Facebook’s Sandberg recalls identity-building BBYO experience

Social media giant’s COO tells youth group’s conference that her involvement in the movement helped her stay close to being a Jewish woman

By JTA 19 February 2014, 2:50 am Edit

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook. (CC BY-SA Scanlan, Wikimedia Commons)

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, described how the Jewish youth movement BBYO helped to shape her.

Sandberg, also the author of the best-seller “Lean In” on empowering women in the workplace, spoke in a video message to the annual BBYO conference in Dallas over the weekend.

She said her experience in the organization helped her “stay close to the Jewish identity as a Jewish women that has really mattered to me.”

Sandberg advised using the monthly “Lean In” empowerment circles she advocates in her book in a BBYO context.

Also delivering video messages to the conference, which drew 2,000 teen leaders from across the United States and other countries, were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency.

Sharansky spoke of the vital role Jewish youth movements played in sustaining his hopes when he was a prisoner of the Soviet gulag.