“I am a whole person. I shouldn’t have to accept that only part of me is palatable to some. I don’t deny anyone else their full identity.”
After one week in Israel, learning alongside her peer Reform Movement Alumni for Israel (RAFI) leaders, Amalia, 26, an organizer in the Austin, Texas, LGBTQ community, felt ready to address the issue she has faced for nearly three years: the exclusion of her Zionist identity from the settings she champions.
This is what leadership for Jews in their 20s and 30s looks like today. They take positions on their community boards, lead campaigns in political primaries, and are voted in to serve on faculty and other professional committees.
Yet too often, they must curb their Zionism and commitment to Jewish peoplehood as a first step to attain leadership.
Each time that the price of entry to positions of responsibility becomes a litmus test requiring Jews to accept the genocide libel as legitimate or to swear off their commitment to the Jewish people, the bright future of Jewish life in North America starts to dim.
The challenges Amalia and her peers face are significant.
In May, Julia Jassey, CEO and founder of Jewish on Campus, spoke at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s “Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism” conference about the perceived ethical value of the “anti-normalization” of Jews, the practice of ostracizing Jews (or “Zionists”) and refusing to engage with them—whether through dialogue or shared programming—because doing so risks validating a commitment to Israel as a legitimate position.
Bringing one’s full self, Jewish identity and all, to the settings where young adults have achieved positions of leadership opens them to the possibility of being removed from these roles or socially excluded from the communities they lead.
The future of the Jewish community relies on a robust pipeline of young adults who have developed leadership skills in the many settings in which they participate, most of them outside the Jewish community. Our Jewish communal organizations have an opportunity to disrupt the anti-Zionist status quo that our future leaders are absorbing.
The time to reach young adults is now, before they embrace the denial of their full selves, because that lesson is already being taught.
ADL has studied the prevalence of anti-Jewish behaviors on college campuses across the U.S. Their findings, while alarming, are also unsurprising in today’s climate. Nearly 50% of non-Jewish students hold anti-Jewish beliefs and a similar number witnessed Jew-hatred in person or on campus digital spaces. More than one-third of non-Jewish students believe that Jews weaponize the accusation of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel.
This belief serves to gaslight their Zionist peers. Aware of how widespread anti-Jewish behaviors and beliefs are, administrators provide only five out of every 100 students with meaningful antisemitism training, leaving 95% of all students ill-prepared to respond constructively when they encounter Jew-hatred.
Universities should do more. They should offer antisemitism training that follows students into every setting on campus and beyond. But Amalia is no longer in college and, in the short term, she won’t benefit from more educated and aware non-Jewish students.
For the future of the Jewish people, we should prioritize extensive lay leadership development initiatives rooted in Zionism and Jewish peoplehood, so that 20- and 30-somethings learn how to lead in all settings with a commitment to the most foundational Jewish beliefs.
The Jim Joseph Foundation’s funded research, “Project Prism: A New Map of Young Adult Jewish Life,” presents a reality for young adults that is at once a threat to the Jewish communal future and an opportunity. Those who have remained only tangentially connected to Jewish communal life throughout their lives might never seek out Jewish community. Yet among 11% who have leaned into Jewish community since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as the 60% or so who are “culturally connected,” “exploring” and “anchored” in Jewish life, we have an opportunity to do better. Some organizations already have.
Russell Robinson, CEO of JNF-USA, speaks of this cohort as the fastest-growing demographic of donors in the Zionist nonprofit he leads.
The quality that, above all else, correlated with young adults’ connection with the Jewish community was having an immersive and intensive Jewish experience at a formative time in their identity development—one in which they experienced belonging. Our 20s and 30s may have passed the traditional formative stage of identity development, but they have not passed the opportunity to deepen their sense of belonging.
It’s time to invest our communal energies in immersive cohort-based leadership development initiatives that deepen their experience of belonging and strengthen their commitments to Zionism and the Jewish people.
The RAFI initiative models this approach to lay leadership development. We form our cohort of young leaders by selecting two or three people from each of 11 cities and bring them to Israel for an immersive seven-day exploration that engages all their senses. During this week together, strangers become friends, history becomes relevant, current events become clear, and the identities of young leaders come into focus.
“On my first night with the group, I went to dinner with three of my peers and felt completely accepted as both a queer person and someone with Zionist views,” Amalia shared.
After dinner, “I went to a drag show, got pulled to the front of the stage and experienced something I hadn’t felt since the war began: being openly gay, surrounded by people who were unapologetically themselves,” she said.
And it wasn’t just that one night. Her shift in thinking continued throughout the week, as she met and spoke with more of those rare people willing to speak radically honestly.
Amalia didn’t come home with answers. She came home with “the confidence to stop hiding parts of myself to make other people comfortable.” And she also came home with a plan: a queer and Jewish book club in Austin, where members of both communities can read, debate and learn together.
“I want to be able to show up as my whole self,” she said, “queer, Jewish, connected to Israel, curious and willing to have difficult conversations.”
