These should be the best of times for the North American Jewish Students Appeal.
Founded in 1971 during the last wave of concern over dwindling Jewish identity, the Appeal helps supports independent student organizations and projects.
Now, federations have again placed Jewish youth at the top of their agenda.
But they are choosing to do so through Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.
On Monday, the Council of Jewish Federations endorsed Hillel as “the central federation agency through which campus services are delivered”.
CJF backed up this commitment by assigning each local federation a goal of how much to allocate for both regional campus activities and Hillel headquarters in Washington.
As for the Appeal, however, the committees that drew up the plan recommended that “the portfolio for national student projects be melded into Hillel”, according to Michael Rukin of Boston.
Rukin, who headed the task force on campus life, presented the recommendations to the CJF Board of Delegates on Monday night.
The committee is recommending that federation allocations which previously had gone to the Appeal should now go to Hillel, he said.
Rukin’s task force recommendation that Hillel incorporate funding for independent, grass-roots student projects did not mention the Appeal by name. But if these groups are to be funded by Hillel rather than by the Appeal, the Appeal will lose its reason for existence and will likely be forced to close down.
Rukin explained, however, that bringing the independent student groups under the Hillel umbrella is necessary to maintain their important role.
“It was the committee’s considered judgment that in the natural course of things, funding for the grass-roots student agenda would be lost in the system and wouldn’t occur”, said Rukin in an interview.
With full-time staff at more than 100 universities nationwide, Hillel has always been the dominant Jewish force on campus. In recent years, however, Hillel has undergone radical change.
Among these changes is a shift in focus from providing services to students to becoming a base for a broader campus Jewish community.
“You go to any campus today, you see from left to right, from up to down, sitting around the table, [students] representing their own groups but sitting on the Hillel board, with Hillel taking no responsibility for the statements groups make”, said Richard Joel, Hillel’s international director.
These changes to make Hillel more inclusive played a key role in the CJF endorsement.
With Hillel’s guaranteed and the Appeal’s in jeopardy, the two groups have begun meeting to figure out the Appeal’s place in the new order.
“The people involved with the Appeal feel its mission and its ideology” of promoting independent, student-led projects “is very important, and want to continue it as beast as possible”, said Robin Fox, president of the Appeal and a recent graduate of the State University of New York in Albany.
“We’re dealing with Hillel in hopes that since the campus we’re dealing with is one and the same, maybe we can work together to better serve the campus and the students”, Fox said.
Fox’s current roster of constituent and affiliated organizations include the Jewish Student Press Service; the Progressive Zionist Caucus; Response magazine; Yungtruf-Youth for Yiddish; and Lights in Action-Students United for Proactive Judaism and Zionism.
Additionally, the Appeal gives $20,000 in small grants to student projects on campuses across the continent.
Although the Appeal provided a conduit for federation allocations to such independent student projects, the amount of those allocations has declined steadily.
The Appeal’s 1994 allocation from federations of $75,000, although up from $60,000 in 1974, reflected a 42 percent decline, after inflation, from 20 years ago. The student group raises about $50,000 more from foundations and contributions.
Federations now collectively allocate $10 million to local and national Hillel activities annually. As that amounts rises under the new CJF plan, no one with the Appeal expects their allocations to go anywhere but down.
This concern motivated the unprecedented January meeting between the leadership of the Appeal and Hillel.
Fox, like others at the meeting, said she came away feeling positive about Hillel’s attitudes toward independent student groups.
Joel “opened the door for a lot of possibilities”, she said. “We’re considering them very seriously”.
Joel said the Appeal “and what it represents is very important for the Jewish community”.
Within his organization, Joel has repeatedly spoken of the need for Hillel to be an “infrastructure” for independent student activities.
“We’ve learned from a lot of what was right” about independent student movements, Joel said.
At the meeting, Joel asked the students to come back with their ideas of how they can work with Hillel.
The participants had no easy answers.
“There is no question Richard Joel is trying to develop this big-tent Hillel”, said Jonathan Glick, national director of the Progressive Zionist Caucus. PZC is one of the constituent agencies of the Appeal, from which it receives a quarter of its $35,000 budget.
“The real question is whether something as different as a Jewish student movement and an adult service-oriented group can some together, even with all the good will that does exist at this point on both sides,” Glick said.
PZC, with active chapters on more than 20 campuses, embodies much of the original independent Jewish student movement of the 1960s. Partially supported by left-wing Israelis in the kibbutz and peace movements, PZC reaches out to “progressive” students as the only organized left-wing Jewish presence on campuses.
On some campuses, PZC and local Hillel coexist.
“I have nothing to say bad about local Hillel,” said Rachel Kraft, who heads the PZC chapter at the University of Oregon.
But she worries that if PZC’s national structure finds shelter under some sort of national Hillel umbrella, it would mean “we’d be monitored”.
“They might limit our freedom to say certain things, do certain things, because they might make Hillel look bad”, Kraft said.
Glick wondered what would happen if Likud wins the next Israeli election and PZC returns to the role it played on campus in the 1980s- a loud, Zionist opposition to the Israeli government.
“What if we couldn’t get funding for our office because we are saying certain things?” he asked.
Similar concerns underlie llana Polyak’s caution. Polyak is editor of the Jewish Student Press Service and New Voices, the press service’s national student newspaper.
“We’re dealing with a unique issue, which is editorial control”, she said.
“In general, we are concerned that being affiliated with Hillel will alienate certain students we deal with who have never set foot in Hillel and don’t hear of the press service through the work of Hillel or its agencies”, Polyak said.
In response to these concerns, Joel said in an interview that he “would expect” an organization like PZC to play a vocal, controversial role in a scenario such as the one spelled out by Glick.
“Their doing do should not jeopardize their funding support”, he said.
Some students worry that independent student groups are able to attract students by virtue of their independence- and that the Jewish community will suffer if they lose that independence.
Rivka Shuchatowitz, who directs Lights in Action, said, “Working under any umbrella would mean giving up some level of autonomy and therefore, integrity, in our work”.
“What we’re talking about doing now is figuring out how we can create a structure in which independent student initiatives can have the most functional relationship with Hillel without being subsumed within Hillel”, she said.
Joel said he would “love to see national entities” under his umbrella at Hillel.
But, he added, “There are some daunting realities that national organizations on the American scene face. It’s very hard to support and maintain national movements in the whole American scene, particularly in the Jewish community. But because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.
“We’re looking to be open to any and all possibilities”.
Kraft adds a caveat of her own, a reminder of the contribution students have made in the past to the American Jewish community.
“It’s important to have groups who can challenge the big structure when it needs to have its butt kicked once in a while”, she said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
