When Jewish Students Didn’t Ask for Permission: What Jewish Students Once Had… and Why They Don’t Anymore

For much of the late twentieth century, Jewish students in North America did not merely participate in Jewish communal life. They asserted themselves within it.

They organised independently of professional oversight, published adversarial journals, disrupted federation assemblies, and built national networks that treated the Jewish establishment not as a benevolent sponsor, but as a power structure with which they were entitled to disagree, and even argue. Jewish student activism was not designed as a leadership pipeline, nor as a service delivery mechanism. It was a space of true agency.

That world no longer exists.

Today, Jewish student life on most North American campuses operates almost entirely within professionally administered frameworks. Student leaders remain visible, energetic, and deeply committed; but their authority is usually mediated by staff, boards, donors, and institutional risk assessments. Independent, democratically legitimate Jewish student bodies that speak for students rather than through institutions have largely disappeared.

In my last piece I alluded to the decline of independent Jewish student organising in North America and I said that this would be the subject of a future essay. This is that essay and my aim here is to argue that the decline of independent Jewish student organising, and the rise of professionalised campus advocacy from the 1990s onward, was neither accidental nor the result of student apathy. I think it was a deliberate institutional shift that responded to real communal anxieties; and in doing so quietly dismantled one of the Jewish community’s most effective engines of leadership formation, political agency, and moral confidence.

The consequences of that decision are now becoming harder to ignore.

When Jewish Students Spoke for Themselves

In November 1969, hundreds of Jewish students descended uninvited on the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations in Boston. Shaped by the Six-Day War, the New Left, and the Black Power movement, they viewed the federation system as assimilationist, cautious, and structurally misaligned with Jewish continuity.[1]

They staged sit-ins, disrupted proceedings, cornered delegates, and demanded a reordering of communal priorities away from hospitals and social services and toward Jewish education, culture, and identity. When federation leadership offered the students ten minutes on the plenary stage in an attempt to restore order, the students chose Rabbi Hillel Levine; then a 23-year-old rabbinical student.

“College campuses are a spiritual wasteland for Jewish students,” Levine told the assembled leadership. “We want action and not delays. We want a change in the order of allocations, and we want more equitable representation in decision-making.”[2]

Those moments are often remembered as youthful theatre. They were not. They marked the beginning of a profound, if ultimately unfinished, experiment in Jewish student self-governance.

Out of that confrontation emerged the North American Jewish Students Appeal (NAJSA): a federation-funded but student-governed allocation body designed to support independent Jewish student organisations without controlling them. The arrangement was imperfect and often tense. NAJSA enforced reporting requirements, withheld funds for non-compliance, and mediated constant clashes between students and federations. But it institutionalised a radical idea: Jewish students had the right to organise independently, set their own priorities, and challenge communal power… while still receiving communal funding.

This was not symbolism. It was structure.

A Movement, Not a Program

Through NAJSA, a remarkably diverse ecosystem flourished.[3]

The North American Jewish Students Network (often known simply as NETWORK) coordinated national organising and communications. The Jewish Student Press Service functioned as a wire service for campus publications and later launched New Voices, explicitly committed to adversarial Jewish journalism. RESPONSE provided a forum for serious Jewish political and cultural thought. Yugntruf built a continent-spanning Yiddish cultural movement. Yavneh fought for religious rights on campus. And the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) mobilised tens of thousands of students into one of the most successful human-rights campaigns in modern Jewish history.

These organisations were ideologically diverse, argumentative, and often internally chaotic. What bound them together was not consensus, but democratic legitimacy: student governance, independence from professional control, and the assumption that Jewish students could (and should) speak in their own name.

Their impact was not theoretical. SSSJ was the first organisation in the world to mobilise in defence of Soviet Jews.[4][5] Long before the adult Jewish establishment rallied to the cause, students were protesting, lobbying Congress, sustaining public pressure, and forcing the issue into the centre of Jewish political life. When Natan Sharansky was freed in 1986, he chose to make his first public appearance in the West at a gathering of over 1,000 students organised by the World Union of Jewish Students in Jerusalem.[6]

“It was you, the Jewish students,” Sharansky told them, “who did not let them forget and who did not let them leave me in the Soviet Union. That’s why I’m here.”[7]

This was not hostility for its own sake. It was moral clarity coupled with organisational power.

Persistence, Protest, and Frustration

By the late 1980s, Jewish student activists were still fighting but the terrain had begun to shift.

At the 1987 General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations, in Florida, Jacob Davidson, an 18-year-old student activist from City College of New York, helped organise a protest that captured both the creativity and the desperation of the moment. Along with around 40 student leaders, he slipped 1,500 flyers under hotel doors overnight. Delegates awoke to a ransom note:

“We have your children. 

If you don’t want them back, continue to refuse to give them a Jewish education.”Signed: Assimilation.[1]

The stunt drew attention. It did not change power.

As Yosef Abramowitz wrote in 1991, reflecting on a decade of Jewish student activism, “poor students have no vote. No vote, no dollars. No dollars, no campus programming. No campus programming, no Jews.” Students made up roughly seven percent of the American Jewish population, yet controlled less than one ten-thousandth of one percent of communal funds.[1]

The passion remained. The leverage did not.

Lights in Action and the Limits of Independence

The story of Lights in Action illustrates both the promise and fragility of independent student organising.[8]

Founded in 1991 after Jewish students protested an antisemitic speaker at Columbia University, Lights in Action rejected reactive protest in favour of proactive Jewish creativity. Students worked from dorm rooms, mailed Torah materials to nearly 100,000 peers, ran pluralistic conferences, pioneered Israel trips, and created programming for students deliberately underserved by existing institutions; including queer Jews, interfaith Jews, artists, and social-justice activists.

At its height, Lights in Action operated on a budget of roughly $350,000, employed professional staff, and maintained a national footprint. Its work was student-designed, textually serious, and unapologetically pluralistic; including prayer spaces that creatively accommodated divergent religious practices.

Yet its success exposed a fatal tension. As Lights in Action professionalised to satisfy funder expectations, students gradually lost ownership. As larger institutions adopted and scaled the programming it had pioneered, the organisation struggled to articulate its distinct purpose. By 2001, facing expiring grants and lacking a strong core of student organisers, Lights in Action closed.

What endured was not the institution, but its alumni; many of whom went on to become Jewish educators, organisational leaders, rabbis, writers, and communal builders. This pattern repeated itself across the independent student ecosystem.

The Turn Toward Professionalisation

The decisive shift came in the early 1990s. The National Jewish Population Survey of 1990, which reported sharply rising intermarriage rates, triggered a crisis of continuity thinking across North American Jewish life.[9] Jewish college students became a strategic priority, but increasingly on institutional terms.

At the same time, Hillel was undergoing a genuine and necessary transformation. Long underfunded and uneven in quality, Hillel positioned itself as the solution to federations’ anxieties: a single, accountable, professionally administered framework capable of delivering campus services at scale.[10]

In 1995, the Council of Jewish Federations formally designated Hillel as “the central federation agency through which campus services are provided.” The consequences were immediate. Funding streams that had sustained NAJSA and its constituent organisations were cut. NAJSA folded that same year. Of its remaining constituents, only the Jewish Student Press Service survives today as a truly student driven operation.[11]

While some have argued that this was essentially a hostile takeover[11], while I believe it may have been experienced like this by Jewish student activists at the time, I don’t believe this was the intention at all. I think it was simply a rational institutional decision… one that, rightly or wrongly, prioritised coherence, accountability, and risk management over the innovation and dynamism that comes with truly grassroots student organising.

Hillel succeeded, and continues to succeed, on its own terms. Having worked within the Hillel movement for seven years, I have seen firsthand the depth of its commitment, the quality of its professionals, and the extraordinary impact it has on students’ lives. In Ontario today, where I am based, Hillel is now better funded than at any point in its history, and still FAR from having all that it needs.

This is certainly not an argument against Hillel. It is an argument against exclusivity.

What Was Lost

What disappeared was not just programming, but agency.

Independent student organisations trained young Jews to understand power by exercising it; to lose votes, build coalitions, confront elders, and live with consequences. Professionalised campus advocacy trains students to operate within parameters defined elsewhere: by donors, boards, institutional partnerships, and brand considerations.

Students moved from being representatives of peers to participants in services; from decision-makers to consultees. Leadership remained visible, but increasingly mediated.

Josh Nathan-Kazis captured the cost in 2007: “Without strong independent student voices, the vital tradition of the antagonistic Jewish student has gone missing from contemporary Jewish dialogue.”[11]

The Vacuum and the Risk

The absence of independent democratic structures has created a vacuum, one now being filled unevenly.

In recent years, explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish student groups have claimed to represent a “silent majority” supposedly suppressed by donor-driven institutions. This claim is rarely tested, because there is no legitimate mechanism to test it.

The danger here is not dissent. It is unaccountable representation.

The British experience offers a revealing contrast. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, far-left anti-Zionist candidates ran annually for the presidency of the Union of Jewish Students of the UK & Ireland. While there was hand-wringing from figures on the right of the Jewish community about the precedent this could set, each time, they were decisively defeated, receiving between 9 and 11 percent of the vote. By 2019, these efforts dissipated as democracy clarified reality.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]

In North America, the absence of comparable structures allows fringe claims to linger, not because they are persuasive, but because they are unverifiable.

Complementarity, Not Competition

Hillel does not need to be a democratic student union. Its strength lies precisely in its professional capacity, institutional relationships, and programmatic reach. But a healthy ecosystem cannot rely on a single model.

What the Jewish community once understood, and has forgotten, is how to fund independence without controlling it. NAJSA was messy, contentious, and inefficient. It was also essential.

Today, emerging efforts to rebuild Jewish student unions in the United States and Canada show promise. They will not succeed though, without serious philanthropic investment… not to compete with Hillel, but to complement it. Funding independent Jewish student life properly should not come at the expense of funding Hillel and other professionally run Jewish campus services properly. Both sides of the coin are necessary.

The independent Jewish student movement was never designed as a feeder system. And yet it produced an extraordinary range of Jewish leaders: Rabbi Avi Weiss, Malcolm Hoenlein, David Makovsky, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabba Sara Hurwitz, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, among many others, spanning the full ideological spectrum of Jewish life. That diversity is not incidental. It is the point.

The Cost of Forgetting

When the Jewish people stood at Sinai, the midrash teaches, G-d demanded guarantors before giving the Torah. Ancestors were insufficient. Prophets were insufficient. Only when the people offered their children did God agree.[19]

For much of the twentieth century, Jewish students demanded to be more than symbolic guarantors of continuity. They demanded to be builders.

The community agreed, albeit briefly, and then changed its mind.

We are living with that decision now.

References

1. Abramowitz, Yosef I. “The On-Going Abandonment of Jewish Students.” Baltimore Jewish Times, November 15, 1991.

2. Levine, Hillel. "To Share a Vision." Remarks presented at the General Luncheon Session, 38th General Assembly, Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Records of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, I-69, Box 400/Folder 12, Collection of the American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, MA, and New York, NY.

3. Records of the North American Jewish Students Appeal (NAJSA/APPEAL). American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/5687

4. Kalman, Matthew. The Kids Are Alright: Chapters in the History of the World Union of Jewish Students. London: World Union of Jewish Students, 1987, Page 39. https://www.wujs.org.il/down-for-maintenance 

5. Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ). Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/student-struggle-for-soviet-jewry-sssj

6. Kalman, Matthew. The Kids Are Alright: Chapters in the History of the World Union of Jewish Students. London: World Union of Jewish Students, 1987, Page 104. https://www.wujs.org.il/down-for-maintenance 

7. Kalman, Matthew. The Kids Are Alright: Chapters in the History of the World Union of Jewish Students. London: World Union of Jewish Students, 1987, Page 2. https://www.wujs.org.il/down-for-maintenance 

8. Thrope, Samuel. “Lights Inactive.” New Voices, April 17, 2002. https://newvoices.org/2002/04/17/0063-2/

9. 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS 1990). Mandell L. Berman Institute – North American Jewish Data Bank. https://www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/search-results/study/885

10. Rosen, Mark I. The Remaking of Hillel: A Case Study on Leadership and Organizational Transformation. Fisher-Bernstein Institute for Jewish Philanthropy and Leadership, Brandeis University, January 13, 2006. https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/report/The-Remaking-of-Hillel-A-Case/9923925791501921

11. Nathan-Kazis, Josh. “Treat Jewish Students Like the Adults That They Are.” The Jewish Daily Forward, December 19, 2007. https://forward.com/opinion/12298/treat-jewish-students-like-the-adults-that-they-ar-00999/

12. Peled, Daniella. “Israeli-Born BDS Supporter Vies to Head Britain’s Jewish Student Union.” Haaretz, December 5, 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2016-12-05/ty-article/.premium/israeli-born-bds-supporter-vies-to-head-u-k-jewish-student-union/0000017f-f7a6-d47e-a37f-ffbeaddb0000

13. Speyer, Lea. “Radical BDS Activist Running for President of Britain’s Top Jewish Student Group Has ‘Definite Chance of Winning,’ Expert Says.” The Algemeiner, December 1, 2016.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/12/01/radical-bds-activist-running-for-president-of-britains-top-jewish-student-group-has-definite-chance-of-winning-expert-says/

14. Sugarman, Daniel. “Pro-BDS Candidate Fails as Josh Holt Elected UJS President.” The Jewish Chronicle, December 12, 2016.https://www.thejc.com/news/pro-bds-candidate-fails-as-josh-holt-elected-ujs-president-ag53r72c

15. “Meet the Candidates Vying to Be the Next UJS President.” Jewish News, November 30, 2017.https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/meet-the-candidates-vying-the-next-ujs-president/

16. “Hannah Rose Wins Union of Jewish Students Presidential Election.” Jewish News, December 11, 2017.https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/hannah-rose-wins-union-of-jewish-students-presidential-election/

17. Phillips, Joanna. “OPINION – #UJSElects: I’m the Scary Anti-Zionist Running for UJS President.” Jewish News, December 5, 2018.https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-ujselects-im-the-scary-anti-zionist-running-for-ujs-president/

18. “Esther Offenberg Is UJS President 2019-2020.” Union of Jewish Students, December 9, 2018.https://www.ujs.org.uk/esther_offenberg_is_ujs_president 

19. Midrash Tanchuma, Vayigash, Siman 2. Sefaria. https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Vayigash.2.2