The Return of Jewish Vibes to Campus

It’s no secret to any Jewish professional that religious service attendance is dramatically down this year. There are many factors at play here and no one particular answer to explain why students are not showing up to Shabbat in the ways they used to pre-pandemic and before the horrors of October 7th, 2023.

Remember that this generation of college students grew up in the pandemic when social gatherings and communal celebrations were severely restricted. Many families got out of the habit of attending services and were slower to return to their earlier ways of regular or even sporadic synagogue attendance. Of course their students would follow these patterns once they arrived on college campuses on the path of their own adult Jewish identity and away from the parental and rabbinic influence that had guided their Jewish choices beforehand.

As a campus Hillel director at the University of Vermont, I witness firsthand each week how the impacts of last year’s onslaught of antisemitism has changed the behaviors of Jewish college students. How we have adapted and changed to meet the needs of students today can offer some lessons for how Jewish communal organizations can adapt to the new reality of our world.

Whenever I meet a new parent or student the words, “it’s hard to be Jewish these days” inevitably comes up. The news and social media are rife with these examples on college campuses, in Israel, and across the country. It’s never been easy to be Jewish and that makes us Jewish too. In 2021, throughout the Title VI investigation of antisemitism at UVM, and during the encampments last year students looked over their shoulder before they came into Hillel, they would avoid our tabling on campus, they’d avoid telling their friends they were headed to Hillel or a Jewish activity. They just didn’t want the pressure of potentially losing friends because of Israel. Jewish identity was present but hidden.

Today, students are wearing their Magen David necklaces and proudly display Hillel or challah stickers on their water bottles and laptops but actually “doing Jewish with other Jews” at Hillel as the old Hillel slogan once went, is fewer and far between in the ways we used to see. They are less likely to try something new unless a critical mass of their friends are already going to try it. Friend groups are formed in the first moments of move-in and if there isn’t a compelling reason to seek out a spiritual or communal connection to Shabbat beyond parental pressure, they likely won’t seek it out. Even environmental factors like a random outbreak of mosquito borne encephalitis which triggered university warnings about outdoor activity right before our welcome BBQ in the fall contributed to the behavioral change we are witnessing.

This isn’t to say all is lost. It’s the reverse.

Jewish life and learning is thriving. It just looks different than before.

In fact, our student engagement metrics are better than ever. Last year we struggled to reach 1,000 students. Most of our student engagements then were around supporting students reporting antisemitism, hosting community memorial events, dealing with vicarious and very real trauma, and just trying to show up to work as our best selves every day. Last year was so very hard for all of us.

This year we’ve already engaged nearly 1,300 of 2,000 Jewish students on our campus. We haven’t even started Purim and Passover outreach which will surely get us to vastly exceed our target metric of engaging 1,476 students one time or more. So what’s working? What’s changed? Why is in-person Shabbat and religious service attendance down but overall engagement is up?

It goes back to the core of Hillel which can be found in a Hillel handbook published in the 1950’s. It’s because, our core principle, “the principle of self-government, of placing the responsibility for the student program in the hands of students themselves” has made all the difference. It’s not as if every student is programmed, shopped for, promoted, and cleaned up after by students. To me, it means we must listen and learn to what our students are telling us with their actions. If they aren’t showing up for religious services it means they want something else from their Friday nights. It’s Hillel’s role to always adapt and change. Students who graduated four years ago experienced a very different Hillel than those who are set to graduate four years from now, and that’s the way it should be.

This semester after listening to and learning from our students’ behaviors we are trying radical new ways to engage students in low-barrier ways with their Jewish identity with what they are seeking from Hillel. When a traditional Jewish learning class wasn’t drawing expected numbers, we pivoted and created our own curriculum around AI, God, and Jewish identity. We used ChatGPT and other AI tools to create a new curriculum and were transparent with students about that while crediting the diverse Jewish voices and teachers present in the texts. Rather than have our staff teach the full eight week curriculum, we are giving students the tools and experience to create and lead their own curriculum for the last two weeks of class by using AI, in a way that we know they are doing already to bolster their academic studies. In short, we are giving students the tools and access to own their own Jewish experiences and endowing them with the confidence to lead others.

Tonight at Hillel we are helping 240 students engage with Shabbat in their way. Instead of being bummed that 30 students come to Shabbat at Hillel weekly, we pivoted and adapted to great successes. Earlier this afternoon we gave out 50 full-size challahs for 85 people in the Davis Center along with blessing cards electric or real candles depending if they lived in the residence halls or off campus with personal bottles of Kedem grape juice. Our Hillel Fresh student volunteers prepared 60 bags for 120 people of local produce, recipe guides, student artwork, and Shabbat blessings via QR code so students off campus could cook a Shabbat meal for their roommates and friends. Here at Hillel, 35 students came to a Paint and Sip where we offered a variety of appetizers, Costco bought Panera Mac N Cheese, make your own mocktails, and a playlist of Sabrina Carpenter, Goose, Chappell Roan and other music that isn’t mine…but it’s theirs and they’re loving it.

We aren’t offering religious services tonight which could be seen as a radical abrogation of our obligations as a Jewish organization. However, we are doing exactly what Hillel’s founder Rabbi Benjamin Frankel envisioned over 100 years ago at the University of Illinois campus. We are offering the opportunity for Jewish connection and inspiration, and students are embracing the opportunity to be together, in their own way.

We never would have had 240 students come to Hillel for Shabbat; even our Welcome BBQ attendance peaked at 220 when we opened the our magnificent Burack Hillel in 2019. Tonight in the middle of February in below freezing weather, 240 students are celebrating Shabbat with Hillel’s help.

I’m so proud of the staff team and student leaders that we have who co-create these opportunities for student engagement. Staring in the face of declining participation we listened, we learned, and we adapted to meet the needs of Jewish students today.

We’re just getting started.

We will partner with local mixologists to create a custom grape juice forward mocktail for Passover in addition to the traditional four cups of Kedem. We have reached out to local chefs of restaurants (that students want their parents to take them to when they’re in town) to design future Shabbat menu items and provide social media content to hype up Hillel. We’re working with student and professional DJs to create custom playlists that play off the themes of Purim. On Monday, we will give away hundreds of make-your-own hamentaschen kits or ingredients for dough and fillings to students with cookie cutters, so they can show their friends the joys of Jewish celebration. We’re giving students the tools and access and encouragement to make Judaism their own.

This fall we will launch our first ever pre-orientation FreshFest program so 36 students can move in early, eat maple creemees (it’s what we call soft-serve in Vermont), meet new friends, connect Jewishly, and get to know new people before the rest of the university moves in. We’ve modeled that on some of the best in class programs in the country like Syracuse Hillel that draws 500 students to their Fresh Fest. We listen, we learn, we adapt. I’m excited for the future when hundreds of Jewish families will sign up for Fresh Fest at UVM.

We’re Hillel at the University of Vermont and we’re just getting started making a new difference in the lives of today’s students.

I invite you to join us in this journey to make UVM a destination school for Jewish families from across the country.

Shabbat Shalom and be joyful.

Jewish vibes are back.