Young Adults Channel

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Organizations

Visit JPhilanthropy.com

A new initiative of the Manuel D. and Rhoda Mayerson Foundation, and in partnership with Jewish Family & Life!, JPhilanthropy.com is a set of tools and forums that will help the field of Jewish teen philanthropy grow and deepen in its practices, and encourage Jewish teens in North America to get involved in tzedakah and giving.

It Takes Insight to Work within the Jewish Community

Is there a way for recent Jewish college graduates to sample work in the Jewish non-profit sector before choosing their career path? Yes! Insight, The Schusterman Fellowship for Jewish Community, provides a two-year experiential learning/leadership opportunity for 8 young professionals with diverse Jewish backgrounds and interests. Insight Fellows, based in NYC or Washington D.C., participate in 3 project placements, a service learning tikkun olam component, a trip to Israel, and more. Online applications for Insight close February 8, 2008. Apply now.

Short-Term Israel Programs

Spend the Summer Enjoying Bustling Tel Aviv While Giving Back to the Community: Sign Up for YJ's Amirim 2008

Amirim is Young Judaea's Summer Volunteering Program for college students and young professionals (18-35). Volunteer at a non-profit organization; explore the Israeli landscape through camping, hiking, and weekly group trips; discover Israeli life through educational and cultural events; and share an apartment in or around lively Tel Aviv with other North Americans or Israelis. Make a difference, and continue your connection with Israel. For registration and more information, email info@yjimpact.org; call 212.303-4585; or download the Amirim Application

Jewish Community Steps In After Virginia Tech Massacre

The national Jewish community is helping Jewish college students at Virginia Tech and in the surrounding town Blacksburg after the horrific shootings that took 32 lives. The Virginia Tech Hillel is receiving emergency donations from a variety of organizations, providing services for the university's 1,400 Jewish students. United Jewish Communities has paid for grief counseling: a major concern is a delayed reaction to the traumatic event.

Jewish and Israeli Young Adults Volunteer for Change

Apples and Honey, an initiative of Brit Olam (World Alliance) which unites Israeli and Jewish young adults in volunteering for the welfare and the advancement of communities in need, is an eight month program that provides an opportunity for young adult members of the world Jewish community, to connect with Judaism and Israel through volunteering for social change. The participants experience life in the Galilee Region, participate in a period of meaningful, full-time volunteer service in Israel, study international development issues, learn to solve conflicts and, in collaboration with the American Jewish World Service, have the option to become a volunteer working in developing communities around the world.

Want to explore Israel this summer?

You’re looking to get to know Israel beyond the windows of the bus and loudspeaker overhead. You want to see Israel in depth and learn about its challenges as a modern Jewish Democratic State. You want to explore this amazing country. Whether you are a student or just graduated. Whether you've already been to Israel or it’s your first time.

You want to join THIS trip to Israel. It’s like nothing you've done before!

For more information… e-mail josh@melitz.org.il

Jewish Coalition for Service

Volunteer abroad or in the U.S. Make a difference, pursue social change, have a real impact. You may build a school in Ghana or pursue social change in NY, Boston, or Chicago. Integrate organic farming and social justice in rural Connecticut. Teach new immigrants in Israel or build new programs in a re-emerging Jewish community in Ukraine. You can deepen your connection with the world in a variety of programs that last anywhere from a week to a summer, a year, or more. And you can do something else that is invaluable: you can help show the Jewish community’s solidarity and concern with people in crisis all over the world. The Jewish Coalition for Service is the right place to look when you’re looking to volunteer full-time. For up-to-date information about dozens of programs visit http://www.jewishservice.org/volunteer.html. The mission of the Jewish Coalition is to inspire everyone in the Jewish community to dedicate a part of their lives to full-time, hands-on volunteer work.

Weinberg Tzedek Hillel

Weinberg Tzedek Hillel, an international public service effort sponsored by Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, is dedicated to transforming life on campus and in the community.

Framed by the Jewish imperatives of tzedakah (righteousness), gemilut chasadim (acts of loving kindness), and tikkun olam (repair of the world), Weinberg Tzedek Hillel engages and empowers students in meaningful public service and encourages creative thinking when addressing social justice issues. In the process of bringing about meaningful social change, participants grow intellectually and spiritually.

Hillel Demands Sanctions against Iran

Hillel recently presented Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) with 12,000 signatures petitioning Congress, Europe, and the U.N. to support sanctions against Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is a Holocaust denier who has repeatedly called for the end of Israel. Lantos has personal ties to Hillel: In 1947 the Jewish campus organization sponsored his immigration to America from Hungary, when he was a “penniless survivor of the Holocaust.”

Log on to New Web Site to End Campus Anti-Semitism

Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, reports that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has recently launched a Web site to help end college campus anti-Semitism, which has been on the rise. The site is designed to educate college kids and to urge victims or witnesses to report anti-Semitic incidents. Become an accurate information resource and help stop racism on college campuses now!

ADAMAH: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship

A three month leadership training program for Jewish young adults, ages 20-29, that integrates organic farming, sustainable living, Jewish learning, and more. Participants live together at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in northwest Connecticut.

Jewish InterAction

Jewish InterAction provides an avenue for people in their early 20s and early 30s to get involved in the Jewish Community. JI offers diverse programming in social justice, Jewish learning, and personal enrichment.

Jewish Organizing Initiative, Boston, MA

JOI recruits young Jewish adults from all over the world for a year of leadership training that includes: working for social and economic justice, Jewish learning, training in grass roots community organizing skills, and Jewish community building. The fellowship year involves work in social justice community or labor organizations, generally in low-income community organizations, (sometimes in the Jewish community) and weekly learning and reflection about organizing for justice, Judaism and community building.

Union of Progressive Zionists: Activists for Peace in Israel

The Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ) provides a voice for progressive, liberal Jewish students across North America who are working to transform the campus debate on Israel/Palestine into a reasoned and civil discourse.

Articles and Book Reviews

Hillel’s Alternative Break in Israel:
Transforming, Inspiring, Interactive

“I wanted to see a side of Israel that Taglit-Birthright Israel does not show,” Marcelo said. “I don’t think it our job to change the world but to change it a little bit. As we say in Spanish, ‘We were able to put in our little grain of sand.’”
—Marcelo David (Student from Uruguay)

Inside a nursery school in an underprivileged neighborhood in Haifa, a group of children whose parents are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia were singing songs in Hebrew, their first exposure to the language and to the broader Jewish community. Outside the school, another form of global Jewish social action was taking place. College students from North and South America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union were working together to repaint the school building, clean up the garden, and replace its rusted fence. These volunteer helping hands, and many more (120), were recently part of Hillel’s Alternative Break in Israel program (contact abisrael@hillel.org with questions). Read about their life-changing experiences. They made a difference and so can you.

Young Reform Jews More Into Ritual, Still Committed to Improving the World

A new online survey of active Reform Jews reveals a younger generation more comfortable with Jewish ritual observance (despite the fact that 19 percent of the under-40 group surveyed grew up in intermarried homes) but as committed as its elders to social justice causes and tikkun olam. More than 95 percent of the respondents — young and old alike — said that “leading an ethical life,” “making the world a better place” and “celebrating Jewish holidays” were important parts of being Jewish.

Thumbs Down! When Nice Jewish Boys Aren’t So Nice: Dating Violence on Campus

“Dating violence is more prevalent on college campuses than many people think,” says Rella Kaplowitz, a program specialist at Jewish Women International (JWI). “And it doesn’t just refer to physical abuse." Sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse can be just as damaging. Disturbingly, 1 in 5 college students admits being abused by a current partner. JWI offers programming tailored for Jewish teens and young adults entitled “When Push Comes to Shove…It’s No Longer Love!”

SocialAction.com Recommends a New Resource:
"Just: Judaism. Action. Social Change."

PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life have partnered in launching "Just: Judaism. Action. Social Change," a new interactive educational resource for Jewish service-learning. Not just a website, not just a book, not just a curriculum, not just a resource guide, and not just a "how to" manual, Just is a set of thought-provoking textual resources, discussion questions, and planning exercises related to social action and community service -- all viewed through a Jewish lens. Just resources are available online, free of charge, at www.justaction.org, or order a print copy. For more information, contact Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, PANIM, at 301-770-5070, ext. 212.

A Hard-Won Coexistence

By CAROLYN SLUTSKY

Guess Who is Coming to Dinner, at a kosher cafeteria at NYU? Muslim and Jewish students eat, live, argue, and coexist together.

They met while volunteering to rebuild homes in New Orleans post-Katrina. Now 15 Muslim and 15 Jewish university students in New York City are getting to know each other better, through "gritty conversations that ended in frustration along with hope," by spending quality time together. Read more about this unlikely but burgeoning coexistence between Muslims and Jewish young adults, where the foundation is first and foremost mutual respect.

Building Identity, One Roof at a Time

By MICHELLE LACKIE

Tzedek, or social justice, work is not just an expression of Jewish identity; it also can be an entry point to Jewish identity. Michelle Lackie is director of the Weinberg Tzedek Program at Hillel.

Crisis in Sudan

This campus organizing toolkit, prepared by the American Jewish World Service for use by Weinberg Tzedek Hillel, provides essential information for successfully organizing students on your college campus.

Jewish Activism and United Students Against Sweatshops

By JESS CHAMPAGNE

The author describes the difference between the Jewish role in the student anti-sweatshop movement today and that of the same age played in the early 20th-century movement.

A Young Woman Describes Her Empowering Internship

By ALLISON LAUTERBACH

A volunteer at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice chooses role models in the work world.

Book review: The Jewish 1960s

Reviewed by DAVID MOGOLOV

American cultural and political movements in the 1960s both contributed to and were derived from the swirl and cry of the Jewish community.

JCUA Urban Mitzvah Corps 2006 Comes To a Close

Thirteen college students from around the country participated in the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA)’s Urban Mitzvah Corps program. The week’s programming included hands-on service work, issue advocacy, and community organizing training.

What Makes a Motivator?

By MOLLY FINK

“I am not just an activist; I am a fighter. I am fighting for the people in Darfur as a Jew, as an American, and as a human being.” Molly Fink tells what works for her in Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, www.shma.com.