Jewish Teens Want a Seat at the Table. After Oct. 7, They’ve Earned It.

At BBYO’s International Convention this month, thousands of Jewish teenagers didn’t just gather. They stood up and insisted on a role in Jewish life and Jewish leadership that no one had offered them.

In Philadelphia, 3,400 teens from 52 countries drafted a resolution through the Jewish Youth Assembly, an initiative of the World Jewish Congress, addressing antisemitism, polarization, and online hate and sent it directly to the WJC’s network of global Jewish leaders. Meanwhile, BBYO’s international co-presidents launched “Seat for the Future,” a campaign calling on organizations like the ADL and Jewish Federations of North America to install teens on their boards. No national organization has yet accepted.

This was not youthful boosterism. It was a moral summons.

After Oct. 7, the organized Jewish community has been tested not only by external threats, but also by internal responses that too often resemble risk management rather than moral clarity. Legacy institutions met the greatest rupture in Jewish life in generations with careful statements, endless process, and reputational choreography, when what Jewish families and students needed was speed, backbone and resolve.

We have become a community that confuses process for protection. And our teens see that more clearly than many adults.

They have watched campuses slide into open hostility toward Jews, excused as “activism.” They have watched fashionable moral frameworks romanticize barbarism while demanding Jewish self-erasure as the price of acceptance. They have watched Jewish as students are pressured to denounce Zionism simply to remain socially legitimate. They have watched slogans that flatten Jews into villains laundered through the language of justice.

And they have watched institutions respond the same way: convene, listen, workshop, “build bridges.”

Antisemitism is not a misunderstanding that can be resolved through facilitated dialogue. It is a civic and communal emergency. Some institutions have begun to act.  Campus encampments dropped 92 percent after universities started enforcing their own codes of conduct, and some schools revised policies and strengthened Hillel and Chabad partnerships. That progress is real, and it proves the point: When institutions show backbone, conditions improve. The question is why it took a historic crisis to produce even partial accountability.

When institutions show backbone, conditions improve. The question is why it took a historic crisis to produce even partial accountability.

The deeper problem is one that can be felt across Jewish institutional life right now: a leadership class that has learned to recognize some forms of hatred instantly and to proceduralize others into oblivion. The result is a community with impressive infrastructure and insufficient confidence, as well as organizations that can raise money, host galas, issue statements and still struggle to do the first duty of communal life: defend our people without apology.

So when BBYO teens say they want a seat at the table, they are not asking politely for inclusion. They are saying: We cannot afford your timidity anymore. That is not youthful impertinence. It is Jewish responsibility.

Judaism is not built on spectatorship. It is built on obligation—arevut, mutual responsibility; pikuach nefesh, the seriousness of life and safety; and the basic dignity of a people that refuses to be shamed out of its identity. In that sense, BBYO is not merely a youth convention. It is a formation space—one of the few places in American Jewish life where young Jews are being trained not just to “feel Jewish,” but also to act Jewish: to lead, argue, build, defend, and sustain.

There is reason for hope here and not only from the teens.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose home was firebombed on Passover last spring by an attacker who cited hostility toward Jews and Israel, opened the convention. He told the crowd: “You are the future, and you are the power to shape it. And don’t wait. The future is right now. Do not look for others to do the work. This is not an opportunity. This is your responsibility.” The teens recognized the echo of Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot—“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it”—and they roared. That is what moral clarity sounds like from leadership. Not a statement. Not a task force. A Jewish governor, targeted for being Jewish, standing before Jewish teenagers and telling them their obligation is now.

That is the standard these teens are asking the rest of Jewish institutional life to meet.

For years, Jewish organizational life has been dominated by professionalized hesitation: donor anxiety, institutional branding, consensus politics. That model was already weakening Jewish belonging before Oct. 7. After Oct. 7, it became untenable.

This generation does not want vague metaphors about “building bridges.” They want leaders who will name antisemitism plainly. Who will defend Jewish students unapologetically. Who will affirm that Jewish peoplehood is not a political inconvenience but a civilizational fact. Who will stop outsourcing Jewish moral confidence to the approval of others.

This generation does not want vague metaphors about “building bridges.”

So, yes: Give them their seat.

But do not pretend that is the whole story. Their demand is also a warning. BBYO’s international co-presidents told the Forward that they have seen a “disconnect” between Jewish organizations and what Jewish youth actually want from leadership, and that when teens are included, it has felt “tokenized.” That is why they are now going organization by organization, asking for board seats. They are not waiting to be invited. If adult institutions cannot recover moral clarity, young Jews will build structures that can. They will invest their loyalty where they see courage, seriousness, and pride.

The lesson is not merely that Jewish teens are inspiring. The lesson is that they are right. And moral confidence begins with naming reality: Hate against Jews is hate. Say it. Mean it. Enforce it.

Jewish federations cannot fundraise endlessly while hesitating to confront the institutions where Jewish students are being degraded. Campus professionals cannot hide behind neutrality while Jewish identity is treated as uniquely suspect. Donors who write seven-figure checks to universities should be conditioning those gifts on measurable enforcement of anti-harassment policies—not accepting task forces and listening sessions as substitutes for action.

Oct. 7 shattered the illusion that Jewish life can be sustained by prestige, branding or institutional inertia. The teenagers in Philadelphia understand what the rest of Jewish institutional life has forgotten: Jewish continuity is not maintained through statements. It is maintained by those who refuse to whisper.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.