The decline of America’s independent Jewish student movement has entered its terminal stages. What was once a politically diverse coalition of student-run publications and activist groups has now been reduced to a few scattered vestiges, and the overarching ideal by which the student-run organizations were bound — the notion that the Jewish student has the right and the duty to act as antagonist to the Jewish establishment — is disappearing with them.
Student groups are inherently impermanent. Their birth and death is part of a natural cycle, renewed every four or five years with the turnover of the student population. And yet when an 83-year-old student organization like the World Union of Jewish Students announces that it has fired its entire staff, moved out of its offices and sold its office furniture — as happened this past June — it is clear that larger forces are at work.
The troubles at the Jewish student union represent a final stage in a 13-year process by which Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life has essentially become the sole worldwide provider of Jewish campus programming.
In 1994 the Jewish community turned its back on the student-initiated model in favor of the professionally administered one advocated by Hillel. Independent student activists, who relied on funding from the Jewish federations, were forced to incorporate themselves into the Hillel framework.
Of the scores of independent Jewish student organizations in the United States at the movement’s peak during the 1970s, today only the Jewish Student Press Service survives as a student-run organization. The result has been a generation of Jewish students limited in both imagination and opportunity, a generation for whom Hillel is the only option. Without strong independent student voices, the vital tradition of the antagonistic Jewish student has gone missing from contemporary Jewish dialogue.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1969, the course of American Jewish organizational life was irrevocably altered when a group of hundreds of students affiliated with the independent student movement descended upon the annual General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.
At the time, the federations were vehicles of assimilation that primarily funded hospitals and social services. To the Jewish students of the 1960s, veterans of the New Left whose identities had been shaped by the Six-Day War and the Black Panthers, such an attitude was hopelessly out of touch. They wanted to reshape the federations to fit their needs, and advocated increased spending on Jewish education and Jewish culture as part of an effort to build Jewish identity.
Delegates to the General Assembly were cornered and lectured. There was talk of sit-ins and protests. In order to regain control of the proceedings, the organizers made concessions, and the students were offered a chance to put forth a speaker. They chose Rabbi Hillel Levine, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“We don’t want commissions to ‘explore the problems of youth,’” Levine railed. “We do want to convert alienation into participation, acrimony into joy — the joy of being the possessors of a great legacy — a legacy which has meaning for today.”
The protests were a success, and the Council of Jewish Federations formed a funding body to help address the students’ concerns.
In the years that followed, the North American Jewish Students Network, an affiliate of the World Union of Jewish Students that had been founded a few months before the General Assembly as a means of organizing for the protests, continued to be at the forefront of issues that the mainstream organizations could not approach. Between 1970 and 1976, the network hosted a groundbreaking conference on alternatives in Jewish education, oversaw the launch of the Jewish Feminist Organization and founded the Jewish Student Press Service.
These organizations served as a training ground for a generation of American Jewish leaders. The independent student movement produced, among other prominent alumni, John Ruskay and Rabbi Michael Paley, respectively the CEO and a scholar in residence at the UJA-Federation of New York; Shifra Bronznick, the founding president of Advancing Women Professionals; Peter Geffen, the founder of the Heschel School in New York; and J.J. Goldberg, the editorial director of this newspaper.
But just as these luminaries reached the height of their careers at mainstream communal organizations, a death sentence was levied against the student movement that brought them to prominence. That sentence was handed down following the publication of the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990, which famously found that 52% of American Jews married since 1986 had intermarried.
With communal concerns about continuity at an all-time high, Richard Joel, selected in 1988 to revive the moribund Hillel system, was able to convince the Council of Jewish Federations to name his organization as “the central federation agency through which campus services are provided.” In short order, he was able to turn a financially troubled smattering of local houses into the institutional behemoth that it is today.
It would be foolish to argue that Hillel has not been enormously successful. Still, without denying the value of the often-innovative work of Hillel’s campus professionals, Hillel’s international leadership needs to be told the organization cannot be everything to everyone.
At home and abroad, the damage to the old guard of Jewish student-run groups is for the most part already done. Today our task is to show those Jewish student activists who do not identify with Hillel that there is a strong historical precedent that legitimizes their discontent, and that there is a long-established role for them within the Jewish community.
Hillel must step aside, and the institutional world must begin to treat Jewish students like the adults that they are. A generation of student-led initiatives fell victim to Hillel’s paternalism. Let’s not make that mistake again.
Josh Nathan-Kazis is the editor of New Voices, the publication of the Jewish Student Press Service.
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Josh Nathan-Kazis's complaints would be more valid if Hillel today were the same as Hillel 30-35 years ago. However, my impression has been that, despite Joe Buchwald Gelles's experience, Hillel is a much more pluralistic organization now than then. Richard Joel and others have emphasized bringing Hillel programs to where the students are (particularly in dorms) rather than having all Hillel-initiated programs located at a place that may not be attractive to many students. Similarly, much of Hillel programming is not necessarly religious in nature, but is cultural, social-action, political. And more views -- political and religious -- are accommodated under the Hillel tent. If this is so, and if it has happened not just at leadership Hillels like UMichigan and Harvard, then the fact that Jewish activity on campuses has become centralized under Hillel, as Nathan-Kazis complains, may not be such a bad thing. Indeed, if it induces folks of different views to cooperate in a single organization, it would seem a good thing.
There is a good deal of controversy about the incidence of recent exogamy among Jews. Some estimates are way below 52% as cited here, But whatever, it was inevitable that as the old battles of Jewish liberalism were won-- civil rights, welfare for all, free speech and social tolerance-- and acceptance of Jews in the wider society became all but total, students and other energetic young souls would hunt around for an encore. Even the main galvanizer of agitation in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam war and the draft, disappeared when one was lost and the other scrapped. There just weren't enough convincing causes and victims for the liberal slogan-shouters to feed upon. They could have had a pop at communism, of course, but the grandparents wouldn't have liked that. Too many WERE communists. Some of the post-protest cohorts made money instead, some turned to that old-time Judaist religion, some did intermarry, assimilate to whitebread suburbia and become, at best, "cultural" or "gastronomic" Jews: temple once a year at Passover, donations to Israeli charities and the odd bagel. At least hardly any except the neocon crazies signed up to the Republican Party, despite intensive wooing! If Israel is genuinely facing an "existential crisis", young and/or idealistic Jews may rally to the banners again. But it isn't: absent Likudnik nonsense, it's never been safer, and its headaches are mostly of its own making. Israel cuts such an unappetizing figure that younger Jews increasingly feel it is only a nuisance, association with which in the eyes of disapproving gentiles makes their own complete acceptance a little bit harder to gain and retain. Unless you dive head first into Orthodoxy, become a settler or (worst of all) an adviser to GW Bush, it's becoming hard to be an out-and-proud political Zionist under 40, except in southern churches. Something about the USA's traditional aversion to distinctions of religion and race as the basis of a polity, maybe? Present indications are that more and more younger and brighter Jews will cut that Gordian knot by becoming, even unconsciously and certainly reluctantly, less and less Jewish... and more and more color-blind multiculti metrosexuals. Secular Jews virtually invented multicult, so there would be some poetic justice in that mutation.
My daughter a few years ago stepped into her local Hillel (George Washington University) looking for community, and found an atmosphere dominated by the voices of the Right -- support for Bush, support for Sharon, etc. It wasn't where she wanted to be, so she left. I do wish there had been other Jewish organizations on campus that didn't toe those ugly lines. I do know from talking to the director that such an atmosphere wasn't his intention. But when there's only one tent it can easily be dominated by the loudest (and best funded) voices, which are mostly on the right the past few years. We shouldn't be surprised when students decide to walk away.
Passion is as passion does. When I was in college adn law school there was a lot of passion, as David Mamet says, for everything including the whales, but excluding Judaism. The "themes" became overarching to the religious holiday and the identification was more as a show of ruffled feathers than anything else. And the proof was the high intermarriage rate with little conversions into Judaism. Reform Judaism magazine jsut had an issue celebrating their outreach program and chose to focus on two families - were these the only two Jew-by-choice, Jewishly observant families they could find?(no, because my family also fits this identification) But the truth is there are not that many. while the Jewish student organizations were advocating for everyone, they forgot to advocate for themselves as Jews. I have children in college and think that hillel is doing a much better job now than they were when I was there.
While I support the passion and courage of the author, I would like to point out that there is more at work here than Hillel's monopolization of funding. Funding is not the key to action. Passion is the key to action. Student activism is down across the board, and those students who are pre-determined to be active -- those products of youth movements, for example -- will still be active when the cause arises. Action for action's sake is hubris; silence when action is called for is treason against the soul. Instead of following the money, publications such as New Voices should focus on identifying key crisis areas, and supporting those who are educating others in the power of activism. Funding might enable isolated sparks to light small candles of alternative thought and action, but it is up to the students themselves to provide the matches -- and to help spread passion like brushfire.
I think independent students are just skipping the organizational structure all together. College students who do not like the options at Hillel often host their own Shabbat meals, join the local shul, or do Jewish stuff with their friends outside of official events. Rest assured, the independents are out their.
I appreciated Josh Nathan-Kazis' article about the need for organizational diversity in Jewish campus life. It is an issue I have supported as a college student, as a Jewish professional, and now as a parent of a college student. In the late 1970's I was President of Penn State Hillel and had the opportunity to participate in the Network of North American Jewish Campus Students leadership training program in New York City and again the following year at their national conference in Toronto. Hillel at that time was, for the most part, ineffective and outdated. The "Network" reinforced my enthusiasm for grass roots Jewish leadership and developed my interests in issues such as Jewish education and Israel. Those experiences confirmed my desire to become a Jewish professional, not just to initiate programs, but to work for innovation in community building and engagement. Hillel today - unlike the 1970's - does represent innovation and diversity. As a professional at other Jewish agencies I have looked at Hillel the past 10-15 years as the model for change. My own son is now active at the University of Kansas Hillel and I am thrilled and amazed at the meaningful opportunities he has had both on campus and nationally including participation in social justice volunteer work and attendance this week at the Hillel Leadership Symposium in Jerusalem. Those opportunities were unheard of before Richard Joel's reengineering of Hillel and the impressive work presently of Hillel professionals locally and nationally. They seem to be truly asking themselves - and their student leaders - the hard questions. I always hope there are well meaning creative grass roots efforts to challenge traditional institutions. However, as a long-time Jewish communal professional and the parent of 3 teenagers, I am grateful for the work of Hillels across the country - not as as old fashioned paternalistic insitutions as addressed by the author - but for their work empowering young adults to change the world. I think my fellow leaders from the 1970's would be proud.