ADENA KIRSTEIN is Executive Director of Hillel at the George Washington University.
What feels like an endless year on campus is now coming to a close. Dorms have emptied out, summer internships have begun, and at long last there is something many of us Hillel professionals have been craving: silence. We are clearing our heads, taking a collective deep breath, and trying to make sense of the marathon we just ran and the last horrible mile we made it through. It is time to look back and reconsider everything that happened on campus during the months between October 7 and graduation. Did the statements and the angry emails and the Instagram posts our community crafted in November and December ultimately do anything to protect us from encampments and antisemitism in April and May? Did we use our voices wisely? What can we do better next year? We played a vital role this year, but now is the time to think about what might come next.
I began working for Hillel in New York City in the summer of 2007. I carried my flip phone to work, read books on the subway, didn’t yet know what it meant to “stream” anything, and resisted opening a Facebook account for as long as I could. I had graduated from college not long before, and my own Jewish experience as a student at Hillel had been marked by my growth as a leader and my embrace of being a Southern Jew in the big city. I barely considered what it meant to be a Zionist; it simply wasn’t a required conversation in my college years. When I wanted to study abroad in Jerusalem, the Second Intifada sent me to Australia instead. Expressing my support for Israel wasn’t woven into my day-to-day life on campus; the hallmark moment only came in Washington, DC at a rally to stand against the bus bombings and violence that felt very far away from my daily realities.
Fast forward two decades, and that image of Jewish life on campus seems unrecognizable. Both Jewish students themselves and the world around them are radically different from what they once were. And yet, in other ways, their needs are the same as they have always been: to grow as Jews and to determine what it means to them to be Jewish.
Understanding today’s American Jewish college students requires that we recognize the world in which they’ve grown up. My students were born after 9/11, after Columbine, and not long before Sandy Hook. While George W. Bush was in the White House when they were born, their political identities have been shaped primarily by the Trump and Biden presidencies. They do not know a world without TSA pat-downs, without metal detectors at baseball stadiums, without security cameras tracking their every move. They have participated in active shooter drills from the time they started school. In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that the overall effect of all these events on young adults in America today has been to teach them that the world can—and should—be divided between good guys and bad guys.
All of this was coupled for my students with a Judaism responding to these new realities of fear and divisiveness in a post-Holocaust context. Many of today’s American Jewish college students were raised in synagogues that taught them to seek light in the darkness and that they could play a part in tikkun olam—healing the world. Forthose who had a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony, it likely happened with a security guard at the synagogue door, either shortly before or after the horrors of the Pittsburgh or Poway shootings. They assumed a ticket to Israel on a Birthright trip would be waiting for them, but they also knew an armed guard would accompany them on the trip. Their hopes for the world—for racial equity and justice for all and for the good guys to win—were intricately tied to who they were as Jews.
This world that my students know is almost inseparable from the online world of social media. They don’t share quick life updates on Facebook, as I once did, after I finally caved and joined the platform during my first years in the Hillel professional world. Instead, my students film a reel on Instagram, share a video on TikTok, update the world on their new job via LinkedIn, and put a quick slice-of-life moment on Snapchat. But where are the lines between IRL (in real life) and the virtual worlds?
Who draws them? Are they sharp or are they blurred? No longer can students consider the nuances of a Zionist identity in isolation, or over coffee with a friend or their local Hillel professional. Instead, their visions and viewpoints are clouded by the virtual world that spills over into their everyday lives. In difficult times for Israel or the Jewish people, this added layer of social media adds fuel to a fire that is ever on the precipice of raging.
My students last fall encountered a swastika etched onto a sidewalk close to campus, slogans such as “Glory to our Martyrs” projected on the side of a library, a screaming match between a protestor and a fraternity brother outside a Jewish frat house, and the ripping down of hostage posters that had been hung inside the Hillel building after October 7. These brief descriptions should raise many questions, some about the facts and some about matters of interpretation. In each case, was the perpetrator a campus employee, a student, or another community member—or were they unaffiliated and just passing through GW’s campus, an open, urban space in the heart of Washington, DC? How long did the university take to respond? Does two hours constitute a “slow” response time? What about one whole day? And if the response was slow, was it because administrators were uncaring and even biased, or because they were taking their time to really think through what they wanted to say? Was the incident breaking a law or just breaking our collective Jewish heart?