Like the Maccabees, Vassar’s Jewish Community is Small But Mighty

Image by Vassar Jewish Union / Facebook
My life began in the tight embrace of the Jewish Theological Seminary where my dad was undergoing rabbinical ordination and continued in the tighter squeeze of the approximate 100,000 Jews residing in the Greater Baltimore area. My senior year of high school, after attending a Jewish day school for nine years, spending seven summers at a Jewish summer camp, dutifully sitting through shul every Shabbat, keeping kosher and kosher for Passover and a modified version of Shomer Shabbat, I finally felt that my Jewish experiences had thoroughly maxed out. When it came time to compile a list of schools I was interested in applying to, I decided to prioritize every other factor that goes into the college decision making process over Jewish community. I didn’t visit Hillels when I toured campuses; I didn’t take time to meet with Jewish students; I didn’t email the university rabbi.
I chose Vassar because I loved the student body, their strong liberal politics and sense of individuality evident from just one campus visit, and because I loved the campus, its stretches of brick buildings and endlessly blossoming flowers. I didn’t anticipate that the Jewish community there would become the most supportive and important group of people to me on campus. Over the past year, as I watched article after article roll off the press and into the laps of alumni and parents, I was frustrated. Articles that described Vassar’s campus as an anti-Semitic hotbed entirely ignored my converse experience with the vibrancy of our Jewish community. Every week I’d been davening, eating Shabbat dinner, making havdalah, and fully immersing myself in the plethora of ways to live Jewishly at Vassar.
I love Vassar’s Jewish community. We are, much like the Maccabees, small but mighty. If websites like The Algemeiner stopped to talk to the students they were writing about, I think they’d find a very different story from the one they want to tell. My Jewish experience at Vassar has been wonderful; it’s enabled me to be active and thoughtful in my Judaism, to practice it in an extremely close community, and to love it as I never have before.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.