Hillel professionals “did not go into Jewish education to win a Kafkaesque “color war” mapped onto complex geopolitical realities”

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Our colleagues working at Hillels around the country are talented, and they are driven to do their work by a passion for the big questions of identity, belonging and meaning. They did not go into Jewish education to win a Kafkaesque “color war” mapped onto complex geopolitical realities; they went into this line of work to shape lives and help inform life decisions. To describe them as deployed as ‘the front line in a battle’, to think of our responsibility as to supply them the weaponry of talking points to be used in a fundamentally unwinnable battle of ideas – this approach and these resources implicitly call into question their ability as professionals to manage nuance, shepherd conversation, steward sophistication, and model a form of leadership that will enable Jewish life to arise above the gutter to which it is being dragged.


Yehuda Kurtzer, “For Israel engagement on campus: Coaches, not cheerleaders”, The Times of Israel (11 September 2014) [http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/coaches-not-cheerleaders/]

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