One of my earliest memories is of being on my father’s shoulders at an Israel rally of some kind in the parking lot of our synagogue. I was bouncing to a song that I only years later realized was Noladeti LaShalom, “I was born for peace.” Being connected to Israel was always a piece of my identity as an American Jew, but it wasn’t until I myself went to Israel with USY (the Conservative movement’s youth group) during the summer of 2000 that I fell in love with the land, the dream, and the promise. I was in awe of the privilege of being one of the only Jews in the history of our people to walk freely, securely, in a modern Jewish State on ancient Jewish land, as hopes of regional peace still hung in the air. My love of Israel became a core tenet of my identity – alongside youth group and camp and holidays and family – and I couldn’t wait to return.
Israel — reality and fantasy — has long been a pillar of post-WWII American Jewish identity. Yet, as it was for young me, this was typically only one pillar of many. As more and more Jews disaffiliate from synagogues, daily ritual practice for non-Orthodox Jews continues to fade, and other forms of Jewish communal life change, the Israel pillar has started to hold more weight. This has felt particularly true post-10/7, and when it comes to emerging Jewish adults, the results are concerning.
Through my work as a Hillel director, I have the privilege of supporting young adults on their own Jewish journeys. For a growing number of students, their Jewish identity seems constructed around their relationship with Israel — love, hate, or unsure. I increasingly meet Jewish students who would defend Israel to the end, no questions asked. Some of these students can speak thoughtfully about Israeli politics and society, but most simply love the idea of a Jewish state and dream of their next Aroma iced coffee. Some are also involved in other aspects of Jewish life and practice, but many are not. Their Jewish identity has become consumed by their role as a defender of the State.
I also increasingly meet Jewish students for whom Israel has been the reason they left the Jewish community, feeling their views on Israel’s policies or behaviors superseded all other aspects of their Jewish practice and made them no longer welcome in organized Jewish space. Connection to Israel has become a litmus test for Jewish communal belonging, and many of our students are stumbling at the gate.
For most Jewish American adults, this is a time like no other in our lifetimes. We have never seen such open antisemitism, from the right and from the left. We realize now more than ever how the Holocaust happened, and why Jews in 1930s Germany couldn’t believe what they were seeing in a supposedly civilized society. We see the limitations of Jewish inclusion in efforts specifically designed to foster and ensure inclusion and belonging. We feel more othered than ever in our lifetimes.
Much has been written about intergenerational trauma following the Holocaust – and of course genocides and horrors of all kinds. We are living through a collective generational trauma, and it is not surprising that our children are impacted by that.
For a seasoned adult, this period in our Jewish lives will wane. We will be able to draw back on earlier Jewish experiences — holidays, cultural celebrations — and reconnect with a more nuanced and diversified Jewish identity. But what about our youth? I look at the students on campus today. Too many have cultivated identities based on defending the faith from imminent demise, and not around the pillars of that faith that have sustained us as a people for thousands of years. I worry that when the current panic fades, and it eventually will — what will be left for them? Will they relate to a Judaism not about defending against hate, but instead about celebrating joy?
In June 2003 my cousin Tamar, z’l, was murdered by Hamas. I remember the day so clearly. Her grandfather, my great-uncle, had worked for the Jewish Agency for Israel through HaShomer Ha’Tza’ir, smuggling Survivors out of Europe and into the Yishuv/Jewish Palestine, before serving in ’48 and helping to found the State. My grandfather, his brother, had stayed in Rochester to run the family business. Forty-five years later Tamar was serving in the IDF, as young Israelis do, while I — also 19 — had the privilege of attending college here in the US. She got on a bus to go home on her day off, and Hamas blew up the bus. I got in my car to safely drive to a summer class, before camp started. If our grandfathers had made different choices, it would have been me on the bus.
But it wasn’t. I see Tamar as the Yom HaZikaron (Israel Memorial Day) to my Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day). In Israel, the first day leads directly into the second; they come as a pair. She is a remembrance of the price of Jewish freedom and Peoplehood, and I am a living embodiment of the promise of a long Jewish future. Both days are important, each in their own ways. We need to come together and mourn the horrific things that have been done — and continue to be done — to our people. We need to memorialize Tamar, the 1200 who died on 10/7, and everyone who has died since in this most horrifying year. But a Judaism based around mourning will not endure, nor should it. We must also live vibrant Jewish lives, loudly and proudly. We must do this for us, and as a reminder to the world that despite the senselessness of antisemitism and hate and violence and terror, those like Tamar did not die in vain. Jewish life must be so much wider and deeper than what happens to us.
This is what we need to be teaching our children.
According to the Talmud, our foundational text of Jewish law, parents are obligated to teach their children to swim. On the surface level (no pun intended!), this is a survival skill. Yet interpreted more broadly, parents are commanded to teach their children to survive the challenges of daily life. They are commanded to teach their children resilience.
More than ever, we need to teach our children resilience. We need to help our emerging young adults add more pillars to their Jewish identity – to help them cultivate meaningful and authentic relationships with Israel, yes, but also with Jewish heritage and traditions, holidays and celebrations, culture and food, texts and rituals. We need to help them find joy in being in a sukkah with peers, and craft identities where pride and connectivity comes from positive joyful communal experiences, not the unity of defense against others. We need to ensure that our children have nuanced and complex Jewish identities that are strong enough to weather the storms of life, including horrifying times like we are living through now, knowing that at any time one pillar might start to crumble, but the whole is strong enough to stand firm.
We also need to teach our children resilience when it comes to Israel. We need to model for them what Israelis have been demonstrating since long before 10/7 – that it is possible to love Israel, and the Zionist dream, and still hold grave concerns about current Israeli policies and practices. We need to create space for students to adore and question, to love and to grieve, so that they no longer stumble at the gate of Jewish community because of their views on Israel, but rather carry proudly together their love and questioning that, like their Jewish identity, is resilient enough to withstand the ebbs and flows of political life.
More so than ever we need organizations like Hillel, which is modeling, every day, how to be Jewish in challenging times. We need to embrace, as the Hillel movement says, “all kinds of Jews, all kinds of Jewish,” and celebrate the many pillars that have sustained us as a people, and as individual Jews, for millennia. For some students, Hillel is the lifejacket when campus life gets too tumultuous. But if we do our job right, we are teaching students to swim – as far as they can dream, to the edge of the horizon of our current times, and far beyond.
Joy Getnick, PhD, (she) is the Executive Director of Hillel at the University of Rochester. Her prior role was as the Senior Director for Programming and Jewish Life at the Louis S. Wolk JCC of Greater Rochester, including as the founding director of Camp Seneca Lake (CSL) in Israel, a summer Israel program for teens. A historian by training she is the author of the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning curriculum on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and spent many years teaching part-time in the SUNY Geneseo Department of History. Joy, her husband, and two sons live in Pittsford, NY, where she enjoys cooking/baking through the four seasons, and celebrating all things Jewish with her family and the community.