Walking up a staircase at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, Colo., in the Denver area, Mathew Grossman, the CEO of BBYO, saw three high school students draped in Israeli flags.
“I was really moved,” Grossman told JNS at BBYO’s annual international convention, which drew about 3,500 Jewish teens from some 50 countries.
“That can’t happen comfortably on many college campuses in the United States, yet we’re able to create this environment where it’s not even a second thought about draping an Israeli flag over your back,” he added. “We take a lot of pride in that.”
BBYO dedicated extra budget funds to ensuring that attendees both were and felt safe, according to Grossman. “If they feel safe, they can express themselves freely,” he said. (Security was so tight that attendees from Texas, who were anxious to experience a snowstorm on Saturday morning, were barred from leaving the hotel.)
The BBYO event is designed to be led by teens. “We treat kids like adults,” Grossman said. “When you treat them like adults, they usually act like adults, and sometimes are more responsible than adults.”
Grossman has seen major changes both among teens and at BBYO, which he has led for two decades and which celebrated its centennial last year.
“BBYO is 100 years old, and somehow what worked back then is still relevant now,” he said. “Those are the themes of brotherhood, sisterhood, kids learning how to lead and applying that leadership to doing good things in the world.”
He and his colleagues shine a spotlight on the teens. “That’s an important role because without that spotlight, they can’t shine quite as much,” he said. “At the end of the day, they get to go on stage and they lead their own elections. They are driving the democratic process of how this organization runs, and they’re driving the way we practice Judaism.”
Grossman told JNS that there were 22 prayer services on Shabbat. “All planned by the teens,” he said.
“BBYO is magic because it is teens who get to have ownership within the organization,” he added.
‘Powerful forces’
BBYO announced at the event that it received a $2.5 million grant this year to establish the Miller Institute for Democracy, which it said will offer programming that allows teens to explore the relationship between media and democracy.
The institute “is going to allow us to bring some of the best voices to go deep on the issues that young people care about and give them the additional skills they’re looking for so that they can be powerful forces in the future,” Grossman told JNS.
“BBYO has been about experiential democracy, which is how we build leaders, which is practicing democracy. Kids are learning leadership skills,” he told JNS. “All of that has been a part of the organization’s DNA forever.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who is the state’s first Jewish governor, spoke at the five-day BBYO event, as did Phil Weiser, the state attorney general. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, and billionaire Jewish philanthropist Robert Kraft delivered pre-recorded remarks. The Israeli pop star Eden Golan, who represented the Jewish state at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, spoke and performed at the event, which also drew Giancarlo Esposito (of “Breaking Bad” fame), Brigham Young University quarterback Jake Retzlaff (who is Jewish) and Olympic gold medalist Tara Davis-Woodhall.
Grossman told JNS that BBYO tries to bring in speakers teens might not “otherwise have access to—and not just in large-scale settings but in small, intimate spaces, where they can ask tough questions and get a sense of what these leaders’ lives, careers and challenges are like.”
Managing their online presence
BBYO is also committed to being inclusive, according to its CEO.
“Whatever you’re doing, you want the person next to you to feel comfortable,” he said. “Our approach, specifically, is to provide a lot of different options—from how you can worship to the kind of food options we provide.”
That kind of emphasis arose from a “listening tour” he conducted after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during which he visited chapters in four U.S. cities and heard from community members about the challenges they face.
Many were seeking connection and a space to be proud to be Jewish.
“I think teens are looking for connectivity with each other more than ever because they find safety in the conversations they’re having with each other,” he told JNS. “I think they’re sharper than ever with how they’re managing their online messages when it comes to talking about Israel. They know how to speak up and know when speaking up just amounts to shouting into the wind.”
Grossman told JNS that he is optimistic about the future of Jewish youth despite rising Jew-hatred globally.
“Even when times seem difficult, you come to something like this and you can’t help but be optimistic,” he said. “I just wish the Jewish world could see the goodness, the optimism, the hopefulness of what these young people are going to bring to our Jewish community moving forward.”