JCC leaders convene to fight Jew hatred

Given the unassailable fact that antisemitism is oozing through the sewer caps and asserting its aboveground presence in modern American life, and also given the fact that Jewish community centers are places where both Jews and non-Jews gather to learn, grow, socialize, relax, and generally enjoy themselves, it makes sense that people fighting antisemitism have chosen to work with JCC leaders to counter it.

Last month, the JCC Association of North America partnered with Brandeis University and Boundless Israel — a nonprofit chartered, as its website, boundlessisrael.org, says, to fight antisemitism through education, honesty, and courage — to offer two leaders from JCCs across the country a four-day intensive seminar called “Navigating Israel and the Rise of Antisemitism.”

To participate, JCCs had to send a two-person delegation to the seminar, and one of them had to be the JCC’s CEO.

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The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly was represented by CEO Steve Rogers and chief engagement officer Sue Gelsey; JCC MetroWest’s delegation was CEO Eric H. Koehler and Katy Strulson, its director of community engagement.

There were about 25 JCCs from across the country represented at the seminar, Mr. Rogers said; each delegation had its CEO there. All the CEOs are Jewish; almost all of the other representatives, who held a range of positions, most of them C-suite, were Jewish as well.

“In a nutshell, the point of the program was equipping senior executives at JCCs with things we can do in a world of increasing antisemitism,” Mr. Rogers said.

The program was intensive and academic, featuring lectures with short breaks in between. It did not allow for much socializing. Topics included “the history of antisemitism, how do you talk about antisemitism, and how you deal with a world in which there are people that don’t realize that they’re being antisemitic even as they are being antisemitic,” Mr. Rogers said.

Those discussions inevitably moved from antisemitism to criticism of Israel, and the permeable barriers between those two states of mind. “We heard talks about why anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that criticism of the Israeli government isn’t necessarily antisemitism,” Mr. Rogers continued. Those positions were described through the murky gauze of personal assumptions.

But basic Zionism, as hard as that is to explain and categorize, was at the foundation of the program. “They did a good job of being educational and unbiased, but at the end of the day, out of the 12 faculty members, 11 were staunch Zionists and the other one is…” Mr. Rogers paused. “The other one is not anti-Zionist,” he said.

Another part of the program focused on leadership, Mr. Rogers continued; not just Jewish leadership, but leadership in general. “It was about exercising leadership in troubled times, and there was some leadership training that was unrelated to the specific issue,” he said.

Several seminars touched on “constructive dialogue in the workplace. Even here, in the Kaplen JCC in Bergen County, in Teaneck, in Brooklyn, in Monsey” — all deeply Jewish places — “there are people, including numerous employees of Jewish institutions, who have no idea about the details.” That is, details about Jewish life, both in its depth and its range; and about the news involving Jews that they might hear with one ear attuned to something else at the same time. “I have plenty of people on staff who only see Israelis killing innocent babies in Gaza. We have to figure out how to have constructive dialogues in the workplace.”

Some of the speakers at the meeting focused on relations between Jews and other groups, particularly Black and Latino communities, and on the relations between different parts of the Jewish world.

The impetus behind the program was Dr. Rachel Fish, “one of the preeminent scholars on antisemitism in the country,” Mr. Rogers said. Dr. Fish has a long list of impressive credentials; the bio on her website, rachelfish.com, introduces her as “Scholar. Warrior.” Mr. Rogers, Ms. Gelsey, Mr. Koehler, and Ms. Strulson all raved about her teaching, her scholarship and depth of knowledge, her passion for combatting antisemitism, and her charisma.

At the end of the program, the focus shifted to action steps.

“My biggest concern is K-12 education, and particularly the upper end of that range,” Mr. Rogers said. “I worry that we are not equipping our kids to go off to college. Organizations like Birthright, Hillel, and Chabad all do good work, but that’s too late in the system for many kids. We have to teach kids when they’re 14, 15, 16, 17. That’s why I’m such a big fan of the national Maccabi Games — also run by the JCC Association.” The combination of fun and education, which naturally give teenage participants pride about being Jewish, teach with a light touch.

“I love the model of this program,” Ms. Gelsey said. The model — two participants from each JCC, and one must be the CEO — “is so smart. If there’s just one, it’s not going to be the CEO, who usually doesn’t implement programs anyway.”

JCCs are the most logical institutions in the Jewish world to counter antisemitism, Ms. Gelsey said. “That’s because we already engage more non-Jews than other institutions. One-third of the people who walk through our doors are not Jewish.” That percentage varies across the country and is dependent on local demographics. “Some JCCs have as many as 75 or 80 percent non-Jews,” she said. People come for the health and wellness facilities; they also come for the early childhood and summer camp programs. JCCs tend to run excellent programs, and communities recognize that.

It’s not like going to a synagogue; non-Jews usually do that only if they have Jews in the family or are invited to a simcha. Otherwise, they steer clear.

That’s because “of all the Jewish spaces, the JCC is the space of joy,” Ms. Gelsey said. “People don’t come to us for the hard things. They come to enjoy themselves. We want to keep ourself in that place. So how do we engage in the really important work” — fighting antisemitism — “and maintain our identity as a place of Jewish joy?”

Although he dutifully went to the program, Mr. Koehler at first harbored doubts about how effective it would be. But his experience far outstripped his expectations. “I am an avid reader, and I thought that I was pretty well informed about antisemitism,” he said. “I thought I really didn’t need to go.

“And then, when I got there, I found out that I wasn’t really that well informed.”

Not only did the workshops help Mr. Koehler and Ms. Strulson consider new ways to counter antisemitism, it also allowed them to assist Brandeis with its research. “When we start doing an activity, we will reach out to Brandeis,” Ms. Strulson said. “Brandeis will help us design a way to collect the data from the activity, and we’ll send it back to them.”

All four local leaders came away with an understanding of how the words used to describe the hatred of Jews can influence speakers’ and listeners’ understanding of the phenomenon. Antisemitism is a bland word, antiseptic in affect; it was created by an antisemitic German scholar to have precisely the lulling effect that it frequently creates. How bad can antisemitism be?

Jew-hatred is blunt. It is, as Ms. Gelsey said, hard to say. It is uncompromising. It is ugly. It is straightforward. And it makes clear that it is something to be fought, not accommodated. It is a phrase they will try to use, at least some of the time.

All four will try to make whatever changes they can. “We should not feel hopeless or helpless,” Mr. Koehler said. “A small act is better than no act at all. Sometimes people feel that they are uneducated” — in Jewish matters, that is — “and because they know so little, there’s nothing that they can do.

“But we all have the capacity to do something.

“As Pirkei Avot” — Ethics of the Fathers — “tells us, we don’t have to complete the task, but we are not free not to begin it.

“That is our mantra. We want to take steps. We want to bring in the right strategic partners to make movement happen. We will be in this for the long game.”

“This is a priority for us,” Ms. Strulson said. “We can’t sit back. This is something we have to focus on. We have to take baby steps and we have to push forward.”