Empowering parents of Jewish college students

“There is no place that is immune from any kind of antisemitism,” Logan Levkoff said. “Not every campus is going to look like the University of Pennsylvania or Columbia, thankfully. But things arise — whether it’s a professor, whether it’s a student, whether it’s graffiti on a campus, things happen — so we have to be honest about that and prepare our kids accordingly.”

Dr. Levkoff specializes in uncomfortable conversations. She will be one of three speakers at a panel the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey is offering to parents of current and soon-to-be college students on October 30. (See below.) The program, “Contemporary Challenge to Jewish Campus Life,” will focus on resources available to students, students’ rights, and how parents can support their children on campus.

Dr. Levkoff’s path to working with difficult conversations did not start with Judaism or Zionism or combatting antisemitism. She has a Ph.D. in human sexuality, marriage, and family life education from New York University and is a sexuality educator with a focus on child and adolescent sexuality and parent child communication.

So she has expertise in parenting and in talking about complicated issues, she said. “A few years ago, what I started to see was that the difficult conversations that needed to be taking place were actually around Judaism and around Zionism and about how to create a next generation of fearless, proud Jews.”

She came to that realization, in part, through her family’s experience. Dr. Levkoff’s son, who is now in college, “was at a very progressive independent high school just outside of Manhattan, and four years in a row, we had to experience and fight back on all of the antisemitism, masked as anti-Zionism, blatant and covert, that we are seeing on college campuses,” she said. “So we had lots of expertise in dealing with it, and navigating it, and using our networks, and creating resilient kids.” Her daughter now is at a different high school.

“This is a moment in time where parents are concerned about what is taking place on campuses,” Dr. Levkoff continued. “How do we prepare kids for what they may experience? What do our young people need to know? She will focus on the parenting aspect of these questions. “How do we instill pride? How do we use our networks? How do we have the tough conversations and give our kids the tools so that they can push back when they need to? Because the reality is, in some way, shape, or form, they will need to.

“The interesting piece of this is that the tools to help people have difficult conversations around sexuality are really no different than how we prepare kids for these conversations as they relate to Judaism and Zionism,” Dr. Levkoff said. “Whether it’s about listening, whether it’s about admitting our own vulnerabilities, gathering facts, recognizing when we perhaps have dropped the ball, or modeling for our kids how to take charge, how to feel pride, how to have a backbone.

“For me, one of the most important things in raising the next generation of strong, proud Jews is that resilience isn’t the default setting for our kids. We have to model it for them. The reason some of us have kids who stand up proudly and fight back, even when the stakes are high, is because they know they have an entire community, starting with the people who love them, who have their backs.”

The difficult conversations Dr. Levkoff envisions include both talks between parents and their children about the climate on campuses as well as those students are likely to have with professors and other students on campus. “In this moment in time, people are understanding that antisemitism is real, it exists, and it is emboldened,” she said. “And it is emboldened on all sides of the political spectrum. This isn’t a right or left issue. It’s everywhere, and it always has been.”

It may have been harder to see before October 7, she added, “but I think that there was a global awakening of Jewry post October 7. So there is that uncomfortable conversation. And that maybe we have raised our kids in environments that are fairly sheltered, and they are going to go out into the world and realize that maybe there are some assumptions that are going to be made about them, and maybe they don’t have the language for fighting back in some way, or responding in some way.

“Even a difficult conversation, like what happens if and when a professor fails you on an assignment because they don’t like your political stance on Israel, which, I will tell you, I have seen happen personally and professionally many times. And having strategies for how to navigate that. Or if a speaker is coming to campus, who are the sources you go to in order to help strengthen your community?

“Which, by the way, we are seeing on campuses all the time now, which is incredible. The movement of young Jewish student leaders on college campuses who are saying no, who are fighting back, who are creating their own events and movements and using the power of social media to get their stories across, it’s really extraordinary. Young Jewish leaders today are heroes. And we see that all over.”

Are these difficult conversations about Israel, or are they about antisemitism? Or are they the same thing? “This is certainly a conversation about antisemitism, with the caveat that Israel is a part of our history, and oftentimes, in an attempt to not use the term Jew, people will use the term Zionist,” Dr. Levkoff said. “We can’t disconnect Israel from this because Israel is very much a part of this conversation, but certainly October 7 and its aftermath proved to the world that Israel is just the first step.

“This has never been about Israel. This global fight is about Jewry.”

Aviva Zucker Snyder, a campus support director at Hillel International, also will appear on the panel. She hopes to help parents learn more about the resources available to support Jewish life on campus for students, and to help parents feel better equipped to support their student on their academic and personal journeys.

“Many Jewish parents and high school and college students have been reflecting on the past year and have a lot of questions about what it means to be Jewish in a post-October 7 college environment,” Ms. Snyder said. “Everything from campus culture to choosing a school has taken on different meaning.” The panel is designed to help “students and parents consider the nuance of these issues and make more informed decisions.”

Jake Davidson, an attorney and a member of the Jewish Bar Association of New Jersey, is another panelist. He will talk about student rights and what resources they can use to enforce those rights, whether they have issues with administrators, educators, or other students. Mr. Davidson also will discuss how to use those resources to make complaints, whether internally — through the university’s administrators, its complaint process, or the campus police — or externally — to municipal police, or in some instances, to the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights.

The Jewish Bar Association of New Jersey is in the process of completing an online student resource bulletin that details the resources available to students and the complaint process at each university in the state, Mr. Davidson added. “When students are experiencing the kind of tumultuousness we have seen over the last year on their campus, and it is interrupting their ability to study and feel safe,” the resource bulletin is a central location that clearly explains what they need to know. It has information about what type of speech or behavior is not considered protected speech or activity, about each school’s own rules and complaint procedures, and about how to complete and file a complaint.”

While Mr. Davidson will be focusing on New Jersey resources, he expects the presentation to be helpful for parents with students studying in other states as well. The Jewish Bar Association of New Jersey’s focus is, of course, New Jersey, he said, but “the basic premise of students’ rights on campus, and the compact between universities, which have a duty to keep students safe and provide an environment in which they can learn and socialize and engage in safe, protected, peaceful protest, and students, and our federal and state laws and commonsense notions of right and wrong, are not confined to the boundaries of New Jersey.”

Mr. Davidson hopes the program will help parents and students become better informed about their rights and feel empowered to get help enforcing them when necessary.

Dr. Levkoff sees the panel helping parents feel empowered to have important and necessary conversations. She wants them to feel “that even if these are not conversations that they’ve had before, that they have the ability to do so,” she said. “That they can actually think a little bit differently and more critically about how they help their kids to make decisions about what comes next in terms of their academic life and how they help their kids prepare for what they might encounter.

“And there is no right or wrong decision. There are some kids who really want to be in a place where they can put these skills to the test, and some who absolutely don’t. This is an opportunity for conversations about who our kids are and who they would like to be in a campus setting. There are some kids who are going to want to be a lightning rod and some kids who are going to say, I want to do what’s right, but I don’t need to be in the middle all the time. Maybe I want to be in a calmer campus environment, in a place where I can just be an emerging adult, trying to figure it out.

“These are tough conversations to have,” Dr. Levkoff concluded. “But we need to use the opportunity that we have. A giant alarm has woken us all up, so this is our moment. And I say this very proudly.

“Our existence as a Jewish people is a miracle. We have thrived and survived for thousands of years, despite having all the odds stacked against us, so we were made for this moment. We know there’s a problem, so this is on us now; now we deal with it, and we can do it.

“The goal is to help students to feel empowered, to feel a sense of pride, to feel a sense of agency over who they are.”

Who: Jake Davidson, Dr. Logan Levkoff, and Aviva Zucker Snyder

What: Will talk about “Contemporary Challenge to Jewish Campus Life” on a panel for the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey

When: Wednesday October 30, 7-9 p.m.

Where: Address given upon registration

Register at: jfnnj.org/challenge

How much: It’s free