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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Claire: Hi and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Claire Sufrin, senior editor at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and editor of Sources, a journal of Jewish ideas. I’m stepping in for Yehuda Kurtzer for today’s episode. We’re recording on Monday, June 17th, 2024.

The summer issue of Sources will be arriving in subscriber mailboxes and available online at sourcesjournal.org very soon. This issue explores the theme “Jewish on campus” with articles from Hillel directors, college students, professors, and other key stakeholders.

The theme Jewish on campus is especially meaningful for me on a personal level, beginning with my parents, who met at the University of Illinois Kosher Dining Club in the ’70s. For most of my childhood, I expected to meet my own spouse at Hillel. I think it’s typical for young kids to assume that they’ll relive their parents’ story, but maybe that was just me.

Either way, when I was in college in the late 90s, despite valiant efforts, I didn’t meet my spouse. I did, however, find a home at Hillel, not a home away from home, so much as a new model of what home could be. I had grown up in a synagogue in an overnight camp with overlapping and strict norms. My home communities also had great confidence that our way of doing things was the only right way. But our blend of liberalism and traditionalism was also quite particular, at the time found mostly in Chicago, where I’m from, and Toronto, and a handful of other places around the Midwest.

And so being Jewish on campus for me began with the realization that the Judaism I had been raised to think was the very best was unlikely to be available to me for at least four years. And yet I so wanted to be part of a Jewish community, to belong. I quickly learned to loosen my hold on what I’d been taught and to work with others, first to define and then ultimately to embrace the standards that worked for all of us, more or less, given where we’d each come from and what we each wanted.

In religious terms, this was often a matter of gender. Who should be counted in a minyan? Who could say kiddush at a community Shabbat dinner? But it wasn’t always. I will never forget vehemently instructing a fellow student that it was time for his new extraordinarily spiritual minyan to hurry up and finish Kabbalat Shabbat as it was already 7 PM and the rest of us were ready to start dinner. I am more of a rationalist than a mystic, and I probably always was and will be. But that moment was not about my own disinterest in singing niggunim, wordless Hasidic tunes, for hours. Rather, this was a moment of choosing to build pluralistic community and a lesson in sustaining the unity of the Jewish people. We can and should create spaces that nurture our different approaches and values. And we can and should sometimes ask one another to compromise for the sake of being together. There must be a balance between these two.

Though I didn’t realize it for a long time, as I got involved in Hillel activities, I was also sketching a blueprint for the rest of my life. I joined a committee planning a student conference on women in Judaism. I became an editor of the Jewish Student Literary Journal, an experience I cited when I was interviewing for my current job. I started going to student meetings and ultimately served as a Hillel co-president. In my mind, I thought that I had fallen into this role almost by accident. But as I’ve continued to find myself in a string of Jewish leadership roles since that time, I am starting to understand that this was less of an accident than it was an early step toward becoming who I want to be.

I ended up meeting my spouse toward the end of graduate school when I was in Jerusalem doing archival research. The more detailed story of our meeting is great, but the essential detail for this episode is that Michael worked at a campus Hillel. And so, much to the amusement of my college friends, I jumped back into that world. I see being Jewish on campus differently now as the spouse of someone whose life’s purpose is enabling and shaping and supporting all sorts of Jewish student experiences. Some of them like my own, as an undergraduate, and others very different.

Working at a Hillel is a job with long hours from the early morning into the evening. It is emotionally exhausting. When students turn to Hillel’s staff, they come with the same range of problems and passions that anyone working in student affairs is familiar with. School stress, family stress, financial stress, physical illness, mental illness. Some know exactly who they are and don’t expect to change until they grow into someone radically different. Others come in already trying out new identities, experimenting in a multitude of ways.

And the job of the Hillel staff member is not to be a parent, not to say, do this, don’t do that. This is right. This is wrong. The job instead is to listen, really listen, and to respond in ways that students can and will hear. Sometimes that means pointing a student in the direction of campus resources outside of Hillel. Often though, the Hillel staff member is the resource the student needs.

There’s a lot of talk about meeting students where they are. This means, or seems to mean, whoever you are, you are welcome here as you pursue whatever it is that interests you. But what the notion of meeting people where they are doesn’t really capture about student life is that young adults are never just who they are. They are living through a time of what the philosopher Martin Buber called total openness, describing it as the least committed, most exploratory moment of a human lifetime.

And so, at least when it comes to being Jewish on campus, I think the best professionals do meet Jewish students where they are, but then they help them think about what sort of Jewish adult they want to be when they leave campus. They answer questions and help students to ask better ones. They discuss complexities of Jewish life that students weren’t ready for in Hebrew school or that they never heard about around their dining room table. Campus can, should be a place where students grow into their individual particular sense of what they want their own Jewishness to be and who they want to be within and together with the Jewish people. It serves its purpose because it is separate from home and because it draws together Jews of many backgrounds. It serves its purpose best when students have Jewish adults they trust and respect.

As I have watched Hillel Life as an adult for two decades now, I have seen that student trust and respect emerge when the staff are true to themselves, when they do not pretend to be every kind of Jew, but instead when they live their own Jewish lives openly and in public. They share the ideas, dilemmas, role models, and relationships that shaped them as they moved along their own paths. They talk about the challenges they encountered as they explored rituals, grappled with Israeli politics, and studied Jewish history. They talk about what they learned from scholars and mentors, texts and traditions.

This honesty is what best helps students seeking their own ways. It almost goes without saying that the last academic year brought tremendous stress to Jewish students on college campuses around North America and the world. Starting shortly after October 7 and often culminating intent encampments in April and May, many universities saw a rise in anti-Zionist activism and with it, often, blatant anti-Semitism. Attempts to respond to these protests brought five university presidents before Congress signaling, if nothing else, the great difficulty these protests posed to college administrations seeking to support commitments to free speech and to attend to the safety of students with radically different political ideas, many of them is much a matter of identity as of politics.

Those of us off campus found ourselves asking more explicitly than we ever had before. What is college for? What does the university stand for and what are its priorities? What does all this mean for North American Jews? Many Jewish college students found themselves afraid, confused, uncomfortable as they navigated addressing October 7 and the war with friends and roommates. Some students discovered themselves to be Zionist with a strength they had not known before, showing up in the front row at counter-protests, wearing Israeli or Jewish symbols around campus, stepping forward when the campus newspaper or national media needed someone to provide a Jewish perspective. Others tucked their heads down, avoided the protest sites, and kept quiet. Some found themselves wanting Jewish community more than ever, or for the first time ever. And some found themselves drawn to pro -pro-Palestinian campus groups and joined the encampments, either ignoring or even adopting the anti-Zionism they heard there.

Today, I’m going to be talking with Adena Kirstein, executive director of Hillel at the George Washington University. She is the author of “Centering Jewish Identity Development, Even When There Is Anti-Semitism on Campus,” an article in the forthcoming issue of Sources. Jewish students at GW saw their share of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism this year, and even before this year, making Adena particularly sensitive to what being Jewish on campus means today. Welcome, Adena.

Adena: Thank you so much, Claire. What an intro. You churned something in me. I thought to myself, gosh, that’s why we’re doing the work, Claire. That’s it.

Claire: I appreciated the push to reflect on things, to reflect more coherently maybe on things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I would love, Adena, if you could share a little bit about your own path, your own journey to becoming a Hillel professional.

Adena: Sure, great question. You know, I find in life, when we’re young and we look forward, we’re not exactly sure which way we’re going, but when we get older and we look back, we’re like, that all made such sense, right? I was born and raised in the South in Roanoke, Virginia, and where does a nice Southern Jewish girl want to go for college? New York City, right? The center of the Jewish universe. So I went to NYU and I thought to myself, I’m going to get there. I’m going to find my people. I’m going to feel a deep sense of belonging. And of course, I got there and they didn’t know what to do with me.

You know, I had a great rabbi in college who said, if they don’t know where you went to high school, where you went to camp, like the New Yorkers don’t know what to do with you. So I was struggling. I really was struggling. And I had a tremendous Hillel professional who really tried to carve out a space for me not to be missing out because I wasn’t like everybody else, but to be honored and valued because I wasn’t like everybody else. So that kind of started my Hillel journey and my place of belonging and growth within the Hillel movement.

I left college. I went to do some work at a nonprofit. I went to graduate school in social work and my second year placement, I got a placement I wasn’t so thrilled about. And I thought, well, maybe they’ll let me do this placement at Hillel where I went to school at NYU. So that was really the start of my Hillel career. I spent about two and a half years at NYU, and then I’m going on, I believe I’m starting my 15th year at GW this year.

Claire: Wow. Can you tell us a little bit more about the community at GW and what makes it both similar to and different from other campus communities?

Adena: I always goof, you know, you’ll meet a student who’s checking out GW or just starting and they’ll they’ll you know, I’ll say hi, I’m Adena. So nice to meet you. And they’ll say I’m so and so, I’m not that Jewish. And they’ll literally physically lean away from the conversation. And I’ll say to them, you are the rule, not the exception. Like, we’re so glad you’re here. It’s a very large community. I always say it’s like New York or Miami. You feel like you never have to overtly do anything Jewish, but you still feel like there are a lot of Jews around. Right. People know when it’s Passover. They know when Shabbat is coming. It’s not particularly observant. We don’t have a huge Orthodox population. I would even say, you know, Shabbat is not the center point of our Jewish lives on campus. It’s much more about belonging.

And you have to remember at GW, right, location, location, location, students come to GW because they want to change the world and they don’t want to wait to do that, right? They want to be senators tomorrow. They don’t want to have to wait too long or they’re just ready to skip the line and make a change in the world. And some days that is a challenge, but most days you have to, I feel, reframe it as like, how amazing, they believe they can change the world today! How are we going to help them be the change maker that they want to be informed by Jewish values doing it in a way with deep intentionality as they go.

Claire: So can you tell us a little bit more because your article addresses anti-Semitism on campus. It goes from there in a lot of different directions, but tell us a little bit more about what that aspect of Jewish life looked like at GW, both, let’s say, before October 7th and then over the last academic year.

Adena: Sure. Over, I would say, you know, the last 15 years of my whole career at GW specifically, what I noticed would happen would be, you know, in the early days, there might be one incident and something would happen. Maybe there was a swastika on a wall or maybe there was something that happened. It happened maybe once every three years. You know, when it came up, we would gather as a community, we would work with administrators, we would do what we need to do, and it would kind of fizzle out.

And what I started to notice last year before I thought about writing the article was, gosh, these are coming, you know, I’m a parent, right? I’m a mother. And I think about it like contractions, right? Suddenly they were getting closer and closer and closer together. And I would notice in myself that, you know, we would have these incidents that they would come, everybody would be up in arms, the phone would start ringing, we would have to quickly like navigate this crisis management and putting these fires out, figure out what was really going on, get to the heart of it.

And then we would get to the end of the cycle, and I would think to myself, you know, what did we just accomplish? What was the ROI, the return on investment on that experience? And it was troubling to me because I didn’t necessarily feel that our students were benefiting from the chaos.

Now, I want to be really clear. I think we need to deeply grapple and deal with the challenges in our world as it pertains to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. But I just wanted to make sure that our students were at the core of how we were grappling with that. So this year, obviously, I don’t even, it was just fast and furious. It felt like there was no downtime. We were just throughout the year dealing with anger, with incidents, with conversations. Should we make a statement? Should we not make a statement? It felt like this constant tenor of chaos and toxicity and we had to figure out a way to deal with it and, again, make sure that students were still, you know, that’s why we’re here. Like you so beautifully articulated, we’re here for identity development. We’re here to help students figure out who they are. I do not want a student to be the same Jew on the day they graduate as the day they come to GW. And I’m sure all of my Hillel friends would say the same.

Claire: So I’m gonna push you maybe in a way that you’re not gonna like, which is I wanna go back to the people who are off campus for a moment. And I’d love for you to flesh out a little bit more all of the different stakeholders who are interested in what’s going on at GW and what the quote-unquote Jewish experience is like. Who are they? Why do they care so much?

Adena: Sure. So I wanna premise it by saying this, Claire, and, I truly believe this. The people who care, care, right? They ultimately, I believe every single party who I hear from when it comes to anti-Semitism on campus is doing so because they believe in the health and well-being of Jewish communal life. They want continuity. They want us to continue to thrive.

With that said, there are many, many parties who are watching from the outside looking in, who aren’t necessarily in touch on a regular basis with a student or have a pulse on what’s happening on campus. And they are, some are just reading headlines and, you know, forwarding a headline to a friend and saying, did you see what’s happening at GW? Dun, dun, dun, right? And others are taking more active advocacy steps to try to figure out how they can help the situation, right? So that’s parents, that’s alums, that’s rando people who one day were in Washington, D.C. and know what GW is like. That is a full and robust and deeply well-meaning Israel advocacy space. That is the social media universe, who absolutely is thriving at times on articles or on headlines that help to increase likes. Social media is a whole other piece of this puzzle that really we need to consider. All of those factors are coming to play.

And like I said, a lot of those people who again, mean well, do not actually know a current college student or have them bother to ask college student, you know, can you tell me what’s really going on?

Claire: So how do you balance between those well-intended sort of forces from the outside who are calling you up on the phone and sending you emails and sending emails to the college administration, leading the administrators to call you and so on and so forth? How do you balance all of that with the students themselves and their needs?

Adena: Listen, I often find that these days my main job is to be translator-in-chief. I have a great colleague at Stanford who used that word and it stuck with me. Sometimes I feel like my job is to bring the temperature up with them. I want to say to them, listen, this incident for me feels different than all the other incidents. And I want you to understand why from, by the way, someone who has a strong relationship with them that we’ve built over time. So they listen to me on a good day and on a bad day, because we’re in relationship with each other. I don’t just scream at them when I’m angry. So sometimes it’s about raising the temperature.

I think for others, for sometimes alums or parents who are so fired up and so angry, rightfully so from a headline that they’ve read, I sometimes, my job is to bring the temperature down and to say to them, guys, let’s take a deep breath. I want to share the bigger context. I want you to understand why maybe what you saw on that WhatsApp group isn’t necessarily what our students are feeling directly on campus, right? So that, that shifting of temperature, I feel like it’s a constant dance that Hillel directors are playing these days.

I also think that the longer I’ve been in this work, the more I’ve thought about my voice, right? What it is I really want to say about these issues. And what I find is if I wait to use my voice, then I get put on the defensive. Well, you came out too fast. You came out too slow. You did this. You did that, right? I’m constantly for the left, I’m too right. And for the right, I’m too left. When I use these moments as an opportunity to reiterate the things that I feel are deeply important, staying focused on students, thinking critically about belonging, thinking about how mental health is playing a role in social media, when I use these opportunities to quickly say, I really want to articulate for you how this is landing with us on campus before I can get a barrage of emails kind of putting us on the defensive, I find it goes better for us and it goes better for others.

Nine times out of ten, listen, I will send emails at times, and I’ll get, if it’s a hot moment, let’s say, I’ll get 30 responses. 28 of those people are saying, Adena, you said the thing that I wish somebody would have said. They’re so grateful that I’m putting voice to what they’re kind of grappling with. It cuts through the noise of the social media stuff.

And then, of course, there are some who write, you know, a small minority who are just angry. They don’t feel that we’ve come out strong enough. And that’s something, again, you know, in a leadership position, you have to be ready to take that heat. And obviously, many Hillel directors have learned how to do that over these past months and years.

Claire: It seems like the alternative is that you could be pushed back and forth to match whoever you’re in conversation with and to lose any sense of foundation or who you are or why you do the job that you do.

Adena: Absolutely. I have got to stay focused on why I’m here. I did not get into this work to fight anti-Semitism, even though it feels like that’s all I’m doing some days. I’m here to positively impact lives. I’m here for Jewish continuity. I believe deeply in Jewish belonging and Jewish community. Our students feel that. They are smart. They are paying very close attention to branding. They do not want to buy into a brand that is built on doom and gloom. Again, that does not mean that we should be naive.

We need to think critically about what’s going on and we need to take very smart intentional strategies for dealing with it. But my goal is to sell the product of Judaism with joy, not with fear. I do not want them to build their Jewish lives on anti-Semitism. We will have missed a golden opportunity. In all the sadness of this year, that is the one bright spot. Never before have students been thinking as critically about what it means to be a Jew. Are we going to meet that moment or are we going to miss it?

Claire: So one of the things I love about your article where you really lean into this question of what are we missing when we’re focused entirely or almost entirely on anti-Semitism, one of the things I love most is that you bring in the language and the insights of social work. For a long time, Hillel directors were rabbis. I don’t know if this happens to you, but Michael is called Rabbi Simon all the time and he’s never set foot in a rabbinical school or, I think, thought about it for more than a second.

And I’d love to hear you reflect a little bit more on how that approach informs your understanding of your work and your sense of what college students, who they are and what they need.

Adena: Sure. You know, it’s funny, I went to social work school long ago and I always say I kind of had a love hate relationship with that. I never thought, you know, should I’ve gotten out now seeing where I landed in life, should I have gotten my MBA? Should I have gone a different route? Would it have served me better?

What I’ve noticed this year is the core principles of social work continue to guide me, right? Every social worker knows meet the client where they are, right? We have to recognize this moment in time and what is swirling around and how are we going to deal with the moment and use the moment so that the student or the client, quote-unquote, can be strengthened, right? So I found I’m thinking a lot more about systems theory, like old school, what are the systems at play? How do they work themselves into the moment that we’re having?

I also think, you know, my secret sauce over my life, I often have students, they’ll come to see me and we’ll have this deep, dark, interesting, fascinating conversation really driven by curiosity and my social work skills deep in me my kishkes. And, you know, at the end of the conversation, they’ll kind of look at me and maybe they’ll notice my card on my desk or see something on my degree on the wall and they’ll say, wait a second, you’re a social worker? You know, it’ll dawn on them like, you’ve been working me, but in the best possible way, right? I lead as a social worker, as a mother, as a nurturer, as an empathizer. That is how I think I do my work and do it well. And I really, listen, man, those skills have been the most valuable ones that I’ve been utilizing this year.

Claire: I think there’s something else going on too, not just, you know, them realizing that you have a little bit of therapy training, but also, hey, I can go to school and learn how to do this, this job. Maybe this is, you know, the path emerges, the like how you got from here, from here to there, or from there to here, I suppose more correctly.

I want to read, if you don’t mind, a paragraph from your article and there were a number I was choosing between because so many of them are so powerful. But this one is from, I don’t know, midway through. You write:

“It is time to turn our field of vision from one view to another. In the first frame, where we’ve been staring too hard is the rightful outrage and anger that take hold of our community when bad things befall us. This frame undoubtedly still deserves our attention. But first we must turn towards another frame. In it are our Jewish college students squarely looking back at us and asking us to keep our attention on them and their identity development. They must be our core starting point. The stakes are simply too high for us to turn the other way. I call on all of us to reject the notion that we must choose between defense of our people and celebration of Jewish possibility. When our students are nurtured and fortified in their identity development, all else becomes possible.”
I love that image of the two frames and like the, it’s, because it’s challenging, right? You can’t look into places at once. That’s not how our eyes and our brain work. And yet, we have to look at them at the same time. We have to understand they’re happening at the same time. Talk a little bit more though about identity development, what you mean by that term.

Adena: Our students, listen, what was the original draw for me of Hillel work? Everyone who went to college or was an 18 to 22 year old knows it is a fruitful time of growth, right? Emotions are heightened. You’re figuring out, who are you gonna love? How are you gonna learn? What are you gonna be with your life, right? How many of us, you know, my life, I’m in my 40s, life is boring, right? I know what to expect for the most part. Every semester changes. Every year they’re living someplace new, right? It’s this moment of really heightened, thoughtful living. And as a Hillel professional, right, I want to not only at times bring Jewish values into that conversation to figure out, gosh, maybe just maybe, you know, for example, you’re so crazy all week long, you’re looking at your phone all week long, you’re so stressed out of your mind by all the academic demands that are on your time.

We have this beautiful gift that’s called Shabbat. Every single week we say, take a deep breath, it’s going to be okay, right? That is a mental health message as much as it is a halakhic one, right? So I really want to make sure that we are supporting students as they go through that process. And I also want to make sure that the negative forces that are at play right now in our world, it is very easy to see how students become deeply saddened by what is happening as we all do, right? But you and I, we feel deeply saddened. We might take a deep breath. We might have a partner to speak to or a best friend to speak to or a parent God willing to speak to. And it helps us process.

They are living in a different universe, right? They might come home, their space of comfort at home, might be living with a person who they know was hanging out at the encampment, right? So how do we make sure we create an infrastructure in a place of belonging for them so that they can safely take that deep breath, whether on Shabbat or any other time of the week, and process what’s going on, right?

Listen, my deepest fear about this moment is not, I worry about what’s happening with anti-Israel stuff. I do. And I, of course, we need to deal with it and we need to deal with it, you know, very smart and intentional ways. However, what I really worry about is that Jewish students are going to walk. They are going to walk away from Jewish communal life because this conversation either feels too divisive or too difficult or too, they don’t know where to fit in. And they’re just going to say, you know what, maybe it seems like the whole Israel conversation is all that the Jewish people want to talk about. I’m just going to actually walk away. And then we’ve missed that fruitful moment of identity development and are they ever going to come back? Right? They’re setting their trends and their patterns of how they’re going to be Jews during these four years.

And if this moment is marked purely by, you know, doom and gloom and darkness and we’re not creating spaces for them to process how they fit into the whole bigger picture, we’re going to lose them! And that is what I worry about. And I feel like I wish every single Jew, quote-unquote, adult was worried about the same thing.

The most common question I get is what can we do? Adena, can I send a letter? Can I do this? Can I do that? And it comes from a beautiful place. What you can do is pick up the phone and call a college student and open up a door to see if they want to walk through. Not to say college student, did you hear what’s happening? But to say, how’s it going? How are you? And maybe they’re gonna walk through that door and have that conversation with you, and maybe they aren’t.

And listen, if they aren’t, that might also calm you down. When our anxiety level is so high about this, we’re not able, you know, I talk in the article about system one and system two thinking. If we are not using system two thinking to take a deep breath and say, what is going on here and how can I help the situation? There are so many things you can do to help the situation, but you need to keep students at the focal point of how you’re providing that help.

Claire: So I wanna back up, not to the beautiful ending of that comment, but to the middle part where the student is afraid of the Jewish community or turned off by the Jewish community because it feels so divisive. And I want to acknowledge, and I think this is more true in some campus communities and less true at others, but for many campus Jewish communities, what happened over the last year was the emergence of fissures and divisions, and students who all of a sudden felt that their politics were out of line with what Hillel’s politics were.

I overheard many conversations about the fact that there’s an Israeli flag in the Hillel building. And those conversations range from the student who thinks they cannot enter the building because there’s a flag, an Israeli flag in one room and they’re not ready to be in a place that signals that they are diehard Zionists, to all the way on the opposite end, why is the flag upstairs in the back room? Shouldn’t it be here by the entrance so that everybody can see it right away? And it’s a really wide span, and it’s just about a flag.

So I would love to hear you really address the divisions that have emerged in many campus communities, and then to think into the future, like what is the fall gonna look like? What are you preparing for? How are we going to repair our internal divisions? Or how are we gonna help, we’re not gonna do it, how are we gonna help our students to choose to repair those internal divisions and to find some kind of unity despite their differences?

Adena: I think going back to the first part of your question, I had a student in my office the other day and she was sharing with me as a Jewish student how she had felt at home at the encampment. Right. And, you know, it was a hard conversation, but I said, I’m so glad she came to talk to me. And the next morning it happened to be a Shabbat morning and my husband and I were sitting on the couch and I, you know, he’s a lovely, wonderful man. And I was telling him this story all about what she had said. And he said, well, does she know about this? Does she know about that? And what about this? And what about that? Right? And his defenses went up.

And I understand why his defenses went up. My defenses go up too. But what I thought to myself is our defenses are not serving us well. If I just put up my defenses for the student, why does she need to keep having the conversation? Right? As much as we can take a deep breath and say, what is this student really trying to say to me? If a student says, I don’t like that the flag’s in the window.

Now, personally, like for us, we have hostage posters in the window and a student expressed, I don’t like that you have that, it’s political in nature. For me, I’m not taking the hostage posters down. It doesn’t feel like a political choice. That’s the purview and choice I have to make as a leader and I want to keep the posters up. However, I have to take a deep breath, not get defensive, even though I read that and I thought, why does she want to… and say, what is this about? She does not feel at home. She does not feel she has a Jewish peer that she can turn to. She feels she’s making a choice between her political stance and her communal stance.

And that is a problem that I as a director need to take seriously. Again, that’s not about politics. That’s not about a flag or a poster. That’s about, how do we make sure every Jewish student has the right to explore what it means to be a Jew while also unapologetically holding, I went to a beautiful Hartman class recently and, they said, are we an open tent anymore? Are we a gated community? Sara Labaton shared that. We’re in a deep moment where, listen, I was a much more open tent than I used to be. I have certainly put up the gates and I have certainly thought differently about boundaries and borders, but that does not change my fundamental belief that I am here to help students explore what it means to be a Jew.

And ultimately, my prayer, you know, listen, I’m biased. I own that. I want to be able to have the conversation with the person who doesn’t want the hostage posters on the wall to make sure that they want to keep engaging as a Jew. I want them to come back. I don’t want to lose them over those posters, but I’m going to keep the posters up. That’s the real tension, right? In terms of what’s to come, listen, we’re thinking critically as a staff and we’re thinking critically with our partners. We’re taking really good data from our students. We’re surveying them right now to understand really where they stand now that they’ve had a minute to breathe after the end of the semester. The line that I always use with anyone I can is to think about what is within our control and what is not.

Part of me believes, and maybe this is a cynical view, things are not gonna get much better until this war is over, right? I cannot change, yeah, I cannot change the policies of Phoebe, I cannot decide what Hamas is taking, what deal they’re taking or not, that is so beyond my control. What I can control is doing everything I can to make sure our students have a safe space to be together, to take a deep breath, to sometimes relax and not think about everything that’s going on in the world.

There are so many things within each of our control, but the problem and the mistake that I feel we’re fundamentally making is we’re trying to control the uncontrollable. It’s a losing strategy for the Jewish people and it’s a losing strategy for our Jewish students.

Claire: I’m going to push you back to the hostage posters. I don’t think that putting up hostage posters will free the hostages. What does it do? What does it communicate?

Adena: Yeah, let me tell you, it’s the best, and maybe it’s a selfish gift, it’s the best thing I did all year. And the reason is because when I’ve had a particularly hard day, when I feel like the world is crumbling and I’m just failing miserably as a Hillel director, I’ll leave the building to go to my car. And we, for anyone who knows Washington, D.C., we’re on a main thoroughfare, right? Every tourist has to walk down the street, to go to the Lincoln Memorial, past our building. Everybody who’s going to the State Department, every motorcade has to go by. And inevitably, if you stand there long enough, you see a tourist. And the tourist might have a 12 or 13-year-old son or daughter. And you see them pause. I wrote about this. That’s the power of the pause. They pause for just a second. And you remember that the noise that we have been surrounding ourselves, and I’m guilty of it too, I’m on my Instagram feed way too much, the noise that I’m letting into my head just might not be the actual story.

I think the majority of people and the majority of students just don’t know what to think. They’re just like, why is everybody so worried about this issue? Why is it still the, right? And these people stand and they care, who wouldn’t have a little bit of a little ounce of empathy to see there is a face staring back at them. Hersh is staring back at them in the window. Who doesn’t want that person to come home to their mother and father? That is a basic, you know, it has restored my faith in humanity and I pray that our students see it too. They see those people pausing to look at those windows. That is what we need to stay focused on.

You know, there’s the conflict and then there’s the conflict about the conflict. They are so focused on the conflict about the conflict. They all need to take a deep breath.

Claire: I think that’s a great way of putting it, distinguishing between the conflict and the conflict about the conflict.

I want to suggest there’s like so much overlapping. And what really brings it all together are relationships. You talked about relationships with people in the administration at the university. You talked about your own relationships with individual students, the relationships between them. But there’s also, in seeing the posters, another relationship, right, between me, the person walking down the street in more or less freedom, connecting with through this image, somebody who doesn’t have that freedom. Maybe if I’m a Jewish student, I connect right to the Jewish people writ large to all Jews everywhere who are in trouble, who are suffering. And maybe it’s just a connection to some kind of broader humanity.

And at the same time, that connection brings with it or can bring with it a sense of not being entirely safe. Right? The hostage posters remind every Jew of dangers in being Jewish. And I guess I just wanted to call that tension out, how impossible, in this moment it is for us as American Jews, right, living at a distance from, we have our own trauma that we experienced on October 7th and we have the trauma of the conflict about the conflict and all of that, but we’re not going through what Israelis are going through.

And I think part of the, I don’t know, maybe what holds us back from wanting to connect to the entire Jewish peoplehood is that it means admitting a little bit, a little bit of a lack of safety or a little bit of danger. That’s really hard.

Adena: Sure, sure, but you know, my children are my own children, not my students, are relatively young, right? They’re 11, 8 and 4. You know, early on I would say, let’s try not to talk about it as much. Let’s try to, right? And then of course my four-year-old starts saying Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. And I thought to myself, number one, the kids are all right, but they’re also listening. They’re paying very close attention. And, I mean, isn’t that the story of the Jewish people? Yes, there are bad things that happen.

You know, here’s a little data point, which strikes me. Those hostage posters on the first floor of Hillel, it’s the space we use not for student life. Our students hang out on the second floor, but it’s the space we use for speakers. And we’ve had rentals, we’ve had wedding parties, we’ve had different things that have come throughout the year. Joyful non-Jewish events. Not one of those rentals who are paying money and have every right to say, could you take down the posters while we have our happy occasion? No one has asked to take them down.

Claire: Wow.

Adena: Now, maybe they just are, they don’t want to offend or they think it’s, I don’t know. But I want to believe, like, life is messy. There is darkness in this world. That’s the whole point of what I’m trying to say with this article. I’m not denying the darkness. There is deep darkness. What are we going to do with it? How are we going to use the skills and the talents that we each have as human beings who can see that humanity that you talked about and use it for the betterment of the Jewish people and God willing the world? That’s the moment. That’s the opportunity.

Claire: It’s the, you know, stepping on the glass at the end of the wedding.

Adena: Amen. Absolutely.

Claire: Adena, I think you can assume that people are choosing not to say something about the posters. You know, do you remember planning a wedding? Like, you ask for everything you want, especially, you know, when you’re renting space or hiring a vendor or whatever, whatever the case, the case may be.

Adena: Right, right. We had a local school recently rented the space for their junior high prom. These are eighth graders at a charter school in Washington, D.C. I’m making an assumption, which maybe isn’t safe, that they’re not Jewish, right? But okay, you would think, I mean, what an opportunity, right? We think it’s very easy sometimes if I only honor the phone calls that I get, the world hates us. And I understand why people feel that way. But like these eighth graders, let them see the hostage posters for a hot second. It didn’t ruin their time. It didn’t impact their ability to have a good time as eighth graders. They still, I’m sure, had all the giggles and laughs and fun times. But that is the world that we’re living in, you know? I don’t want to deny that.

Claire: Yeah. You know, I’ll tell you a story. You talked about your kids. I’ll tell you a story about my 9, now almost 10-year-old. When Hamas attacked on October 7th, you know, it was a it was a Shabbat. But much like your campus, Northwestern is, the Jewish students are not observant for the most part. And they were on their phones and they got the news and, as soon as we got the news, Michael left. He went to campus for his students. And I was here with the kids and it fell to me to tell them that Israel was now in a war.

And one of them, Jacob is, at the time he was 12, Jacob said, well, how long is it going to last? And Ethan, our 9-year-old, like with the greatest, greatest confidence said six days, right? That’s how long wars are. And it was such a moment of having reflected back to me what we talk about and what we had taught our kids without realizing, right, this moment of Jewish pride and celebration. And he does, you know, we haven’t, he’s not at an age where we’ve gone into all of the ramifications of that war, none of that, but he was so, wars last six days? Cause that was all that we had taught him. And it was really hard to tell him he was wrong. I want it to end, but…

Adena: But Claire, you’re bringing up a really important point, which is, we know intuitively that younger children are paying attention, right? Whether we like it or not, they’re paying close attention. And I think we sometimes forget that college students are also paying attention. They’re not fully formed beings yet. That’s why I love working with them. They’re paying close attention to how we’re handling these moments of tension and grief. And we need to remember that, right? We are teachers first and foremost. I think that’s why most people got into this business of Hillel life or Jewish communal life, right? We believe that we want a model for the next generation how to handle ourselves. And I think that when we lead with outrage, you know, I talk about this a little bit in the article, they’re paying attention and I do not want to impart that message. And trust me, I get angry too. I understand the temptation. I get it. But I want to teach more than just that.

Claire: Well, and it’s two choices, right? You’re also choosing to be more than an angry person yourself, right? You’re recognizing your outrage and you’re saying, I am so much more. And then you’re conscious of yourself as a model, right? As you live that out, you’re also showing it as a way to live.

I think it’s important to remember another aspect of students not being fully formed, which is that they haven’t solidified their connection to the Jewish people. They also, for those who are not with the Jewish people, that’s not permanent either. You know, I think sometimes there’s this perception that what students are doing on campus today is who they are, completely and totally. And I think your perspective reminds us that, no, it’s not. It’s who they are today, and little by little they’ll figure out who they are tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so it’s not a one-time thing that we say to them something, some magic word and they’re set, but it’s also not that we’ve missed an opportunity to say those magic words that they need to hear.

Adena: Absolutely. Listen, I think a lot of students who are coming to these protests are going to encampments, yes, I think there’s a small minority that to be blunt, I think are just toxic and are not interested in building any bridges whatsoever. I think there are far more who care about the world and who are troubled by headlines they’re reading, which are maybe a different set of headlines than you and I are reading. And they’re trying to find a way to make a difference, right? That is a pure and beautiful thought.

Now, how it plays itself out is deeply troubling to me, and to many, but I have to lead thinking that and feeling that. We live in a world where when I use my voice, it’s not like only the Jews or my Jewish students are listening. I have to be mindful of that, right? What are the messages that we’re communicating again in the hopes that one day these bridges will get built, that a student might look back at that encampment and say, you know what, when I was in college, I understand why I did that, but maybe I didn’t take the right tactic. Or maybe I didn’t think critically about how that was landing with Jewish students, who felt like it was anti-Semitic. I hope that that reflective space happens. I want to believe it can. I’m an optimist at heart, Claire, you know?

Claire: Yeah. So you’ve said the word “amen” a few times, and I know from your writing that you use the word holy to describe to describe this work. And I don’t know what my question is so much as I just want to point that out and to point out that there’s a sense of calling that I hear in your talking in you’re talking about this work.

Adena: Listen, you started this introduction talking about, you know, you weren’t a mystic. I can’t remember the exact word you used.

Claire: I’m a rationalist.

Adena: Right, I understand the rationalists. I have many in my life who I deeply value. My first earliest kind of study or thought process on Hillel. I wrote a paper on the minyan at NYU many months ago with my former mentor Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, current mentor, still, I’ll say. And, you know, we talked about, there are dwellers and there are seekers. This was from academic work long ago and I should be referencing who it was and I’m blanking. But I am a seeker. I want to believe there’s a better way. I want to believe, my family and friends and colleagues know “amen” is a regular word in my vocabulary because I want to find the holiness somewhere. If I didn’t, if I just looked at the darkness, I could not do this job any longer. I would have quit long, long ago.

Claire: And if you have your own ways, how does your staff not burn out?

Adena: I will say this. I didn’t realize a year ago when you originally said, hey, does anybody from Hillel want to write an article for this issue we’re going to do in a year? I didn’t realize how much sanity the process of writing this article would give me this year, which has led me to think a lot about the deep importance from taking a breath and taking a step back and trying to reflect on what we’re living through as Hillel professionals. I really encourage every single one of my colleagues to do the same. It has been a gift to me to write this piece because it forced me to take a step back and say, what am I doing here? What is the most important piece of this puzzle?

And I think that we really, with intention for my staff and for myself, we need to carve out the time to be doing that because it’s very easy to get swept away in the work. It’s just, as you said, you’re there early, you’re there late, you’re thinking about it all the time more than anything, you know.

I’m a regular shulgoer and of course, I’ll get to shul and in the thick of things right after October 7th, it was like, it didn’t feel like it was a break. Adena, how are you? Adena, what’s going on? Adena, give me the scoop, you know? And that was, again, came from a good place, but it didn’t give me the sense of the space to always breathe, and I’m really, especially this summer, trying to take that deep breath and to make sense of what we’ve just lived through because, at times, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll be honest, you know, that’s the pessimist in me. I don’t understand, at times, how such hatred could find its way to campus, but on the whole, I know many more strong, kind, empathetic beings than I know toxic, angry ones, and that’s what really keeps me rolling and keeps me going.

Claire: Okay, now I feel like I’m supposed to say, amen. I hope that the summer is that time for you. It is one of the true blessings of the academic year. I think the other blessing of being in an academic setting is that 25% of the people leave every year and you get an influx of 25% new people with new energy and new ideas, new curiosities. Yeah, all right.

Adena: Amen, yes, it’s true. It’s true.

Claire: We’re just gonna dissolve into an amen session. So I think we should end, say goodbye. And thank you.

Adena: Thank you so much, Claire. Great to discuss this with you.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show, and special thanks to our guest host this week, Claire Sufrin, and our guest, Adena Kirstein.

Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC with music provided by Socalled.
Transcripts of our shows are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. We’re always looking for ideas on what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, email us at [email protected].

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