The Cost of Conditional Belonging: On identity, exclusion, and the growing cost of being openly Jewish in LGBTQ campus spaces

On Monday, a former student messaged me and told me I needed to listen to the latest episode of Stand & Talk, the podcast of the Jewish Stand in the UK. The guest was Josh Rose, a British Jewish writer, speaking about what it has felt like since October 7 to be both Jewish and gay, and about the growing sense among many Jewish LGBTQ people that spaces which once felt safe no longer do.

I first got to know this student years ago when I was serving as his Hillel Director, and our conversations since then have often circled questions of identity, belonging, and community. He is gay, and he knows that while I am straight and cisgender, I have tried over the years to show up alongside queer Jewish students working to make campus Jewish life safer and more welcoming. So when he sent the episode, it wasn’t an intellectual exercise for him. He wanted an honest response from someone he trusts to engage the question seriously.

It was a long podcast covering many subjects, so after listening, I asked what exactly this student wanted my take on. His answer, paraphrased, was straightforward: as someone who has been working on these issues for many years, why do I think Jewish LGBTQ students are increasingly feeling pushed out of queer spaces that claim to welcome everyone, what is driving that exclusion, and is there anything we can, or should, do about it? I shared my immediate reaction with him, but I have been sitting with the conversation since Monday, and what follows is the result of having had time to think more carefully about what is actually going on. Because this is not really about one podcast, or one campus, or even one political moment. It is about what happens when belonging becomes conditional. And I am increasingly impatient with how politely we keep talking around that reality.

The central issue here is not activism, nor Israel, nor even antisemitism in the narrow sense, important as those questions are. The deeper issue is fragmentation. What I am watching, over and over again, are students learning to split themselves in order to survive socially. Jewish here. Queer there. Politically muted in one room, emotionally guarded in another. Students become diplomats in their own lives, constantly scanning environments before deciding which parts of themselves are safe to reveal. At first this looks like maturity, social intelligence, adaptability. But spend enough time with students and the cost becomes obvious. You watch people grow quieter about Jewish life because it complicates friendships. You see students detach from communities they once loved because the friction becomes exhausting. You hear people joke about keeping their Zionism “low-key,” not because their beliefs have changed, but because they do not want to fight about it every time they go out with friends.

Slowly the lesson settles in: wholeness is socially unaffordable. This shows up in real decisions about who people date, whether they remain connected to Jewish practice, whether they go to Pride events or quietly avoid them, whether they continue showing up to Jewish community at all. The deepest damage is not exclusion from a particular space but internalising the idea that authenticity carries penalties you may not be able to pay. Once people learn that lesson, they rarely unlearn it easily.

Some doors, at least right now, are simply closed. We need to say that plainly. Some activist and queer spaces have drawn ideological boundaries that make participation difficult for Jews who refuse to renounce Israel entirely. Pretending otherwise simply sets students up for repeated disappointment. There is something quietly cruel about telling young people to keep knocking on doors that are not opening, as if perseverance alone will eventually melt hostility. Sometimes dignity lies in recognising when participation requires self-erasure and choosing spaces where belonging is possible without apology. That does not mean conditions will never change. Political climates shift. Social norms evolve. Relationships can be repaired, but students need community now, not promises of acceptance at some future date.

This reality helps explain why Jewish campus spaces increasingly function as refuge. Students are not always showing up because they are spiritually searching or intellectually curious. Often they arrive because other spaces have become hostile or exhausting. That is both an indictment and an opportunity. Refuge can become home, but only if it offers more than safety… joy, learning, friendship, ambition, and meaning, a sense of life bigger than simply surviving hostility. The danger is that refuge turns into bunker, that identity becomes organised around threat rather than purpose. Siege creates cohesion quickly but narrows imagination and tolerance. Communities held together only by fear eventually become brittle. Resilience keeps people alive. It does not help them flourish.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Everyone reading this already understands that, across many activist and queer spaces, hostility toward Jews is frequently laundered through the language of anti-Zionism and anti-Israel politics. Jewish identity is often treated as morally suspect unless accompanied by an explicit rejection of Zionism or condemnation of Israel. The political test becomes a condition of belonging, and Jews who refuse to pass it are recast as representatives of state violence rather than individuals. But moral conviction does not neutralise discrimination. History is full of people convinced they were on the right side while pushing minorities out of public life. The responsibility does not lie with Jewish students to simplify or disavow parts of themselves so others can maintain moral clarity. Jews should not have to fragment their identities in order to participate in spaces that claim to defend human dignity. Understanding how exclusion is rationalised may help explain the moment; it does not excuse it.

At the same time, anti-Israel politics alone does not fully explain the situation. Something broader has shifted in campus and activist cultures. Over the past decade, political identity has increasingly been organised around simplified binaries: oppressed and oppressor, colonised and coloniser, powerful and powerless. Frameworks developed to analyse real injustice have been flattened into moral sorting tools that reward clarity and punish complexity. Jews do not fit neatly into these categories. A people with a long history of persecution who are nevertheless perceived as successful or powerful in Western societies. A minority that is simultaneously racialised and treated as privileged. A diaspora people emotionally and historically connected to a state now cast as an oppressor in dominant activist narratives.

Instead of grappling with that complexity, many spaces resolve the tension through exclusion. Social incentives reinforce this. Students quickly learn which positions bring approval and which invite conflict. Nuance costs status. Certainty earns belonging. And so spaces that once centred solidarity around shared vulnerability now sometimes demand ideological conformity as the price of entry. Understanding these ecosystem dynamics does not excuse them; it explains why appeals to empathy alone rarely shift behaviour.

Clarity matters here. Jews should never be blamed for antisemitism. It is not the responsibility of Jewish students to educate their peers on how not to exclude them. Racism is not the job of racial minorities to solve, and antisemitism is not a pedagogical obligation placed on Jews. If spaces claiming to fight oppression cannot recognise when they are pushing Jews out, that failure belongs to them, not to the students absorbing the consequences.

But exclusion in public spaces is only one part of what happens next. The quieter consequences unfold in private decisions… dating choices, friendships, community involvement, and how visibly Jewish people allow themselves to be. Over time, repeated social penalties reshape behaviour, often subtly. People learn where Jewishness costs them and begin adjusting accordingly, not out of ideological conviction but simple social survival.

Back in September, I had a catch-up call with an old friend who still lives in the UK, who is Jewish and a lesbian. She reached out asking whether I knew of a program or framework that might allow her to spend a few months living in Tel Aviv. The question surprised me. She has long been deeply involved in Jewish communal life and has had a strong relationship with Israel over the years (leading teen tours, participating in numerous visits, and maintaining close ties) but over the past decade she has also grown increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s political direction and had largely avoided travelling there as a result. So her sudden interest in spending significant time in Israel caught me off guard. The reason she gave was heartbreakingly simple: dating.

She would still prefer a Jewish partner, but in recent years had decided that building a life with someone mattered more than holding out indefinitely for someone Jewish, and so she had begun dating outside the community. Since October 7, something had shifted. She told me that almost every time she went on a date in London and the person she was seeing discovered she was Jewish, one of two things happened. Either the conversation immediately turned into an interrogation about Israel, with her date waiting to see whether she would repudiate Zionism outright (something she was unwilling to do, even as someone critical of Israeli politics) or, as she put it, “the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees,” and she could feel the other person quietly lose interest in her simply because she was Jewish. Her hope was that even a few months in Tel Aviv might give her the chance to meet someone where this wouldn’t be an issue at all. Hearing that made me deeply sad. Not because she wanted to spend time in Israel, but because she felt she had to leave home to date without first passing a political test.

This also does not look like classic forced assimilation. Nobody is openly pressuring students to change their names or hide Jewishness for employment. Instead, pressure operates through moral belonging. Students learn which aspects of Jewish identity complicate participation in progressive spaces and quietly downplay them. Attachment to Israel becomes socially risky. Jewish communal involvement becomes politically awkward. The mechanism is different, but the outcome feels familiar: identities grow thinner, quieter, more private. These are rational survival decisions, not moral failures. But communities are shaped by cumulative survival decisions. If Jewishness repeatedly carries social penalties, fewer students will carry it forward publicly. We should be able to name that reality without shaming people who are simply trying to survive socially.

Which brings us to the part of the question that matters most: what do we do about it, and why should we bother?

The answer to whether we should do something feels obvious to me. If Jewish LGBTQ students - or any Jewish students for that matter - feel that participation in public life requires hiding parts of themselves, then something fundamental has broken. Communities do not flourish when belonging comes at the cost of integrity. And if the organised Jewish community shrugs and tells students that exclusion is simply the price of progressive politics, we will watch more and more young people quietly detach from Jewish life altogether. Doing nothing is not neutral. It simply means accepting fragmentation as the norm.

So what can be done?

First, we have to build Jewish spaces that are strong enough not to depend on outside validation. Too often Jewish campus life has functioned as a supplement to students’ primary social worlds. Now, for many students, it has become their only place of uncomplicated belonging. That reality demands investment… in leadership development, in programming that centres joy and creativity rather than only crisis response, in serious intellectual and spiritual engagement that treats students as adults rather than passive consumers. This also means materially supporting the institutions already doing this work: funding and strengthening the Hillel movement and Jewish student unions, which on many campuses are often the only Jewish spaces where LGBTQ students can show up as their full selves without needing to fragment their identities. Jewish spaces must become places students choose, not places they retreat to when everything else fails.

Second, we need to cultivate leaders who can operate credibly in broader campus ecosystems. Retreating entirely into our own institutions may feel safer in the short term, but it risks permanent separation. Students need training, language, and support to show up in coalition spaces without feeling they must apologise for being Jewish. That means leadership training, mentorship, and public modelling of complexity by people their peers respect. Norms shift not just through argument but through relationships and status cues.

Third, institutions must be willing to set boundaries. Universities and student governments constantly advertise inclusion while tolerating behaviour that pushes Jewish students out. The problem is not that the Jewish community is squeamish about calling this out, we have been calling it out, loudly, for years. The problem is that universities are structurally built to absorb outrage without converting it into change: power is diffuse, responsibility is fragmented, and delay functions as strategy. I wrote about this in detail in my last essay, including why visibility creates heat but only leverage creates risk, and why campuses can acknowledge you endlessly while moving nowhere. If you want the longer version of what has to change in our approach, read that essay. The short version is this: stop mistaking being heard for being effective, and start organising for binding commitments, enforcement pathways, and operational consequences that outlast the news cycle.

Fourth, we need to support Jewish LGBTQ students specifically, without turning them into symbols. Visibility should be voluntary, supported, and accompanied; not imposed. Communities must ensure that students who choose to be visible are not left carrying communal battles alone.

None of this guarantees success. Some spaces may remain closed for a long time. Political cycles will shift, but slowly. In the meantime, survival and repair have to happen in parallel. We build resilient internal communities while continuing to pursue relationships and coalitions where possible, without begging for acceptance.

Students rarely come asking for frameworks. They come looking for permission: permission to say something feels wrong without being told they are imagining it, permission to feel hurt without being accused of oversensitivity, permission to remain Jewish without apology. Sometimes they simply need someone to say: you are not crazy, and you are not alone. That matters more than analysis.

Choosing wholeness often costs young people friendships, status, and belonging… currencies that matter enormously when you are nineteen or twenty and still figuring out who you are. Some students will choose integrity despite the cost. Others will choose safety. Neither choice is a moral failure. But when students learn they cannot afford to be whole, that is not an individual weakness. It is a communal and institutional failure. That failure is not abstract. It shows up in quieter Jewish engagement, in students withdrawing from spaces they once loved, in people deciding parts of themselves are safer left unspoken. It shows up in exhaustion.

The responsibility now is not simply to defend Jewish participation in activist spaces or to argue endlessly about intentions. The responsibility is to make belonging possible without self-erasure. That means Jewish communities building spaces strong enough that students do not have to beg for acceptance elsewhere. It means institutions rediscovering the difference between disagreement and discrimination. And it means refusing the increasingly common demand that Jews fragment themselves in order to participate in public life. No student should have to choose between being accepted and being honest about who they are.

If spaces claiming to stand for dignity cannot make room for Jews as they are (complicated, diverse, politically imperfect human beings) then those spaces should at least have the honesty to admit they are not as inclusive as they claim. Young people should not have to fracture themselves to belong, and spaces making this demand of them should stop pretending they are, in any way, progressive.