The following is a transcript of Episode 11 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: Hello and welcome to our second episode of Perfect Jewish Parents Israel at War. I am Masua Sagiv, scholar in residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute and I also teach at the University of California, Berkeley.

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Masua: As of recording, it has been 17 days since Hamas brutally murdered over a thousand people, Jews and non-Jews alike, in Southern Israel. For 17 days, over 200 hostages, including children, the elderly, peace activists and Holocaust survivors, have been held by Hamas in Gaza.

Josh: While the war is being fought thousands of miles away, for anyone who works with teenagers and college students, a different type of war has emerged in the lives of young American Jews. 

Despite the deep complex history upon which this war has emerged and the incredibly challenging political and military circumstances the war faces now. The world many young people face online in their classrooms and on campus. The world many young people face online in their classrooms and on campus is presented as black and white. 

Teens and college students, as well as their parents, caretakers, and educators, are being asked to navigate questions about ethics, justice, and anti-Semitism that they may not have thought about before, and often on digital platforms that actively encourage binary black-and-white thinking.

Masua: On today’s episode, we ask what is black and white, and what is gray? To do this, we sit down with Tilly Shemer, who spent 20 years working with Hillels, including 12 years as the Executive Director of the University of Michigan’s Hillel, and has just joined the Shalom Hartman Institute as our Senior Vice President for Wellspring Initiatives, our program for young people ages 15 to 25, as well as the professionals that work with them. We’ll be back with this conversation in a minute.

Tilly, thank you for joining us today. Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your family?

Tilly: I’m from Canada. My wife is from Israel. So our heart is in many places and my heart is always on campus after having worked with Hillels for 20 years.

We have one daughter, and she is 17 months old. 

Josh: Tilly and Masua, I’m appreciative of being able to talk with you about this question, because this is a question that I came to, what’s black and white, and what’s gray, when I sat down with a couple of student leaders at Berkeley’s Hillel in the week following the attack. 

All three of us have been spending time with both college students and the professionals that work with them. We know it’s rough going on campuses. And as we were speaking, as I was speaking with these leaders. They started to explain that it feels to them that on campus most issues appear black and white. Support for Ukraine, Black Lives Matter, whatever, both domestic and international politics feels really sort of already pre-legislated for their communities. And this particular issue feels both black and white and gray to them.

And I’m wondering, you know, as you’re considering this, as you’re hearing me explain this sort of what you’ve heard, what you’ve seen on campus, what feels black and white, what feels gray and what do we need to do to sort of unpack that question?

Tilly: I think that’s right, Josh. I think that students and the professionals who support them are feeling that there are elements of this that are black and white and so clear to them, and it’s shocking to them that it’s not black and white for others. And there are other parts of this that are so gray and so muddied. 

Some of the words that I’m hearing this week from our sessions at the Shalom Hartman Institute with teens in high school, with college-age students, and with the professionals that support them on college campuses are words like overwhelmed, exhausted, numb, heavy, upset, scared, frustrated by misinformation, crazy, touched, heartbroken, community, guilty for when things feel normal and drowning. That’s just a snapshot of the diversity of what they’re all feeling.

And so as I’ve been listening to all of these young people and their professionals in the last two weeks, when I think about campus in particular, I’m thinking of three categories that I’m happy for us to be able to unpack and explore together today. 

The first word is heartwarming and all of the heartwarming stories that are coming from campus. The images of vigils across the country of thousands of students, faculty, and staff coming together in their grief in support of one another. We hear stories, warming stories of outreach from partners, from administration, from counseling services at the ready to support our students.

We’re hearing students who are finding their Jewish identity for the first time through this tragedy. And we’re seeing so many moments of comfort and pastoral support from Hillels, from rabbis, reaching out to their college-age students, from Chabad, from other communal leaders, all at the ready to support their students, and I’m seeing that continue week after week, knowing that the grief of the students are many knowing that the grief of many of these students did not end after that vigil, while also holding that there are many students who are ready to move forward and come together and need to come together in community in other ways. 

So the Hillells are also planning their programming that they know are going to help the students move forward in all the ways that they want to. 

The other story that I’m hearing from campus is a story of heartbreak, of breakdown of relationships and breakdown of community. And people are concerned because they don’t know whether these are short-term breaks or long-term breaks that are going to continue. There’s a sense of shock when a faculty member or the leadership of their university didn’t check in on their students, or the professionals didn’t acknowledge the horrific attack of October 7th, and the way in which the Jewish community continues to feel and grieve on campus. 

There’s a breakdown of relationships between students, peer-to-peer, friends, through Instagram posts, through messages people are sending. And there’s a breakdown of community for many of our students who thought that they would find their values and their people in certain communities, in particular progressive communities, queer communities.

They thought that they were going to be able to find themselves and their people through these communities only to find that the leadership of those groups or other members of those groups are really coming down on the opposite side, and the way in which Jewish students may see this as black and white, they see those communities also seeing this as black and white. But their version of black and white is not the same.

And then the third story is the heart-hardening story. And I think that people’s fear and anger is really hardening their hearts at this time because some of the reactions have been just so mind-boggling and painful to them.

It is inconceivable for so many of our students and professionals to realize that they have to explain that Hamas is a terrorist organization, or that this was a horrific, unthinkable, barbaric massacre of civilians. While their bodies are still not all identified and they’re still grieving, they are experiencing protests and statements and coalition building that justifies this as resistance, it’s simply too much for many of the students and campus professionals to get their head around. 

So now rather than just feeling shocked and upset or disappointed that their grief wasn’t seen, they now also feel that they have to justify or explain or defend why they are grieving and mourning in the first place. 

So I’m seeing a lot of pain and anger that is making people retract deeper into Jewish communal bubbles and isolate themselves. They’re feeling burned or hurt or angry by the lack of response or even more so the justification of this massacre as resistance. 

All of these things are happening all at once, everywhere. It’s really hard for me to find any campus or Hillel professional that is not experiencing something or some version of these stories. And if they’re not experiencing anything, then the silence itself is what feels deafening or troubling to them.

Masua: I think that this is the first real big-scale encounter with anti-Semitism for a lot of our Jewish students, especially the liberal Jewish students. And it comes not like just as anti-Semitism, but on top of a deep value crisis. Because if the notions of justice that I have as a student and that I grew on, right, as part of the Jewish liberal community, if my notions of justice, or if the notions of justice that I know and understand do not apply on Jews, then I think it’s both saying something, it’s creating a crisis not only with my peers and with my educators, but also with my values themselves.

Josh: Right, well Tilly, when you said students are seeing something as black and white, a good portion of Jewish students will say, this is black and white, and a good portion of the rest of the campus community is seeing black and white, and they’re on different sides of the black and white. Can you just, I mean, I think we all know, but can you just flesh that out for us? What is that? What do you say?

Tilly: I think one of the things that’s coming up a lot for students and for professionals is that when something happens to other communities, there’s often, I’ll say that in our own Hillel building, we would have a discussion with our leadership students about, how would you want to be treated in this moment, what kind of outreach would you want to experience, and we would talk as professionals with our students about how they could exercise leadership in moments and be in support of another community. 

And they would do so. They would reach out. They would send a letter. We would talk about the difference between making a communal statement versus making a personal gesture of outreach. What was needed based on the severity of the example. 

And here we had a horrific attack against Israel and the Jewish people that is being felt very deeply and personally on university campuses by our young people. And many of them were left feeling not just disappointed, but heartbroken by the fact that their peers didn’t reach out to them in the same way that they would have reached out to others. 

Even more so that they have their friends, their communities, even their faculty and grad student instructors, who are seeing this through a completely different lens than they do. And that’s why we’re hearing language. That’s why we are hearing a sense of, that’s why we are hearing words like crazy, afraid, scared, because this is something that they can’t understand how there is another black and white to this. They can’t get their heads around that. I can’t get my head around that.

Masua: Yeah, I have students who told me that their classmates have specifically told them, we cannot be empathetic to Jews right now. Because again, you know, it’s funny, in the first week after it happened, I also had a conversation with students at Hillel and they asked me whether I think it’s black and white or it’s complicated or gray.

And the interesting piece for me is that, you know how at Hartman, we always say that things are complicated and we explain why things are complicated? And we always see things in gray about, you know, about Israel, about our Judaism, about everything. Our life is really based on and this is also my experience. My professional, personal life are built on complexity and gray.

And for me, this moment is completely black and white too. And I think it’s important to maybe emphasize it. You said it before, Josh and Tilly, it’s not that people are seeing it as black and white and we are seeing it as complicated, which is usually the situation that we are at. And then we have to try to figure out how to complexify the situation and reality. 

It’s actually being on both sides of black and white, which is so much more difficult, because for me this is definitely black and white. I usually, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I would say it’s complicated. This, it’s black and white. There are people who are wrong and evil, and there are people who are right and victims, which is also by the way a place where I usually not feeling very comfortable of being, like, victimized.

So it’s not just trying to complexify reality, which is something that we’re talking about with our students. It’s actually being on both sides of black and white.

Josh: I mean, I want to tease out sort of the ethical quandary that we’re talking about, which is to say you, Masua, are saying, and Tilly, I think you’re saying, that you feel, Masua, and students feel, and much of the Jewish community feels, the murder and kidnapping of Jews and others, Palestinians, Thai workers, non-Jewish tourists who are at a festival or visiting friends. The killing and kidnapping of those people is horrific. It’s abhorrent. It transcends the whole conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is an act of terrorism, and Israel has the right to defend itself, Hamas can no longer be a neighbor and they should be rooted out and that action, that Masua: Or at least Western humanity, right? At least Western liberal values.

Josh: Meaning you are saying, Masua, and I think this is something that on certain college campuses and certainly in the humanities, the post-colonial or decolonial notion of justice is very different than John Rawls’ liberal notions of justice. 

And we’re seeing that conflict play out, which is hard philosophy that many of us have spent years studying, being played out on Instagram, in binary ways, on college campuses, in like protests, how beautiful could it have been to have, for a moment of everyone was in Shiva together, where everyone had said, yes, this is a horrific loss of life, before we start to talk about any underlying historical nature of the conflict, what feels legitimate as a moral position? 

What’s happening though is, and I think what you’re both speaking to is, seeing on college campuses, a version of the left, not the entire left, but a version of the left, express a moral position that basically says it’s okay to kill Jews if it leads to Palestinian resistance. 

And that feels abhorrent. It is anti-Semitic. That’s where I think for me, that type of black and white, that version of the black and white, ignores deep complexity in the moment. But that, I don’t wanna take away from, I don’t wanna be heard sounding like I’m rationalizing anything, right? It’s how do you talk about horrible violence against Jews in this moment, and a political situation or an occupation or a situation with Palestinians, whatever language you’re going to use, that doesn’t feel tenable, and not turn that into any type of rejection of Jewish feelings. That’s what I’m hearing you articulate is the tension underlying. Is that accurate?

Tilly: I think that one of the things that is standing out so strongly and deeply is the swiftness with which there was just for some a response right away that this was justified, and others the justification came after the initial support for Jewish community. 

Both were shocking. Both were shocking. And both were so fast that it felt like it didn’t give our Jewish community time to grieve and feel a sense of support from the broader community and feel seen in our moments of grief and in our moments of shock of what happened in Israel.

Masua: And also we need to also acknowledge the fact that, you know how, in progressive worlds, if someone is, God forbid, attacked or raped, our first response is, we believe you. And I think that what a lot of our Jewish students experience right now is the absolute opposite of we believe you, because we are also hearing voices on campus where this is not true, it’s exaggerated, it’s fake. So again I want to try to iterate again it’s not just the betrayal of people it’s also the betrayal of values.

Tilly: I think also campus is a microcosm and is where everything is felt in society very deeply. And so it’s this mini community where everything happens and can be felt very deeply. And so I think that it’s not unique that this is happening on campus. It just feels very intense in a campus environment. 

Josh: One thing I heard you say is sort of mimicking what our colleague Jonathan Golden has been sort of teaching everywhere, which is this notion of you start with the heart. What are people feeling, then you enter into the head: What are people like thinking about? What are the ideas underlying some of this stuff? And then hand? What are the activities? 

When I was talking, I was not actually thinking about students in that conversation. I was thinking about as a parent, or as an educator, who’s hearing your young person express views that feel incredibly black and white in ways that they don’t take into consideration human dignity of Jews. One conversation that feels really important, or if you’re a college student and your roommate is speaking in a language or at least posting in a language that feels to totally reject human dignity of Jew, one important conversation seems to be, hey, at some point we might need to explore the notions of justice that you’re expressing and that there are alternative notions here.

Tilly: One of the things that I think that you’re getting to is actually, how do we get people away from the I see the world this way, you see the world that way. This is how we’re, the heart hardening and even the heartbreaking, right? We’re seeing that playing out on social media and Instagram posts. 

And I think one of the things that is helpful for parents when they’re engaging in conversation with their teens and college-age students, or professionals who are engaging in these conversations, when they’re seeing that moment of heartbreak where a relationship has broken down or a community is lost because of this competition of values or because they thought that others would see the world in the same way that they did, then I think that our young people, they want us to be with them, and to create spaces for them to be able to talk about that. They want us to be with them, to hear from them. 

That was really hard. And what was hard about it. And then I think that there’s a question that we can ask them of, what’s your relationship with that person or that community and how important is it to you? And do you feel like you can, do you feel like you value that relationship to the point where you want to reach out interpersonally, not in their DMs, not a direct message, but interpersonally, and really sit down and engage with what is probably going to be a really hard conversation, but engage with somebody whose views are different from your own on this or who put forward something that makes it seem like their views are different from you, but it might be that their views are not that different from yours, and they were drawn to posting something for whatever reason it may be. 

And so there’s an opportunity for this young person to be able to reach out in person and really engage in a conversation. But I think that they need to ask themselves, are they in real relationship with that person? And how much do they value that relationship in order for them to feel that they want to push past their vulnerability and their fear in that moment and their anger in that moment and really engage in a conversation that could potentially be very hard.

Masua: I think something important that you’re saying, Tilly, is that a part of our instinctive reaction is taking a step back and closing within ourselves. And I’ve also seen a lot of will with both, you know, high school students and college students to do something. And then one of the questions is what to do. And there’s so much around us, right? So much information and so much initiatives of what can we do.

And also at the same time as us, as it can be both parents and professionals, we also want to protect our kids, right? To protect our children and protect them from very hard encounters on social media or very hard stories and videos of things that have happened in this horrible Shabbat on October 7th. And part of what I’m hearing you say is go to the personal, right, and start small and step by step, right?

Tilly: Yes, and you had Sivan Zakai on this podcast. And she talked about the kinds of questions to ask our young people around Israel. And I think that those are all still relevant of starting with the how does that make you feel? Starting with the hearts. 

And then going into the questions about what do you feel you want to know? What do you feel you want to learn? And going next to the questions of what do you want to do? And I think that we are going to see, we are going to see a lot of leadership emerge in this moment of people exercising their own leadership. We will see young people step up in a lot of ways that are heartwarming because they feel like they want to do something in this moment. 

I am not seeing a lot of the head programs right now on campus. 

Josh: No, and we shouldn’t.

Tilly: I’m seeing the hearts and the hand. I’m seeing the, how are we processing, how are we creating spaces, and I’m seeing the, what do you want to do, how can you feel, 

How can we help? Yeah.

Tilly: How can we help, how can we feel productive? And just like we’re seeing the mobilization volunteer-wise in Israel, so too are we seeing that kind of mobilization of young people, of young people of young people running fundraisers, sharing information of where to donate, sharing information of what supplies are needed, really coming together to be in support of community.

And I’m seeing this not just in the typical campus groups, but I’m also seeing this come up in the different organizations that focus on young people, Camp Ramah, Young Judeah, creating spaces of support, creating spaces where young people can come together in support of one another and thinking together in that community that was so important to them. How can they do something that makes them feel connected, that makes them feel productive in this moment?

Josh: I want to go back for a moment, Tilly, of what it means to sit in front of someone and to decide to talk to them about the way you’ve been hurt and the way you’re feeling, and the desire of whether or not you want to transcend that relationship, or transcend that pain to have that relationship. 

I spent most of my 20s living in Jerusalem. And spent a lot of time. working, this was after the Second Intifada, working with bringing Jews to hear from Palestinians. This is a very tough moment for me right now to think about that work that was so important to me and the, is it possible to transcend the boundaries right now? I remember sitting in a room one time outside of Bethlehem. And we were listening to a woman, a Palestinian woman, religiously Muslim, who was on her city council or her town council, talk about her ownership. 

Like, the text says, Jerusalem is mine, dot dot dot, and a fellow colleague, now a rabbi, saying, my text says the same thing. How do we sit together, and recognize that we come from traditions that might require us to, like what am I supposed to do with that? What am I supposed to do with the fact that, and that moment for me has lived on in my life as an incredibly brave moment of saying to someone, I see your situation and I need you to see my situation.

And I think right now that’s incredibly difficult if you feel like, my people were just killed. And then then, instead of getting up and saying, oh, hey, by the way, I’m worried about your safety, your friend get up and said, great, this is what Palestinian resistance looks like. It’s very hard to then go sit in front of that person if you don’t feel like there’s a mutual trust of a commitment to, hey, do you see me as a human?

But I also want to encourage people, like the only way to walk forward is to have any of those moments of vulnerability to be able to say, oh yeah, I’m a human. And I see that you’re a human and we’re in deep pain and what could it possibly look like? And obviously, it should be mentioned, no one in Jerusalem or in Gaza city or in Qatar or in Riyadh or wherever this is going to be legislated is waiting for the two students who are fighting because of what they posted on social media and they go to University of Wisconsin. No one’s waiting for their phone call. 

This is about them and their sense of who they are in that place and what does it mean to help them encounter that vulnerability and transcend that difference. That feels so important to me. And I understand it’s super scary and it might go against the sense of like, wait a minute, I feel totally justified in my position right now. I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that given the pain that we’re all in.

Tilly: I think it’s a question of how much capacity does one have and if they feel like they don’t have the capacity to be able to sit with somebody whose views are different. And I’m not talking extreme difference. I really think that, 

Josh: Right, obviously, obviously. I’m not talking about extreme difference. 

Tilly: I really think we need to protect our, right, I really think we need to protect our hearts and I wouldn’t encourage any young person. I wouldn’t myself engage in a conversation with somebody even if I had a deep relationship with them, if their views I felt would be painful, really painful for me. 

And right now, I don’t have the capacity to be able to sit with that, and to sit with their pain. I do know that our Jewish students are reporting that they feel unsafe. And I would typically in the past have asked the question, do you feel unsafe or do you feel uncomfortable? And I think that this is a moment where, I don’t know for how many, but this is a moment for Jewish students where they say they would answer, no, I feel unsafe, not just uncomfortable, where a year ago, two years ago, when it’s a difference of ideas, it would maybe the answer would be it would be more likely that it was uncomfortable than unsafe. I feel like since October 7th, something has changed in that. 

And I also know that there are Muslim students on campus and Muslim professionals on campus that are targets of Islamophobia right now, and that they too are reporting to the universities that they are feeling unsafe. And so in that, there is something that is shared. And if we are in relationship with one another, and we can reach out to somebody else and say, this is a really hard time for our communities, or this is a really hard time for me, and I imagine it’s a hard time for you, then that is an opening. And that is something that we share. 

I just had an example of this where a Muslim friend and former colleague of mine posted something right on October 7th that was very painful for me, the kind of thing where you open up your social media and you see it and you throw your phone across the bed, right? 

And I sat with it. And as I was hearing stories of experiences that Muslim students or Muslims were having in America, I thought, okay, now I’m going to reach out. And I sent her a note that said, there’s a lot of pain and suffering, and I just want you to know that I’m thinking of you. And she sent me back this beautiful text. She said, in our tradition, we learn that when one part of the body is in pain, the entire body is in pain. And that is how I feel right now about humanity. And I’m sorry for your community’s pain. 

And I wrote back to her and said, one of my teachers at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi, one of my teachers at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Elana Stein Hain, just taught a beautiful text of a rabbi who went to the doctor with his wife and said, Doctor, my wife’s foot is hurting us. And so then we were able to connect on our shared common texts from two different traditions, from two different communities that are both in pain and experiencing suffering right now. 

We did not talk about the post that made me throw my phone across the room. I hope at one point we will, and I hope at one point we’ll be able to engage in what was hard about that. But for right now, she knows that I’m thinking of her and her community, and I know she’s thinking of me and my community. 

I had the capacity to do that with one person. That for me is a hopeful moment of turning something where my heart was hardened towards her. And we had one heartwarming moment that was able to soften my heart.

Josh: Tilly, it’s an amazing, amazing moment of vulnerability you just shared and brave, bravery. I wanna thank you for, I think, I wanna thank you for providing us with this framework of like, we’re seeing people hardening their hearts and we need to help them unharden their hearts. We’re seeing people whose hearts are broken and we need to help them heal those broken hearts. And we see people engaging in heartwarming moments that transcend the incredible pain and the incredible difference. 

We started with a question, what’s black and white, and what’s gray? And I want each of us in our last minute to offer sort of on one foot, if you will, which is part of our normal programming. How would you answer that question? What’s black and white, and what’s gray for you right now? 

And you might not have a black and white or you might not have a gray, but I think it’s important and helpful for our listeners, for all of the parents, caretakers, and educators out there, as well as maybe teens and people in their 20s who are listening, to hear, there are variety of opinions on this right now and that there’s a North Star. 

Masua, can I start with you?

Masua: What Hamas did is evil, morally. This war is a just war, even though within it, we might have some red lines. And I think it’s important to talk about these red lines. I think that my North Star would be to slowly add back complexity, because I still recognize it’s important. But I have to say that right now I need to actively seek for that after that gray, and maybe, and maybe just sit with the fact that even in the face of this great vulnerability, that we are rediscovering as Jews, both in North America and in Israel, there’s also great power and resilience within us. Josh: Beautiful. Tilly, what’s black and white for you, and what’s gray?

Tilly: Well, I think what’s clear for me is that our hearts are breaking or broken. And I think that our hearts are going to continue to harden if we don’t have more heartwarming moments. And I think what is unclear to me is how many heartwarming moments we need in order to make sure that our hearts don’t harden completely. And so I think that we both need to open ourselves up to heartwarming moments, however hard that may be and however vulnerable we may need to be in order to do that. But we need to open ourselves up to heartwarming moments in order to make sure that our hearts don’t turn from heartbreak to hardened hearts. 

And the other thing that is always very obvious to me is that, I’m really thinking of my Hillel colleagues in this moment, and they’re working so hard, and are giving so much of themselves to their communities and are not, I’m sure not, allowing themselves the time to be able to grieve or personally navigate what this moment means to them. 

I think that they are positioned in our community right now, between academic institutions that people are feeling very angry towards. And they are in relationship with parents and alumni. And so they are in between the parents and alumni and the institutions, and are often the ones that are on the receiving end of our parents’ fear and anger around what their students are experiencing or what’s happening in their alma maters.

And so my hope for our Jewish parents and alumni who listen to this podcast is that they find a way to hug their Hillel professional today and really see that they are not responsible for the actions, they may be in a room where they’re trying to influence the actions of the administration and make sure that the administration is in support of their students, but they are not responsible for their actions. 

And so I would encourage people to really lean into the relationship in a positive way, and if you are not feeling like you are seeing enough of the heartwarming stories of what’s happening on campus because you’re seeing the stories that are coming out through social media and various Jewish press, then sign up for your Hillel newsletter and see the pictures of the vigils and the president showing up for Shabbat dinner, of the groups of students coming together to run fundraisers, and of all of the ways in which our professionals are there for students in support of them during this moments of grief and mourning.

Josh: Beautiful. Thank you. I’ll tell our listeners that both of my colleagues on here and myself are trying to hold back tears as we speak. 

I’ll say for me, what is black and white is terrorist murder is evil. It is awful. You may not, you cannot do that. What Hamas did was evil and wrong. What is also clear to me, I like that language, Tilly, is actually something that you, Masua, said to me the other day, which is, I am struggling with the fact that on the left, I don’t see a differentiation between Hamas and the Palestinians. 

And my fear is that as a result, Israel, as it moves into a rightful war of self-defense, also won’t differentiate between the Palestinians and Hamas. And it was a very powerful statement. And I will say what is gray to me is the way forward. I absolutely believe that Hamas has to be eradicated. And I’m not a military expert. I just know, I saw what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I know that more killing breeds more terrorism and more pain. So I don’t know what it looks like moving forward, and it makes me scared and sad. 

I also know that all of our colleagues on college campuses, in schools, youth group advisors are working harder than ever, they need our support, and they’re holding young people through an incredibly challenging moment, and I thank them for their service.

Thank you everybody for joining us. We’ll see you next time.

Masua: Perfect Jewish Parents is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where we tackle pressing issues facing Jewish communities, so we can think better and do better. You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free live classes, and events at shalomhartman.org. This episode was produced by Jan Lauren Greenfield and edited by Ben Azevedo. Our executive producer is Tessa Zitter. M. Louis Gordon is our production manager, and Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creative.

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