The following is a transcript of Episode 184 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Tuesday, April 16th, 2024. 

Okay, so this is an anecdotal observation, but I think it’s still true, even if it is going to annoy quite a few people. And that is that an immense, and I think disproportionate number of Jewish leaders of my generation, which is to say give or take 10 years older and younger than me, spent time as students in either Yale, Hillel, or Harvard Hillel.

I actually started making a list, I could read names to if you want, but it’s more entertaining to go to my Facebook page where I asked people today to self-identify if they fit that category. I got a lot of people to proudly raise their hands and a lot more people who seemed offended by the question, that the question itself was somehow elitist or absurd.

I want to weave together two threads of university-related topics that we’ve covered on this show pretty extensively over the past couple of years. One thread is about elite universities. These universities have been in the news a lot lately because of anti-Semitism controversies. We talked to Mark Oppenheimer and Mijal Bitton and Ron Hassner, and I think Bret Stephens and others. And some of my interest in that angle, about elite universities and their challenges, is definitely informed by my own biases, my own field division, my networks. I venture to say it also correlates to an interest of many of our listeners, some of whom you are products of these universities, and others may have children at these universities, and others yet who may still be interested in the ways that our elite universities are and aren’t bellwethers for larger ideological trends.

The second thread about campus life and campus culture has centered Hillel. Most of those episodes addressing aspects of Jewish life on campus that aren’t about politics or those types of controversies, but about the more basic and essential needs that Jewish students have, like other students on campus, to survive and thrive. We did an episode about student mental health. We did several episodes with Tilly Shemer, who at the time was the Hillel director at Michigan, is now my colleague at Hartman about supporting Jewish students during the pandemic. There’s an episode that we should do about student food insecurity on campus as a much bigger story than people outside of the campus world seem to know about that also influences Jewish life and so forth. 

Today I want to unify these two disparate threads to engage some of the big and meta-political questions that are vexing our elite universities and to ask specifically about the role that Hillel does, can, and should play in combating what many of us are witnessing as some dangerous trends, or at least seem to be uncomfortable sites for a lot of our students. 

But as background to our discussion, I want to pick up on a question that I asked of Mark Oppenheimer back in episode 171. I referenced one of my favorite conversation topics, something I raise often with unsuspecting guests who find themselves stuck in my office. And that is the amazing rise and fall of the Menorah Society and its accompanying journal. 

You see, well before the organized infrastructure of Hillel and Chabad on campus, the Society, founded at Harvard Hillel and then spread around the country, was a group, an organization of sorts, that sought to create positive associations between intellectual scholarship and Jewish tradition, kind of a secular humanist project that sought to affirm the legitimacy of Jewishness in the context of the university.

You can’t really write the history of Jewish engagement on campus without significant chapters on the Menorah Society, even though it has disappeared today. And one way to think about the trajectory of that story is that the journey of Jewish life on campus went from the world of ideas to the world of Jewish community. It went from Jewish intellectualism to Jewish social clubs. 

The Menorah Journal, the publication is a treasure chest. All of the major Jewish intellectuals of the time contributed to what was originally a student-run journal, and the journal itself outlived the society by several decades. 

I think maybe the zenith of this era of Jewish life on campus, when the project of Jewish life on campus was to try to constitute a Jewish equivalent to the pursuit of knowledge in the broader university, was the University of Chicago Hillel inviting Leo Strauss in the 1960s to give a major lecture that would become one of his signature essays entitled “Why We Remain Jews.” The lecture was not only passionate, it made no attempts at being dispassionate, as you can hear in the title. He used the word “we” unapologetically. 

I won’t summarize it here, but ever since I’ve read that essay I’ve wondered: why is it that there are never major academic lectures by Jewish scholars at Hillells anymore?

But the Menorah Society lived on in some ways in a handful of key and elite Hillels well into the 1990s and a little beyond. At Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and a number of other campuses, Hillels were led by intellectuals, mostly, but not all, men, who were far more interested in cultivating intellectual and spiritual engagement in their students than they were in positioning Hillel as either a social network or a city of refuge from the campus. 

Our guest today, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein grew up in that Hillel milieu at Harvard under the tutelage of the late Dr. Bernie Steinberg in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And I know that because that’s where Jason and I met when I was working at Harvard Hillel as a temporary maternity leave replacement program director during the time I had dropped out of graduate school. And then I got to help lead an Israel trip for Jason and other students. Jason was like many, many of those people I listed before for whom the Menorah Society-like conditions of Harvard Hillel undoubtedly put him on the path he is now on. 

Jason is now in a unique position, a path paved before him somewhat by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, who followed the same journey, Jason will be moving professionally from serving as the Howard Holtzman Chaplain at Yale, a position that evolves working in and closely with Yale Hillel, to becoming the executive director at Harvard Hillel this summer. And Jason will be returning to that Jewish environment in which he, I dare say, grew up.

It’s hard to imagine a harder time to take on this role, with Harvard and its struggles to speak articulately about its anti-Semitism problem, much less to actually address it. That is the stuff of New York Times articles and Shabbat table conversations all over the country. 

Meanwhile, as much as the elite schools are the subject of admiration, they also constantly elicit no small amount of resentment. I wonder how many people, those that didn’t get in or never thought that they might, I wonder how many of those folks even want the schools to succeed. But if, as we talk about here often, there’s a struggling pipeline for Jewish leadership, and if we know that under certain powerful conditions, places like Harvard Hillel can be immensely effective in putting out Jewish leaders into the world, great change agents, maybe we can’t collectively afford it if those schools fail. 

So Jason, thanks for coming on the show today. And let’s go back to Harvard Hillel of the late 90s and early 2000s. We’ll talk about your job soon, and we’ll talk about what needs to change. But I’d love for you to paint a little picture about what was it about your own experience as a Hillel student that stands out to you that maybe was unique in that period of time and I think still is relatively unique compared to Hillel campus culture more broadly around the country. What were the things that were so powerful? Because I know it was a huge inflection point for you and your own Jewish journey.

Jason: It sure was, and it’s great to be here today, Yehuda, and that Israel trip really has left deep marks of the best kind on me.

Yehuda: Loved that trip.

Jason: So there were a few different things. I think the first was, I remember this moment so clearly, I grew up in a great Reform synagogue in Washington, D.C., kind of did every educational opportunity that was available to me. And my first Shabbat, it was Parshat Ki Tavo and another incoming first year, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a historian, land the whole Parshah. And I remember kind of as the aliyot went on and on, I went into deeper and deeper belief that this is the kind of thing a Jewish 18 year old who is worldly enough to be a Harvard freshman was capable of, and yet I was seeing it and hearing it before my eyes. And it was that kind of encounter. 

The other moment where it was very palpable was I went to Shabbat services later in the year I started going to other holiday services and then Purim happened and I walked in and had the best kind of disorientation, because until that point in my life, there were the Jews who, you know, kind of had progressive politics, were widely read, and there were the Jews who put on tefillin, like many of my firm relatives who I love very deeply, and never the twain shall meet. 

And I walked into a room of people I’d come to know for the past four or five months as, you know, widely read and politically liberal, and there they all were wearing tefillin. And I, you know, identity-slash-crisis was happening in real time. I remember going home for spring break, finding my dad’s tefillin in the closet, burnishing them, and bringing them back to campus with me. 

And so I think the first thing, there’s really two components there of one, you know, realizing that some of the truths you knew were wrong and some of the possibilities are wider. And then the second, which is kind of implicit in that story of laining is that the possibilities of potential, of activity, of what putting a mind and a musical sensibility and the building of social capital through hard work could achieve, that I had never imagined might be my responsibility or really even something I and the people around me could achieve on our own. And that kind of grew in a lot of different ways. 

The last thing I’ll add, because I think there is a way in which Hillel kind of captures a piece of Jewish community in the fragmented world here, is I remember thinking, really by my junior year, that Hillel was like the best version of college I had access to. And what I meant by that is in other places I had friends, I had people I studied with, I had people I volunteered with, I had people I made music with, I was a bassoonist for up through my junior year of college. 

And Hillel, I had all of those together and it wasn’t merely more efficient to only have to go to one address. It was, you know, it’s a different thing to make decisions on communal policy when you’ve also, you know, traveled with a group of people to the funeral of one of their fathers and stayed up late on Friday night singing and studying your Torah reading and the sense of that kind of integration and harmonization was something that was very, very compelling to me. 

And I think probably hearkens back to these universities of a couple centuries ago when they were much more integrated the way you hear, you know, All Souls might be across the pond.

And so those are the things that really were deeply formative to me and are the things that have brought me here and I hope to be facilitating for students here at Yale and soon at Harvard.

Yehuda: Yeah, so I want to come back to the first piece that’s embedded there. We’ll come back to the question of pluralism, because I think what you’re describing is the hardy ways in which Jewish students can actually encounter real difference. Not pluralism of solving the problems, but pluralism of genuinely encountering difference can have radioactive effects on students. Sometimes, there might have been other Harvard students who walked in, saw people wearing tefillin and was like, I’m out of here, like no way. And for you that was like, okay, I better go home and find my tefillin. You might’ve seen, you know, now Professor Perl Rosenthal reading Torah and being like, no way, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to achieve that or nor do I want to and I would walk away. So sometimes pluralism, as I sometimes describe, can be hot in that it actually warms us, it makes us…

I’m curious though about a particular piece of what I remember from those days at Harvard Hillel was also a kind of culture of learning that I know was essential to, it was essential to Bernie Steinberg at Harvard Hillel, was a big piece of Jim Ponet leadership at Yale, Jim Diamond at Princeton, Chaim Seidler-Feller at UCLA, and a handful of other Hillel directors who may have been far less interested in all of the social and emotional dynamics, to say the least, of what their students were experiencing, but who were centering something really unusual, that the intellectual encounter at Hillel had to be equivalent and measured by the same standards of how one would encounter Judaism on campus. 

So I’d love for you to reflect on that a little bit from that time at least.

Jason: Yeah, so it absolutely was the case. I remember Bernie would pack the big room upstairs every year after Kol Nidre and teach Hilchot Teshuva. It was actually probably the single event that had the best attendance. 

It was, a moment I’ll never forget is the spring of my freshman year, the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over Mass Hall demanding a living wage for university subcontractors. And by that afternoon, Shai Held had a source sheet of five or six Jewish sources that might be helpful in thinking through what’s at stake in living wage, and protest, and being part of an organization, all these kinds of issues. I remember doing the same thing in my second week here when the Kavanaugh hearings started, which at Yale were seen as a referendum on the culture of Yale Law School. 

So I think there was really a sense that the ideas in the text mattered and also because they were useful. I mean, they were kind of intriguing on their own, but they actually could help you go through life. And I only learned this after a few years here that, you know, it’s not a coincidence that Harvard Hillel and Slifka Center had those cultures, because Jim and Bernie more or less spent the 70s in Dovid Hartman’s Gemara Shiur in Jerusalem and really carried that with them. And I’ll just give one picture of how that lives on today. 

You know, we had never really had to make explicit how and why we think about or do pluralism because it all just kind of worked until after October 7th. And so I started the semester with a pair of sessions, one really on tragedy and redemption about Israel and Gaza and one about pluralism and opened up with that tosefta that a student walks into a Beit Midrash, you know, riven by the cacophony of descent and wonders, I guess, the radioactive sense of pluralism. How could I ever do this? You know, is there a meaning here? And then, you know, make yourself a heart of many chambers.

And to be able to share with a group of students that what they were seeing is the spiritual DNA of this place as we’re running it and this place as it was built 25 years ago by Jim Ponet and the Harvard Hillel right in between those two, that I was raised in, it was actually like quite, and the Gemara shiur of the 70s, which this is done at Hartman’s book, is Heart of Many Chambers. To be able to kind of give them a lineage in that way was really remarkable. 

I just want to share one other moment that was so, it actually gave me chills and it’s giving me chills as I think about it. I was reading the better part of a year ago, Isaiah Berlin’s collection of, I think it’s called Personal Reflections. It’s one of the few things he actually wrote. And this section at the end where an Israeli reporter is asking him, is it true that they’re kind of your Jewish influences in this communitarian sense? I didn’t use the word communitarian. He says, yeah, you know, I did bring that from Riga and feel like the Jews of the West don’t have it. 

And it struck me as uncannily like the ways Bernie spoke to us. And so looking at it, it turns out that Charles Taylor spent some very formative years studying with Berlin, and Taylor was kind of required reading at Harvard Hillel of a generation ago, if you spent more than an hour with Bernie, and the ethos, and so I just want to point out these kind of ideas, which are, you know, are they ideas in the philosophical or are they Jewish ideas? You know, they are in the philosophical, but they come from Berlin’s experience of Jewish community and turn out to, you know, kind of come back alive a century later. Or, you know, almost indistinguishable. The social and intellectual distinction didn’t even kind of exist on some level. They were that fused.

Yehuda: Let me ask you, I wanna formulate this correctly, because I don’t wanna, I genuinely am not trying to insult this whole field, so I wanna be careful about this. There’s a lot that’s different in the vast majority of Hillells. I would argue even today at Yale and Harvard Hillell, then that story you described, that if you’re in Bernie’s office for an hour, you walk away having to read Charles Taylor, and that’s one of many different items. A number of shifts have happened over the last few decades emphasizing, for instance, student health and well-being, which I think is essential for on college campuses. 

There was a shift, I think a very positive one, to put more senior Jewish educators on campus. That’s kind of fluctuated at times, so you actually have a tremendous number of rabbis who go into the work to actually be on campus, but the work intellectually of most rabbis is not quite the same as the work intellectually of most PhDs who would do Jewish education on campus, and I don’t think it’s an accident that when we did stories about the university, we weren’t really looking at Hillel, and when we were doing stories at Hillel, we were talking about like this the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campus without necessarily engaging the big intellectual questions on campus.

And I have some theories of why that dynamic changed. I’m curious if if that observation codes true as you look at the field of Hillel today, that there’s emerged some gap between what Hillel does and what the life of ideas at the university is basically about.

Jason: I think that that’s right. I think, you know, that kind of the part of the university that most Hillells are most closely linked to and most resemble is student affairs, right, which sits in a whole different world. Some people actually do have PhDs in student affairs, which is some kind of interesting thing. 

I think, you know, going back to, you know, Mark’s work in Gate Crashers and Dan Oren’s History of the Jews at Yale, I want to zoom out a little bit from your question because, you know, the way they narrate the kind of fight over what Yale is, over what these elite institutions are, is between two different camps. There’s one, the intellectual achievement and that gets a big boost after Sputnik. You know, we need the best and brightest. The other is leaders, right? And that’s the sense of why football is important, why it might be important to have a lot of Rockefellers, why some of these kind of softer social skills are important, because those people are going to be the great leaders. 

And part of what’s like striking to me as I hear kind of your, well, where is the intellectual side of the university being reflected in Hillel work? The place where I’ve sat most for the last five and a half years is where is the leadership side being reflected in the Hillel work, right? Like the focus on students implicit in the formulation that we adults need to care about student welfare is a picture of students as kind of vulnerable and a site of work, you know, an address that’s being invested in, rather than people with strengths who can kind of weather this. 

And, you know, I could share some data that we’ve created and collected over the years about how important that sense of empowerment is to the work of a Hillel. When I look back, the other piece of Harvard Hill that’s totally unrecognizable for most Hillels these days, there were monthly coordinating council meetings run by the undergraduate president, according to Robert’s rules of order. And there was a sense that you spoke on behalf of this community.

And one of the most, kind of most useful foils that I’ve had in my work was an alum from the class of ’08 telling me here at Yale, you know, I wasn’t really interested in leadership at Slifka as an undergrad because there was a sense that the grownups made all the real decisions. And in other organizations, you could actually do something with your leadership. And so achieving the opposite of that, like what does it take for, to have the, being the leaders of the undergraduate Jewish community, or the graduate one also, but let’s stick to the undergrads for now, because you’ve actually acquired the legitimacy to speak on behalf of a diverse group of Jews, which doesn’t happen in so many different Jewish contexts or political contexts nowadays. And then to actually bear a lot of responsibility and be shaped by that has been totally foundational. 

And it goes alongside the intellectual piece, but it’s really interesting to zoom back on both accounts of what the university ought to be. A Hillel is something quite different, as is probably the whole student affairs apparatus.

Yehuda: I have two questions on that. First is, I think maybe, or at least a hypothesis, part of that happens because over the last 20 years, the level of scrutiny that people have towards campus life and Hillel life in particular, especially around Israel politics, is so severe that it almost seems like that means that the highest level decisions have to be made by professionals who are entrusted by boards. I mean, one of the strangest things about Hillels compared to every other Jewish organization is that Hillels are the only local Jewish organizations whose boards don’t live in the district where the institution is. It would make no sense that like, the Manhattan JCC would have board members who lived all over the country. It’s a local institution. But that’s normal for most Hillells because it’s alumni who don’t live there anymore but remember the university back then, or it’s parents of current students. 

So maybe there’s just a design problem, that it’s actually very hard to really create full student empowerment and student leadership at this level of scrutiny. And I’m sure you’ve experienced already in your role at Yale Hillel, but are going to now experience on a stratospherically higher level. If all these stakeholders are kind of, they want to know what’s happening at Harvard Hillel, could you actually give students the ability to, you know, give them the keys to running the institution?

Jason: Right. So the other entity that’s a lot like the Hillels is the universities themselves, right? The Yale Corporation is traveling into New Haven this weekend, and students are putting on various displays to try to create their impression of the campus. And that’s maybe where the Hillels got the idea. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of the ADL scores, which came out, love them or hate them. One of the interesting questions that kind of in the Hillel world is there seems to be some assumption, which I guess is plausible but I also think is wrong, that the Hillels have some responsibility or ought to respond to the score their university is getting. 

And on the one hand, yes, you need to advocate for students, but the intuition that I’ve had here over the last six months is, at least as important as advocating on behalf of the Jewish community is kind of mentoring Jewish students as they advocate on behalf of their own community in a world which is not necessarily going to be that friendly or unfriendly, who’s to say? 

You know, they graduate, but like rather than kind of stepping in as the grownups who solve the problem, be like, okay, you’re in, you know, this theater production where a few days before it goes up, the director is now saying that they’re going to insert Never Again Means Gaza in the program and the director’s note in a way that you take to be a breach of the norms of this production of Fiddler that you’ve worked on for three months. How do you navigate that with the other Jewish cast members who are varying degrees of like-minded, right? That’s like a really interesting and difficult question. 

And so have been really clear that that work of advocating on behalf of the Jewish community is not the work of the Hillel staff, but it’s also our work, vis-a-vis our peers, and it’s the work of hundreds of students in their different situations. And part of what that means is that you, as the staff, I don’t really get to take credit for the outcomes, but you’re also not placing, oh, our goal is to change this university and XYZ, I think it should change in certain ways, we should articulate that and make a good case for it. 

But it’s not the kind of the key outcome or the KPI, key performance indicator, for whether a Hillel or a Jewish community is working in the sense that it’s actually the educational work of students learning to do certain things and having intellectual frameworks for it. That’s the core thing that you ought to be responsible for. And it’s much harder to tell those stories because they tend to take, have a lot of characters and in a lot of stages rather than this conference didn’t happen, this professor did or didn’t tweet this.

Yehuda: Right. And even that example, like that you could be doing all of this incredible ground level work in helping Jewish studdents advocate for themselves, make the case they need to make. And then if the Jewish Journal in L.A. picks up on this controversy taking place on campus around student performance, it is going to be thought of as a referendum on the quality of Jewish leadership on campus and the courage to fight anti-Semitism. And then you’re basically stuck. It almost forces the hands of professionals on campus to get involved in ways that are actually counterproductive to the work they’re trying to achieve.

Jason: Right. I want to tell you a story. I think it’s from, I can’t remember the year, I should have done my homework. It’s from that fall semester when Cornel West was taking off from teaching his course to campaign for Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary. And Larry Summers was then the president of Harvard, seems to have kind of sat him down and said, if you want to collect a Harvard paycheck, you have to teach your classes. And West didn’t like this and quit and went to Princeton. And a group of campus organizations took out a full page ad in the Crimson, taking West’s side in this way. Oh and West had also by this point already referred to Larry Summers as the Ariel Sharon of academia.

And I was on the steering committee of Harvard Hillel, and I thought, I’m being a lefty kid from Temple Micah, said, yeah, we should take West’s side of the spade, so we signed up. And there was another undergrad a year ahead of me who went on to clerk for Scalia, Moshe Spinowitz. And Moshe was beside himself, it seemed like, in terms of the university’s governance, in terms of standing up for anti-Semitism, just seemed like the wrong position for the Jewish community to take. And that year, Shavuot fell during the school year. And Moshe, in his slot taught the opening sugya of Masechet Horayot, about the responsibilities of an individual in a community when the leadership makes the wrong decision. It wasn’t until the next day that another student pointed out, he said, do you want to see what Moshe was just doing? And that has stuck with me. 

I actually saw Moshe at Washington Square in Minyan a couple weeks ago. And I mentioned that. I was like, that story stuck with me. And the reason I want to share that, first of all, is the intellectual piece, which is just so remarkable as a way of kind of sublimating the tension. But also the ways that like, probably like the larger impact of that story. If you had some kind of hyper vigilant national media landscape, you could imagine the set of angry people that say, what’s your student board doing? Get them in line. 

But there’s a different world in which students creatively, and forcefully and gently push back on each other. And then 20 years from now, that’s the story that they remember and is guiding them. And so having that kind of the playfulness that’s required for an educational space does require a certain sense that what’s happening on the university campuses while it’s important and while there’s like real pain and there’s things that need to be called out, is also part of an educational process for students and to really center them going through and being able to have space among other things to fail.

Yehuda: That’s so interesting. As you describe this, I’m remembering like my favorite troublemaking incident as a Jewish undergraduate as part of, there was no Hillel at Columbia at the time, it was just the Jewish Student Union. And there was also no real estate, there was no Hillel building yet. And all there was, there was an office in the basement of the religious life building and there was a small Beit Midrash room on the top floor that had basically been procured by lobbying by the Orthodox community over a number of years.

And at some point in like my, I think it must have been my sophomore year, I was in the Beit Midrash, I was learning, and I looked up and there were all of these unpacked boxes at the top of the shelves. And I was like, that’s curious. So I took them down and they were filled with Heschel, Plaskow, Buber, Kaplan. And I was like, what’s going on here? And it turns out that they had been a gift from the previous year’s graduating seniors to the Beit Midrash, like a compliment to the collection. And the leading, the ruling class of the Beit Midrash had decided that they were not kosher to be included in a Beit Midrash. And I, you know, started to make trouble about this. Obviously the best way of doing that was I just shelved them. And then I would wait, come back, and turns out they were back in the boxes. And people said hilarious and outrageous things. Rabbi Soloveitchik would roll over in his grave if he was on the same shelf as whoever. And I was like, they were in the same universities together in Berlin. 

Anyway, it unfolded as student controversies do, in all of the predictable ways, I was like, OK, I guess I’m going to run for a seat on the Beit Midrash committee. And then they were like, they changed the rules to have more people on the committee so they could stack the deck.

What’s amazing about that story to me, as absurd as it is, was how important it felt at the time. But also, I don’t remember an adult ever being involved in this conversation. I don’t think they knew about it. I don’t think they were involved at all. And I don’t know, there’s something wonderful about that. And I’m curious whether that still remains the culture for most of the issues that can take place on a campus where, I’m not talking about the big issues, but I’m talking about internal stuff about Yale Hillel or soon-to-be Harvard Hillel. Is it possible to have genuine student governance over a lot of the aspects of Jewish communal life, or has the dynamic around adults and students changed?

Jason: It’s possible and it’s not easy. So what we have working for us here at Slifka, which really helps in this regard, is the Hillel Student Board is actually a legally distinct organization from Slifka. It’s actually incorporated under the Yale College Dean’s Office. And I’ll give you one example of the play and the joints here, which is interesting to think about, complex to remember back to.

So the Barr DOJ filed an affirmative action suit against Yale, just like they did for Harvard. And then when Biden came in, the DOJ withdrew the suit, and it was refiled again by SFFA, Students for Fair Admission, something like that. Basically copy paste with one addition, where they added in a sentence in the kind of the preamble. It’s not the technical term, but the preamble to the lawsuit saying, you know, holistic admissions were more or less invented at Yale to keep the Jews out, and therefore the Jewish community’s historical memory ought to be against this. 

So we started getting calls from Jewish civil rights lawyers or Yale Law School, and I was saying, oh, no, they did not. You have to file an amicus brief. And we’re kind of thinking on that. And then we got a call from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And they said, we actually want you on behalf of the judiciary to apply for intervener status, or you can say, we are co-defendants. We actually believe the interests of the judiciary are served by a more diverse student body. 

And our Slifka board, which meets in Manhattan, I think rightly wanted nothing to do with federal litigation that they didn’t need to be a part of. And then we explained to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that, oh, there’s a student group that actually is the duly elected representative of the undergraduate body. They’re like, oh, we want to talk to them. And so we put them in touch with the Hillel Student Board, who had a number of internal meetings, met with the clinics at the law school to understand what exactly it means to be in a lawsuit, and then created a set of processes. There were a couple of town halls. There were some online petitions circulating. There were some surveys where people could register things. 

And ultimately they decided they had a super majority to join the lawsuit. And part of the coda to this story is, last year at our Seder there were a group of seniors, one of whom is actually going into politics right now, he’s from central Pennsylvania. And he was kind of decrying the knee-jerk-ness of student groups feeling like you have to put out a statement within 90 minutes of something happening, and if you are a student who says, wait, let’s pause and think about this, you’re part of the problem. And I asked him, totally innocently, not like I was pulling for a compliment. Like are there any moments you’ve been, you know, this campus almost four years, where you kind of saw a political process unfold differently? And he thought for a second, he said, well, you know, that decision among the undergraduate Jewish body about whether to join this lawsuit, like we really did that with like deliberation and substance. And so I do think it’s possible. Like it takes more work.

Yehuda: Yeah, just going back one step, you know, a different trend that’s emerged in Hillel over the years, which I think also has been kind of an extraordinary story, connected in some ways to how do we evaluate metrics of success, but also, you know, to democratize access to Jewish resources on campus, has been the language of engagement. And it’s been a burgeoning kind of industry for a while on campus, of the goal of being engaging really as many Jewish students as possible.

Mike Uram wrote his book about the way in which Penn Hillel managed by building basically two parallel businesses, one that served the students who came into the building and one that served the students who had never come into the building. They were able to engage one year over 80% of students on campus. And Hillel International has benchmarks of X number of points of contact is a well-engaged student. 

And I hear that and I find it very powerful in a lot of ways. And I also wonder whether it comes or has to come at the cost of empowerment. Our engagement and empowerment, they draw totally different resources. How you work with students to really become leaders requires a totally different focus. In fact, one of the critiques of some of the older guard of Hillel directors was that they were far more interested in a small number of student leaders than they were in engaging anyone who walked into the building.

So, assuming that these aren’t necessarily at odds with each other, engagement and empowerment, how do you as a leader in this field think about trying to achieve success on both ends?

Jason: There is something moving, you know, kind of morally about the idea that a Hillel ought to make an effort to engage with every single Jewish student, to meet them, to hear what matters to them, to try to make connections into Jewish life. And I love that. 

I think the main way that our strategy has differed from the very, very successful strategy at Penn is that I believe that to be a dignified member of a community means to have a path towards power. And to reflect the community back to itself in a community where only the people with the thicker Jewish resumes will ever be represented in that community. It loses only to the students who are kind of kept in this outer kind of trench or track, not have the chance to take on real leadership, but also the community as a whole is deprived of their insights and leadership.

And I want to say that it’s not a zero-sum game. So last year, we had to increase our estimate of the number of Jewish students on campus. And the reason why is that we don’t track who’s Jewish, right? You walk in, dining swipe, it goes into our system, and you just keep track of people. So we were working with an estimate of about 750 Jews on campus. And the number of people who had come to kind of multiple events of Jewish substance, and we discount Shabbat dinners a little bit and classes and prayer services and those kinds of things was like 790. Wow! I don’t know how many Jews there are, but I can tell you there are 790 Yale undergrads who are doing Jewishly substantive things this year. 

So like, I don’t know, there must be at least 800, you know? And that was kind of a wild moment. Like, and the Hillel International people keep telling us, like, you can’t have, you know, numerators that are higher than your denominators. You can’t engage more than 100 % of Jews. And we’re like, well, I guess we have to bump up our numbers then. So I definitely think it’s not a zero-sum game. 

And I think the key ethos is, you know, I thought about this a lot after Bernie passed away and I saw that Ethan Tucker actually wrote something on Facebook like the ethos of chelech l’orayta, right, what Rabbi Yochanan says when he sees Reish Lakish, this incredible young human being and Jew. And he says, right, I want your strength for the collective endeavors of the Jewish people and for the Torah. 

And that’s what it means to be at one of these universities. You meet people, these young people with incredible potential. And that’s what brings them here. And one of the deepest ways of thinking about what they’re figuring out while they’re here is what are the communities and traditions in which they’re they ought to deploy their resources, what they ought to commit to, right?

The Yale Daily News is making that case for journalism, the econ department is making that case for McKinsey and for academic econ, and on and on, and we are making that case for the Jewish community. That if they live a life where they think hard and they work hard and they listen to people who think differently and they try to build something beautiful here and write the next chapter of the tradition, their lives will be deeper and sweeter and ennobled. 

And the way we do that is right here. I find a place where when they work hard and think hard and make something beautiful out of a really diverse group of students, their lives are richer and deeper and sweeter. And I think if we do that right, the experience, you know, of a student, if you’re sitting in the lobby at Slifka, you’re a regular here and you see someone who walks in who you’ve never met, you know, your kind of affective, instinctual, emotional response ought to be, I don’t know what you have to offer this community and I don’t yet know what this community has to offer you, but we’re going to have an amazing time figuring that out. 

And if that is the experience, you know, to be seen in that way is what it feels like to walk into the building, you will have big, big numbers. Like if that’s how the insiders are relating people, they will be drawing people in. And that’s been our experience here, that there actually doesn’t need to be a trade-off. And in fact, when the leadership stuff is done compellingly, the student leaders are actually by far the most effective people on campus at bringing in more Jews and a lot of non-Jews too.

Yehuda: I mean, it’s beautifully articulated. We’ve been thinking a lot here at Hartman, and there are a lot of folks thinking about this in the broader Jewish world, that the instinct to respond to the challenges that our community has around leadership, what’s called the leadership pipeline, one instinct is large-scale interventions. 

And I think a lot of us feel that the only thing that will work done at scale is actually somebody like you, Jason, tapping somebody on the shoulder and saying, you matter to our community, have you considered a life, a career, something? Or how do you take your skills and apply them to the Jewish community because we need you to do this work? 

And it doesn’t merely happen at Yale. I don’t want it to merely happen at Yale. You know, I’m skeptical of the idea that it should, that it’d be better necessarily if it was just happening at Yale than in all the other campuses around the country. But I’m curious whether it gets that explicit in your mind, of like, I need to make sure that so and so, who could do anything, decides instead, I think they’d be a great rabbi and so since I think they’d be either a great rabbi or a great structural engineer or a great management consultant, I actually want to invest some time in trying to persuade that person to become a rabbi.

Jason: There are times when that’s important and it only feels pastorally important. So I want to take a step back and say what I do think really matters and then the significance of the tap on the shoulder.

I think the area where kind of Jewish upbringings, and I say this as someone who was involved in my synagogue, a little bit of youth group stuff, I never really did camp, but the area where it seems to fall short of what sports offer young people, and I heard, I forget if it was from you, Yehuda, or someone else that had this, you know, Maimonides Foundation convened a conference a while back, there was this kind of the sports pipeline was the metaphor, you know, there’s talent scouts who know every high school tight end in Texas. 

And I think the sports metaphor is good, but the pipeline is not the problem. If you are, and I know this from my extensive viewing of Friday Night Lights, right, if you are a 17-year-old tight end in Texas, there is a moment when you’re going to get on a field and hundreds of people in your high school and thousands of people in your town will be counting on you to do a great job. And so if you stayed up the night before playing, you know, Nintendo or drinking too much or kind of like not working hard in the gym, you will let them down and you matter to them. 

And your capacities, chelech l’orayta, your strength, I mean not for orayta there, for football. And I think about that like, do we provide Jewish 17-year-olds any moment like that where there will be hundreds of people whose lives will be better or worse based on how hard they worked and whether they dug really deep and did something incredible? I don’t know. 

And so one of the moments I’ve been proudest of is I was at Tashlich this year. And I saw some, just with my family, and I saw some yellow stones up at the beautiful Mill River. And one of them said, everyone can’t stop talking about Odessa’s Dvar Torah on Rosh Hashanah. And it’s like she had produced something incredible and people felt challenged by it. They were like, and to see that, like what it means to like, you could write a paper for your class and your professor will grade it and hopefully they’ll read it well, as they do it in the office. But you could also write this, think and speak and sing in a way that will like transform and touch people’s lives and that you have the power to do that. 

I wanna share one other story that’s saying, because it’s one of my favorite stories here. There was a student a number of years ago, who was descended from the Besht, and he told the story of the Besht’s, the Maggid of Mezritch conversion to Hasidut, and he goes and he spends Shabbat with the Besht, and he’s not particularly moved to the Besht at some point, and he says, okay, get out of Talmud, and they’re studying, and the Maggid is saying all these chidushim on the Gemara looks bored and he says, you know, why are you bored? And the Besht says to him, I can tell that you’ve been through the whole Talmud, but the Talmud hasn’t been through you.

And this student stood up and said, he’s from a, he went to Frish. He went to the Gush. And he stood up at a undergraduate retreat which is entirely run by the undergrads here. And he said, you know, I spent my whole life singing the Zemirot, he told this story, and people were like, why are you telling this story, and he said, I’m telling this story because I spent my whole life singing the Zemirot but the Zemirot had never been through me, until I sang them at Slifka. And it was actually a Reform and Reconstructionist students were the leaders of Zemira. 

And like what does it mean to create a space where students, like, their presence and what they create hits other students with the force of a revelation. It’s an incredible, and I would say also not just students, staff can do that also, right, and need to kind of model that and do that to be exemplar. And that’s the kind of work, can you make something beautiful and compelling and kind of arresting and show students the path to doing it. Here’s what it looks like to do it as a 19 year old, here’s what it looks like to do it as a senior, here’s what it looks like to do it as a 24 year old, here’s what it looks like to do it as a 40 year old. 

Now the tap on the shoulder is important because it can be like a really powerful pastoral moment. A student was sitting on my couch speaking with me last week. We’ve been through a long struggle of kind of coming to recognize that she feels captivated by Jewish life and the thrill and rewards for herself and others of Jewish communal leadership. And at that moment, it was important to tell her the truth, which is, I think you would be incredible at this work and the Jewish people and the world would better off. So I think the most important thing is to create a context in which students feel it and are doing it. And then at certain personal moments to say, yes, I believe in you. But not as a recruiter, but in that sense in affirming that you see in them the same thing they see in themselves. And you’re proud to count them as one of your students. And please, God, one day as a colleague.

Yehuda: It’s beautiful and there’s a recurring theme as you’re talking, Jason, about the way that you lead, which is create the context, create the environment in which, you know, if you create the environment as a professional, as a leader, for students to so impact one another that they experience the force of revelation, or that a student can feel that they’ve grown so much that then their comment of I’m interested in being in this community in a professional context, then all you need to do is kind of gently move them. And it’s not as aggressive as a tap on the shoulder. It’s more just like a, well, you’re already here. Let me show you and help you. 

And I’ll go back to kind of where we started, which is that culture of pluralism that fostered so beautifully, as you described it at Harvard Hillel. And let’s assume, again, that there were people who were alienated from it, who felt, as is always the case, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, there are going to be people who say there are insiders and outsiders, and I’m the outsider. 

We discovered this, Stephanie and I, when we founded an independent minyan. First Shabbat, we didn’t know anybody. We started the minyan because we needed the minyan. We started it together with people we weren’t friends with yet. And the first Shabbat, a whole bunch of people were like, yeah, I walked in, but everybody seemed like they were friends with each other, so we left. I was like, there’s nobody, there is no inside. 

So let’s assume even in your beautiful story of like, you were magnetized to this, that there are people who are left out, but that for the people who don’t feel left out, that there’s something really powerful about difference. And let’s also posit that the central brokenness that we have around us right now is our society does not know what to do with difference anymore. We can’t deal with basic difference. That’s what polarization means. That’s what hyperpartisanship means.

What do we need to do to rebuild that fire, at least in Jewish communities, that then maybe, I don’t know, become the template for the universities that they’re supposed to mirror? Maybe the mirror can cap in two directions. What do we need to do, and what could we do in the context of Jewish environments to rebuild the hot pluralism that needs a fire burning at its center?

Jason: So two parts. First, it was my orthodox colleague here, Rabbi Alex Ozar, pointed out something. It took both of us five years here to realize it. He said, Hillels, if they’re working in the ways that we’ve been talking about here, where there’s very deep student leadership, very empowered student leadership, we’ll actually have more of an insider-outsider problem than Chabads have, where they’re run by the Chabad couple. 

Because you walk into a Chabad, you know, at least our model here on the standards that I’ve seen, you know, it’s really run by the Rabbi and Rebbetzin on Friday night. So that means there’s no other student sitting next to you who actually knows what’s about to happen more than you do. And it’s actually the degree of student involvement that produces some of that insider-outsider gradient. And then you need to find ways of softening and dealing with it. But it is a really interesting way in which it’s a price I think is worth paying. But it is a price that comes across. 

So now I want to talk about that second piece, the how do we create the pluralism, how do we do it. So I have to zoom out a little bit to a different intellectual Yale moment. I was at a lecture a bunch of years ago by Jonathan Sarna, great Yale alumnus, Jewish historian. And he said, you know, one way of thinking, there were three ideologies that promised the Jews safety and well-being. And those were communism, liberal democracy, and Zionism. And by the end of the 20th century, there were only two after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

So there’s a lot in this formulation. One of the pieces, though, is the conceptualization of different types of Judaism as attempts to secure the safety of Jewish communities and the flourishing of Jewish communities. The safety of Jewish individuals and the flourishing of Jewish communities is better after the shattering of the communal political economic structures wrought by Napoleon. And so you kind of conceive of Reform as the first of these, Hirsch’s orthodoxy as a second one, and Zionism really as a third wave of these, right, and a response to some of the failures of the Reform project and perceived of the Orthodox one as well. 

And the reason I’m offering that framework is the kind of core intuition here at Slifka, and I was just saying this to a group of our high school undergrad leaders this morning, is, you know, I may or may not be a Reform Jew, a Zionist Jew, a Yiddishist, and I may really differ, not just I’m not, I may have some fundamental critiques, you know, if you’re an Orthodox Jew you tend to think Jews ought not to light Shabbat candles at 6 p.m. on in the northeast in December when it’s dark on Friday night. And if you’re a Plaskowian feminist, you tend to think that Jews ought not to have gender dividers and only count people on one side of that for their quorum when they’re praying. You can have real critiques, like you don’t need to agree. 

And you need to say, but the only people I will actually fight is someone who wants to say you don’t have a place here, right? That your commitment ultimately is to this broad and diverse set of Jewish experiments, includes Jewish feminism and Zionism and Orthodoxy and Yiddish and, you know, and on and on. 

Almost like the way you might think of the field of physics, right? Many labs we will find out in retrospect and theoretical projects are dead ends. But there’s no way to know that. And your commitment is like everyone should, if they’ve made a good case for the grant, get to do it. And then until and unless we found it’s a dead end, they get to try their thing. 

And so the reason I’m offering that is because that I think is the fundamental commitment we have to that kind of diversity and experimentation, and we ask for students to actually have with each other and I think to the extent they have, it’s even because, if you’re fundamentally disagreeing with me, but I know at the end of the day that you will fight for my right to be here, the extent of that disagreement is softened.

And here, just to go back to the utility of intellectual concepts. I did a session at Yale Law School, gosh I don’t know, a couple years ago with Robert Post, former dean of the law school, great First Amendment scholar and Post showed me something really interesting. He used to actually teach in the social studies program that I studied in Harvard. He said, you know, for decades I taught Carl Schmitt on polarization, because there’s a million and one different definitions of polarization, how much overlap there is between the leftmost Republican and the rightmost Democrat, or you know, etc. He said Schmitt’s definition of polarization is when you come to see the other people whose politics differ from you as the enemy. Because for decades I taught and had no idea what Schmidt was talking about until 2015. And so that, I think, is the core intuition that these people are not your enemies, and therefore you actually owe them something, which is an affirmative commitment to their belonging and to fight for that if necessary. And if you will articulate that and live up to it, then we can do a lot of things. And I would just add that this is very sharp right now because, you know, at Harvard and Yale and other, you know, we’ve seen this at UCLA Law School, the question is whether Zionists belong on campus. 

And the core ask of our Zionist students, and I think they’re right to ask this. They say it’s fine if you’re not a Zionist, but we need you to defend us against that attack.

Yehuda: You know, my scientific analogy, you gave one, you said it was like physics. It kind of sounds to me like it’s basically chemistry, in that there are certain combinations of permutations are going to work, but all of us are alchemists. None of us actually know the formula, so we’re effectively dependent on one another for a culture of experimentation. And you know. Maybe sometimes it works. 

Jason, last question for you. You’ve been generous with your time. You’re moving this summer from New Haven to Cambridge. One hope or wish for your first 100 days in your new role?

Jason: I want… I’m going to answer it in the spirit of this conversation, Yehuda, by telling a parable of Rabbi Yochanan’s from the Peskita D’Rav Kahana. 

Yehuda: Perfect. 

Jason: The parable is of a woman who fell in love with a charming young man of noble birth. And they had this courtship that was thrilling. They exchanged beautiful love letters. They had a wedding that was just beyond what anyone had thought was possible. They have an enchanted beginning to their marriage. And then one day she wakes up and he’s not there. And he doesn’t come home that night. He doesn’t come home for Shabbos, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, he’s gone, it becomes years. And her friends start to say to her, like, look, we know you love him. And he seems to have loved you at one point, but he’s gone and you’re not getting younger. And we’ll find you someone new, you can have a life and a family. And she, like her heart almost is crying each time they say this. And she goes home and she opens the folder where she keeps their love letters and reads them and is comforted. And then after a very long time he comes back and the first thing he says to her is, I can’t believe you waited for me.

So too, Rabbi Yochanan says, the Jewish people and God, right? We left Egypt. Sinai was this incredible wedding. God promised us a world where we wouldn’t be afraid or our children wouldn’t be in harm’s way. And then God left and we’re subject to degradation and humiliation and fear. And the nations won’t say, why don’t you join us? It could be much easier. And we Jews go back into our study halls and we open up the Torah and we’re comforted when God comes back after a very long time, the first thing God will say is, I can’t believe you waited for me. Lulei Toratcha, right, if it weren’t for your Torah, I would have been lost in my afflictions. 

So one thing just on the scholarship front, David, what’s his name? Stern! Stern points out, this is in Midrash and Theory, that, his claim is that this is the only depiction in classical literature of a woman reading. And she’s clearly a foil to Penelope, who stays faithful to her husband through the women’s work of weaving.

But the picture here, I mean, there’s a lot to say about this midrash. But the image I want to give, and this is the first 100 days for what I hope Jewish students at Harvard will experience, is if you were to think of what metrics I use for Jewish institutions, if you were to take this midrash as their template and their raison d ‘etre, is you would say, do Jewish institutions provide a place and a set of experiences where our capacity to believe in and hope for things that are beyond what we can defend as plausible, or even possible, is restored. 

And that’s what I hope Harvard Hille; will be for Jewish students. In those first 100 days, there’ll be a place where, like, who knows what the world of the Middle East, the world at large, the American electoral scene will be like 100 days from now. But that in coming to Shabbat dinner, and coming to classes, and coming to singing, they will, Hillel will be, the image is like a crowbar that holds their heart open against the vice of the world, and that they will create that with and for each other.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest this week, Jason Rubenstein. Identity/Crisis is brought 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 Hobbes at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by so called. 

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