? She offered to pick up some challah and Bobka at Beyond Bread as a treat for her students and asked if that would be OK.

I accepted her invitation, believing as always that it’s extremely important to explain facts to non-Jewish groups of any age whenever people are open to hearing them, and adolescent students are particularly impressionable, of course.  I freed up some time Tuesday afternoon; and then that morning the teacher emailed and asked if I could come an hour earlier and talk to her 8th graders, too, since they would be going to high school soon and expressed real interest in hearing from a rabbi.

As it turned out, purely by chance, the date of the class was Yom haAtzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, the 76th birthday of the modern State of Israel in the old/new Land of Israel.  Truly appropriate: and so, I ended up explaining the entire history of Jewish connection to the Holy Land, from Abraham to Moses to the Babylonians to the Romans to Theodore Herzl to the contemporary nation, twice that afternoon.  The kids were great: attentive, curious, funny.  I had them point out tiny Israel on the map I saw in their classroom, and asked them to estimate how big it was compared to the massive Arab and Iranian and other Muslim states that surround it; I showed them this dogtag, reminding me of the hostages still captive in and under Gaza.  They asked lots of questions; when did we stop doing animal sacrifice, for example; although my favorite was “Can rabbis get married?” 

Catholicism is different that way.

Some of the kids told me eagerly that they were performing Fiddler on the Roof at the school this weekend and when I told them I had done that show in high school they asked if I could attend.  And so, this morning I took an hour and a half and drove back to Immaculate Heart High School’s hall to see these very Catholic kids peform the most Jewish show ever.

I have to say, it was heart-warming.  They did a much more complete version of Fiddler than I could possibly have imagined: costumes, dancing—including the bottle dance—singing, sets, really charming.  They did cut the show down, but still it was over an hour without intermission, and they did a commendable job.

Most of all, they captured the essence of the show, the humanity of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, the devotion to tradition, the dislocation forced on the characters by antisemitism.  And as I was driving away several of the kids shouted “hey rabbi” and “thank you rabbi.”

It reminds me of the time I returned from a trip to Israel and spoke for a Catholic group with then-Bishop Gerry Kicanas here at a local country club.  I had to drive up to the guard gate at Skyline and get admitted; and I recall saying, “Hi, it’s Rabbi Cohon. I’ve come to speak to the Equestrian Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre…. I’m pretty sure that sentence has never been spoken before in all of human history.”

Which is a long way of saying that it remains incredibly important for Jews in America, and right here in Tucson, to build relationships of respect and understanding with people of all religious traditions.  But it also emphasizes a rather different point; that we need to do the same kind of work with our own young people.  And we do not always choose to do that.

The anti-Israel, pro-terrorist movement on college campuses, as well as the organized efforts to disrupt city council meetings and public spaces on behalf of Palestinian terrorism, is finally waning as colleges end semesters and encampments are disassembled.  I’ve been asked several times over the past week what I thought about the apparent young people’s public embrace of the Palestinian “cause”, often in openly antisemitic ways that advocate violence and genocide of all “Zionists” and the killing of all Jews. 

First, I must note that the pro-Palestinian-terrorist organizations that motivate and run these efforts on college campuses have been funded and largely created by big sums of money sent through devious channels from Qatar and Iran.  These protests all use the same “playbook”, including the same chants, to simulate a popular movement.  And the radical ideology that pretends all Israelis—most of whom have darker skin—are colonials oppressing “black and brown people” has been ginned up by people funded by Arab and Middle East Study Centers paid for by Arab and Iranian oil money.  It’s infuriating, to be sure.

But there is another side to this story—the Jewish side. 

I’ll start with a personal al cheit, a public confession and comment on the way the organized American Jewish community has failed our Jewish youth on college campuses for many years. 

When I began serving 25 years ago as a senior rabbi in Tucson, my then-synagogue was just a mile from the campus of the University of Arizona, considered the finest university in the state.  After rebuilding membership at that temple, dramatically upgrading the religious school and life-cycle offerings, creating an Early Childhood Center, and developing a talented staff, I turned my attention to our older teens and college-age students, many of whom were attending the U of A. 

I was friends with a Reconstructionist rabbi who assisted the director of the Hillel there—we were in a small running group together—and I asked him about the market penetration Hillel was achieving among the 6 or 7,000 Jewish students at the university.  It seemed like most Jewish kids at the U, and most Jewish graduate students and administration and faculty there, did not engage with Hillel, the main Jewish campus organization on nearly every decent-sized college and university campus in North America. 

The statistics Hillel boasted about at the University of Arizona reflected that failure to engage: perhaps 1,000, at most, Jewish students attended a Hillel Shabbat dinner or program over the course of the whole year, roughly one of out of 7 of the Jewish kids in school, not to mention the many other Jewish members of the university community who could have been involved but weren’t.

I began work on a program to connect students at the university with our synagogue, which was a short bike ride from campus.  I was young enough then to hang out with college students in coffee shops and cafes, and we had an even younger assistant rabbi who easily connected with the college and grad school-aged students and younger faculty.  I reasoned that if Hillel wasn’t reaching most of the students—and it surely wasn’t—shouldn’t we help make Judaism, and Israel, a stronger influence on campus by using our own synagogue’s energy and effort?

As we began, however, I received a call to meet with a major congregational and community donor.  He told me that Hillel was raising funds for a large expansion of its building, and that Hillel was the organization empowered to connect college students to Judaism, not our synagogue.  In other words, Rabbi Cohon, put your efforts elsewhere.

This was not exactly a threat, but it certainly implied one: you are trodding on someone else’s turf.  That message was reinforced by our local Jewish Federation, which had what it termed “beneficiary agencies”—never synagogues—who have their own mandates.  Other Jewish entities, like our temple, who did not receive Federation funding, still weren’t supposed to invade the areas that these beneficiary agencies claimed… or else punishment would come.  Mind you, the amount of money that funded Hillel was never very large; there were always other things to put community philanthropy money into, like paying the salaries of Federation workers.  Still, they believed the U of A was Hillel’s turf, and we synagogues shouldn’t be trying to engage students there except through Hillel.

Since Hillel was missing 6 out of every 7 Jewish students, I thought this attitude was absurd, that keeping rabbis from reaching out to college students and grad students was insane.  But I had plenty to do in my 80 hour a week job at my own synagogue without putting effort and resources into campus Jewish life.  I had only just managed to wrestle adult Jewish education back where it belonged, at the temple, my first couple of years on the job.  I didn’t really see how getting into a community battle over college students would benefit anyone.

So I redoubled my own efforts at Outreach, bringing in people who wanted a connection to Judaism throughout the larger community, with success.  But I didn’t engage the university community directly, save for guest lecturing at an occasional class, or holding an event on campus every year or two.  I had been warned off, and decided not to fight that battle.  Besides, Federation was already causing mischief with our own temple board.

Now that’s just how our Jewish community here in Tucson worked; I can’t speak for how it worked elsewhere, but I suspect it went similarly.  We synagogues would keep our own students engaged in Jewish education and temple life through bar and bat mitzvah and then all the way through high school, many of them teaching younger kids in our Religious School.  Then they would graduate high school and we’d send them off to college and hope—pray?—that Hillel kept them connected. 

We’d ship them Hanukkah candles in December, Purim and Pesach treats in the spring; once a year, in December after classes let out, we’d have a College Shabbat and invite all the kids back for nice dinner and Oneg Shabbat.  That was about it.  And locally, we didn’t really connect in any systematic or organized way with the college students here in Tucson.

Now since Hillel had such limited impact, the void in Jewish communal life at the University of Arizona was filled a tiny bit with free Shabbat dinners at Chabad—drinking alcohol was the big draw with Chabad, of course; random Orthodox rabbinic couples coming to push observant Judaism from time to time—JACS, I think it was called; there was one Jewish fraternity—I was chapter advisor at one point—and of course some of the Jewish students from the U came to teach at local Religious schools. 

The larger issue, that a huge potential Jewish population, perhaps 20% of the whole university, was unconnected to its Judaism, went unaddressed.  Most Jewish kids were not connected to organized Judaism during their time at university, or during grad school.

I suspect that’s very much what happened, and happens, everywhere in this country. And that means that when our own youth are most impressionable and growing and changing the most, during their formative college years, most of them have no real connection to Judaism or Israel or synagogues.

Which also means that when these organized efforts to destroy Israel and advance the Palestinian terrorist positions—and eliminate the only Jewish nation on earth; and advocate the genocide of all Jews—arrive the organized Jewish community of America is in an incredibly feeble position to respond on campus.  Because our best allies, the Jewish kids we educated through their high school years, have been cut adrift and essentially abandoned by us.  And instead of dynamic pro-Israel organizations on campus, and an excellent array of Jewish choices built by knowledgeable and talented young Jewish leaders, synagogues, and organizations, we have the Hillel movement—laudable, but so limited in its reach!—and then Chabad, whose Israeli members don’t even serve in the IDF and who aren’t really Zionists.  And the response is predictably tepid and ineffective.

That needs to change.  The American Jewish community has serious resources at its disposal.  What we need now is the vision to apply those resources to the marketplace of ideas that the university academy is supposed to be, and to engage and recruit our young Jewish adults in a serious and committed way.

I know that this seems like a large agenda: but we are devoting so much effort now as a community to the painful work of salvaging a PR disaster, and we are discovering that the very Jewish students we should have been connecting with and assisting are sometimes part of that disaster.  Shouldn’t we put in the positive effort to build college and post-college communities that are dedicated to Judaism, Jewish life, and Israel, instead of paddling upstream against a flood of well-coordinated anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda?

There is a theme in Fiddler on the Roof that is worth remembering: Tradition, when it runs into change, must adapt.  And we must adapt and consider our sacred youth, our children at university and in their early adulthood, as truly essential for the future of our people, and our Jewish nation.

Let’s remember that commitment, and seek to build a better college future for our kids, and by doing so, for ourselves.