A College Student’s Roadmap for the “New Jew”

As a young, politically engaged American Jew, I am often asked by adults to describe my feelings about the current state of our community.

My response is terse: “I’m pessimistic.”

I used to be far more hopeful. My conservative bona fides notwithstanding, I placed full trust in the synagogues, day schools, and progressive three-letter acronyms that today are sacrosanct in the American-Jewish ethos. When the occasional controversy arose, I dismissed calls for internal reform, seeing them as reactionary efforts that lacked clear vision and a basic respect for the institutional memory of the organizations our community holds dear.

When I arrived at Princeton in 2020 for my first semester of college, I joined the campus Hillel at the earliest opportunity. It’s a hub littered with Jewish and Israel-related student organizations, a microcosm of the elite echelons of American-Jewish institutional life. I soon found myself presented with significant leadership roles, culminating in the presidencies of two Jewish student organizations—Koach, the Conservative minyan, and Tigers for Israel (TFI), Princeton’s pro-Israel student group—as well as a coveted student membership to the Hillel’s board of directors.

Right upon assuming these roles in early 2022, an atmosphere of foreboding appeared when an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign materialized on campus. The Hillel charged me to lead a semester-long effort to defeat it, designating me as their de facto student liaison with outside press (in one case, I was even asked to retroactively revise a Hillel media statement that was inelegantly phrased). Following several draining months, I emerged tattered and bruised, but nevertheless triumphant.

It was after this Pyrrhic victory, however, when I began to worry. As students departed for summer break, a subtle pressure began to curdle in my kishkes. And though I was already reeling from the sleepless nights, shattered friendships and severe depression incurred from spearheading the counter-BDS effort, this sensation felt unique. The pressure soon turned into a throb, then the throb into a pang, which has persisted ever since. I sensed a series of future anti-Israel fiascos brewing on the horizon, but the leaders of my Jewish community, however well-intentioned, were asleep at the wheel.

This augury was not lost on me when I returned to campus several months later. I proceeded to outline several recommendations to Hillel students, staff and members of the board of directors in an effort to curtail these likely developments, but my words fell on deaf ears. Community leaders were eager to sweep the drama of the prior semester under the rug with little recourse. They shuddered when I proposed hosting an “Israel Shabbat” at the Hillel to boost morale among Zionist students despondent after the prior semester’s BDS debacle (student leaders had shot down the same suggestion at a retreat just before the BDS campaign began). I also sought to disband the Hillel’s Israel Advisory Committee, a bloated bureaucratic arm on which I served with five other Jewish students to advise the Hillel’s administration of Israel-related programming. There, my voice was diminished by anti-Israel members who had contradicted the Hillel’s mission by endorsing the BDS campaign, and I was pushed out due to my reluctance to proceed under the provided framework. When I articulated these and other concerns in my resignation letter to the Hillel’s board of directors, not a single member had the courtesy to respond to me.

Hillel leaders at every stratum played coy in an unrealistic attempt to return to the “normalcy” of the pre-BDS era. In doing so, they glossed over those students who had suffered the most to vanquish BDS from campus. The staff are kind, well-meaning, good-faith actors. To this day, I maintain cordial relationships with a number of them. But in today’s precarious climate, talk is cheap, and inaction speaks far louder than nice words. Coupled with the increasing antagonism I faced from a number of self-described “woke” members of Koach and overly dogmatic, “my way or the highway” types in TFI, I came to accept that my Jewish community was no longer a home for those like me. And so, I made the painful decision to depart, never to return.

Today, despite its fortuitous history with anti-Israel activity, Princeton finds itself faced with the possibility of yet another BDS referendum. But with no lessons learned from last year’s situation and a ragtag coalition of external consultants and ill-suited student “leaders” at the helm of the opposition, I fully expect my school to go the way of other once-great universities—and fall victim to the anti-Zionists’ global crusade. Indeed, my Hillel and Princeton at large claim to be in the business of cultivating a vibrant social atmosphere under the cultish banner of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” yet their negligence has spawned a campus climate that runs afoul of the needs of Jewish students, engenders Jew-hatred, and reneges on the University’s historical improvements to Jewish student life. I say this all with a heavy heart, but I am incapable of altering this downward trend, as I am no longer part of the Hillel community.

Those who have been through similar circumstances know the feeling well. As Jews, we are genetically engineered to perceive the effects of the loss of community more acutely than most. It’s akin to the type of tribal rejection many of our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced in the Stone Age—what Tablet Magazine editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz describes as “devastating precisely because it forces you to rethink everything, not only your convictions about the world but also your idea of yourself, your values, and your priorities.”

One of my most shocking discoveries within the past year, however, has been the extent to which so many others have had similar experiences. Consider whether any of the following familiar scenarios applies to you:

1. My family’s longtime shul, day school, and summer camp are awash in progressive ideology. Members and staff spend heaps of time eulogizing Roe and fawning over notions of “equity” and “democracy” while making little effort to discuss genuine threats facing the American-Jewish community.
2. My synagogue’s leadership appears more preoccupied with not “rocking the boat”—maintaining status and social acceptability under the guise of social justice—than doing what is difficult, necessary and just to defend Israel and the Jewish people.
3. My alma mater is once again soliciting me for their annual giving campaign. In the past, I have donated handsomely. Yet today, my college appears almost unrecognizable: anti-Zionist ideology runs rampant on campus with no administrative pushback, and Jewish students feel increasingly compelled to conceal their Judaism to align with the dominant progressive social order. Is this really a worthwhile use of my money?
4. By failing to realistically assess the state of Jew-hatred in academia, corporations, and government, American-Jewish leaders are weakening our community, emboldening our adversaries, and driving a growing wedge between Israel and diaspora communities. The delusion progresses from the top down: As an independent thinker, I no longer feel heard or welcome in my community and have been forced to depart.

Most likely, a significant number of readers will identify with most, if not all, of these points. And for too long, you understandably believed that you were alone in your struggle. I assure you that you are not. What is currently lacking is not an audience of American Jews receptive to these messages, but rather an infrastructure tailor-made for people like us—proud Jews who do not bend the knee to faddish progressive ideology, who have been left behind by Jewish communities that do, and who are searching for a loving and supportive community of like-minded peers to offer refuge from today’s intoxicating political discourse.

A spirit of dissatisfaction is ablaze among the thousands of American Jews who have found themselves alienated from their communities at the hands of repressive woke ideology.

A spirit of dissatisfaction is ablaze among the thousands of American Jews who have found themselves alienated from their communities at the hands of repressive woke ideology. Many are hungering for a new direction to take shape, one that nurtures and enlivens its members, burnished by a reverence for the Jewish people’s extraordinary history, an unabashed love for Israel, and a tolerance for diverse denominational backgrounds. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz’s recent piece underscores this shifting climate:

The New Jew does not cower. He does not make excuses for those who hate him, whether white supremacist or black nationalist. She speaks plainly about threats, refuses to pretend they’re exclusive to the far right when she can see with her own eyes that they are not … He discovers there are many others like him, so many others, and they’re welcoming and accepting as we all navigate together being independent Jews in the freest of countries.

And discover we must. It’s become cliché to point out the rapid decline of non-Orthodox segments of the American-Jewish population and to just leave the conversation there. Indeed, the outlook is dim: Jewish intermarriage with non-Jews remains sky-high, Conservative and Reform Jews are abandoning their religion in droves, and younger generations of Jews are becoming increasingly hostile towards Israel; all the while, our leadership has acted with little success to reverse these trends. Already we have witnessed a new religion—wokism, a disturbing concoction of neo-Marxist, postmodern and postcolonial thought—supplant this vacuum of faith for countless American Jews.

But we cannot simply expect a new and better system to emerge naturally after wokism dismantles Reform and Conservative congregations from within, nor should we entrust fatigued leaders with outdated philosophies with the awesome responsibility of carrying our people’s torch. We must bond over shared experiences and speak truthfully about this institutional decay that has plunged the American-Jewish community into a state of cultural paralysis. Only then will we enable a new generation of Jewish leadership to take flight—Jews armed with courage and resolve, grounded in conviction, undeterred in the face of harsh realities.

I’m doing my best to pitch into this effort. I recently created a Substack titled “Kavod” to amplify and foster community for disaffected Jews who have endured the conditions outlined above. My hope is that Kavod will stimulate conversation around a topic that has been referenced only in small part, and not in full force, in mainstream American-Jewish settings: the illiberal takeover of our religious and cultural institutions, and the alienation of members, ideas and core Jewish principles that has ensued as a result.

The platform will provide a democratic forum for Jews of all stripes (and non-Jewish sympathizers) to vent, speak their conscience, and unite around a shared purpose. As I author more pieces for this Substack, I invite you to do the same: to share your story with Kavod’s growing community, discover new friendships through mutual experiences, and lend a hand to forging “a new path for the self-respecting American Jew.” You can do so by reaching out to kavodsub@gmail.com.

No matter how this community for the “New Jew” (as Markowicz terms this phenomenon) links itself to the incalculable chain of Jewish tradition, the prospect of igniting a vigorous debate within the American-Jewish community concerning our institutions’ failures is not something to be feared. Instead, we must embrace it as a critical feature of any sound community and a much-needed invocation of makhloket leshem shamayim—argument for the sake of heaven—a vital Jewish practice that has been uprooted from our institutions by woke forces.

It is upon us to seize this moment, to reorient our ship and to build a destiny of unrestrained promise for the Jewish people in the Land of the Free.

Jared Stone is a student at Princeton University from Las Vegas, Nevada studying American politics, Hellenic Studies, and ancient Greek. He is the founder of Kavod and former head of Princeton’s Tigers for Israel, conservative debate society, and Koach Conservative Jewish minyan.