What’s the Matter with Hillel?

Since its founding in 1923, Hillel has become the most important Jewish campus organization in America and abroad, with a presence on more than 800 campuses across the world. Its programs and leadership are central to campus Jewish life and, looked at a certain way, reflect the broader failure of colleges to educate students these days. Hillel was established on the premise that Jews themselves need to take responsibility for Jewish prospering by participating in cultural events and social programs and by being intellectually challenged in in-depth classes and seminars. The organization also sought to respond to campus antisemitism and to prevent it from spreading in America, as explained in a 1945 brochure:

It is important to remember that in European lands, anti-Semites never failed to utilize the universities. These became hotbeds of fanatical race hatred and nationalist terrorism, often stimulated by the professors themselves. […] The lesson must not be lost here.

As the past two years have made painfully clear, that lesson has been lost, with too many professors in America now stimulating hatred towards Jews or excusing it. A piece by the actress Mayim Bialik in the Atlantic illustrates the problem by noting that Hillel centers have become a regular target on American campuses.

Hillel centers have become a regular target on American campuses. At an event for incoming freshmen at Baruch College, for instance, Jewish students were harassed by people shouting references to recently murdered Hamas hostages, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. “Where’s Hersh, you ugly-a*** b****?” shouted one of these monsters at a Jewish student. At Hunter College in Manhattan, a sign was found depicting an assault rifle and a symbol targeting Hillel. There is no question that Jewish students—including those attending Hillel events—have endured horrendous things in the past two years. A separate question, however, is whether those students still find what they need at Hillel.

A separate question, however, is whether Jewish students still find what they need at Hillel. Earlier this month, Northwestern Hillel invited Pamela Nadell to speak as an expert on campus antisemitism. Nadell, a professor at American University, is probably best known for sitting beside Claudine Gay during the now-infamous congressional hearing at which university presidents refused to affirm that calling for genocide against Jews violated campus conduct codes. Instead of confronting the hostility directed at Jewish students, Nadell’s testimony that day spoke of “nuance,” “complexity,” and the need to avoid “overbroad definitions” of antisemitism—phrases that sounded less like a call to conscience than a defense of bureaucratic restraint. Her words echoed the caution of the university presidents beside her, transposing what should have been an unequivocal defense of Jewish dignity into an abstract exercise in procedural liberalism. Ultimately, there is not much “expertise” left if an antisemitism expert is unable to recognize the problem sitting right next to her, as the rest of the world did. “Could I ever have predicted the fallout from that hearing?” Nadell later asked rhetorically in an interview. “Absolutely not. There was no way.”

In a recent article in Minding the Campus, I noted how inadequately Hillel has generally responded to rising Jew-hatred. During the severe outbreak in the spring of 2024, for example, Boston University’s Hillel sought its first-ever “director of wellness” to provide “wellness education” for Jewish students

in the areas of wellness, mental health, and counseling. This professional will … install a wellness strategy at one of the world’s largest Hillels. This will include priorities such as: wellness focused retreats, Jewish learning wellness classes, student-led wellness education events/programming, and more. Each part of what we do will be woven into the ecosystem of wellness.

At the same time, Hillel was searching for a wellness director to serve at USC, wellness support for Queens College, and a mental-health professional for Emory—but no new employees for legal advice, Krav Maga, or any other form of self-defense.

In a subsequent piece in Commentary, Josh Tolle went even further, describing his former employer as “in crisis, farther from its roots than it has ever been,” and “undermined by the excesses of progressivism, which [have] chipped away at American Jewry’s sense of self and its basic will to survive.” Though Tolle sees renewed Jewish passion on campus after October 7, he is troubled by what students now encounter at Hillel centers across the country:

As academia became increasingly hostile—to the American project, to religion generally, and to Jews in particular—many Hillel leaders accommodated their peers on campus by embracing their ideas. […] The truth is that the ideas animating the anti-Israel movement—social justice, decolonization, DEI—have become entrenched among Hillel’s top staff and made the core of its organizational outlook.

Even senior employees of Hillel, argues Tolle’s piece, seem at times shockingly uninformed about and even hostile towards Israel. I recently asked Hillel about these assessments. The response came from an external PR firm that declined to comment but directed me to a press release that speaks of “click-bait claims.” Hillel is “proudly Zionist,” the release reads, as well as the “clear leader” in fighting antisemitism on campus.

Even senior employees of Hillel seem at times shockingly uninformed about and even hostile towards Israel. The first of those claims can be seen, presumably, in the organization’s Israel Fellows program. Indeed, for more than two decades, that program has brought young Israelis to campuses across North America to give students a more realistic understanding of their country. By reading their current profiles, one concludes that many Israel Fellows are of Ethiopian descent or are openly gay—a strategy that makes sense given the chickens-for-KFC red-green alliance that has taken hold of North American campuses. The reality of Israel’s liberal and diverse society disproves progressive students’ severe misconceptions about the Middle East. Tolle’s interviews, however, indicate that, in practice, Israel Fellows are less likely to share their experiences with students, often feel like mere props for donors, and are discouraged from offering serious educational programming such as history classes or Hebrew practice. Hillel calls Tolle’s conclusions “misleading anecdotes.”

I, on the other hand, wonder why the organization isn’t investing more in actual education. Probably what is at play here are two fundamentally different ideas about the college experience. Hillel’s statement may be a genuine act of self-perception, not just PR, if they have begun with the assumption that Nadell is an antisemitism expert and that Jews on campus need nothing so much as wellness education. I, on the other hand, wonder why the organization isn’t investing more in actual education, such as language training. After all, learning a second language can benefit one’s well-being more than any of Hillel’s spa treatments. It allows one to think through problems from a new perspective, providing emotional distance. Words can lose their intensity, enabling more rational reflection, or capture subtle feelings more precisely.

For example, learning English allows a Hebrew speaker to conceptualize a feeling such as “awkward,” which has no exact equivalent in Hebrew. Social discomfort is expressed as lo na’im (“not pleasant”) or mevich (“embarrassing”), terms that are more situational and lack the generality of “awkward.” Similarly, a German speaker can distinguish, in English, “happiness” from “luck.” This principle applies to culture in general: It safeguards mental stability. No wonder that, with the erosion of culture in Western societies, mental struggles have increased—struggles that people now seek to address by acting out, via “wellness,” or in therapy, especially at American colleges.

Tolle’s piece in Commentary further describes an ideological takeover “by a confused progressivism that is basically supra-Jewish.” In the words of one of Tolle’s interviewees, “Sometimes I feel like there’s no standard of what Jewish is.” At Berkeley Hillel, for example, the organization calls itself a “community garden for the spirit” where “students continually redefine their relationship with Judaism.” I observed this do-it-yourself phenomenon several years ago, myself, and termed it Zen Judaism. In my book of the same title, I provide several examples: Arizona State University’s Hillel offered mindfulness meditation and a “yoga class under the sukkah,” while Brown University’s Hillel organized a “Jewishly inspired meditation.” At Stanford, the former director of Jewish life and learning promotes a Zen rebrand of Judaism. He recorded guided meditations on different apps so people could practice Judaism’s “strong emphasis on the experience of being in each moment.”

This is in no way a critique of Buddhism but a concern about miseducation. A Judaism experienced through meditation apps at home, with minimal engagement with other people and with the clear aim of suppressing thoughts, becomes unrecognizable. Hillel is not educating here but reshaping one of the oldest traditions of the world. Jewish learning requires students to experience the richness of their culture and the insights of millennia of traditions and rituals. No wonder it fits so well with higher education. Both help young people develop a stable identity—something formed in relation to others, not through spa treatments or mindfulness-meditation apps.

Hillel’s choice of guest speakers further demonstrates a hands-off, anything-goes approach to Jewish education. Among these is Michael Twitty, an author who converted to Judaism (ironically right before his Birthright trip) and who smeared Jews as “annoyingly stubborn” and an “exhausting set of people.” In his book Koshersoul, he portrays Judaism as a vessel one can fill with whatever one wishes: “Bring it to the runway or be drag kings on Purim—you can create the observance and engagement you want or need if it isn’t right there already.”

Jewish learning requires students to experience the richness of their culture and the insights of millennia of traditions and rituals. As inclusive and fun as this approach may be, it is inconsistent with how any culture transmits knowledge and tradition. Moreover, students’ well-being comes from developing connections to their peers, not from focusing on what “you want, what you need” at community events. Hillel’s guest-speaker selection also recalls an observation Naya Lekht makes in Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership. She warns of a form of education that is “woke in content, Jewish in form.”

The beauty of Judaism lies in the moral code it offers the world, not in progressive advocacy. Hillel’s institutional priorities tell a similar story. Each year, the Hillel International General Assembly presents an Exemplar of Excellence Award to employees “whose remarkable passion and outstanding devotion to the Jewish campus community sets a standard for all to emulate.” In 2024, the award went to a rabbi whose professional biography highlights her coordination of “Jewish social justice education programs.”

At the same time, Hillel International’s Jewish Sensibilities: An Interactive Guide—intended as a manual for campus educators—does not mention “Zionism” even once. Yet its chapter titles include “Jews and Social Justice: A Covenant of Responsibility” and “Tikkun Olam: Can We Repair a Broken World?” The prominence of tikkun olam reflects a distinctly American, progressive reinterpretation of Judaism. The concept speaks to cultural illiteracy because the term is not central to Judaism, and it does not, in fact, even appear in the Bible. Its likely origin in the Aleynu prayer—l’taken olam b’malchut shaddai (“to establish/fix the world under the kingdom of God”)—concerns the rejection of idolatry, not social-justice activism.

The beauty of Judaism lies in the moral code it offers the world, not in progressive advocacy. And Judaism certainly did not survive millennia of persecutions by neglecting education or by following whatever happens to be in fashion.

Christopher L. Schilling is a lawyer and political scientist and the author of The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia (Hurst) and The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility (De Gruyter).