Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff talks with ASU Hillel students about antisemitism

Douglas Emhoff, the Second Gentleman of the United States, made a brief visit to the offices of Hillel Jewish Student Center at Arizona State University to speak directly to college students about antisemitism on Thursday, Jan. 18.

Emhoff joined 10 students, Hillel at ASU Executive Director Debbie Yunker Kail and Hillel at ASU Assistant Director Taylor Silverman, for a 50-minute round table discussion, during which Emhoff invited students to share their personal experiences and how the current climate around antisemitism is impacting them as leaders.

ASU senior and Hillel at ASU Student President Zachary Bell was impressed by Emhoff’s ability to listen to each student’s experience and refer back to what they related when he offered his own comments.

“He made it clear that he heard and respected the experiences of everyone in the room,” Bell told Jewish News.

Bell said several students told Emhoff about how they sometimes feel unwelcome in certain studentled multicultural coalitions and initiatives. Emhoff told them it wasn’t the first time he’d heard similar stories and didn’t think it would be the last.

“It was clear that this is an issue he’s passionate about and that he will take concrete steps to make the global climate better,” Bell said.

Yunker Kail learned of the visit through an email sent to her by a

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a few more issues that divide Jews today, including political leanings, financial competition, physical distance, perspectives on Israel, moral priorities, visions for a Jewish future, even food choices. “And sometimes, perhaps, our egos,” he added.

For the first in what Yanklowitz hopes will be a series of conversations, he brought together four community leaders, representing the three main branches of Judaism and the leader of the Center for Jewish Philanthropy of Greater Phoenix (CJP).

Richard Kasper, CJP’s CEO, Orthodox Rabbi Pinchas Allouche of Scottsdale’s Congregation Beth Tefillah, Conservative Rabbi Nitzan Stein Kokin of Phoenix’s Beth El Congregation and Reform Rabbi John Linder of Paradise Valley’s Temple Solel sat on the dais together — from left to right — to kick off a discussion about fractures in the Jewish community and possible solutions.

CJP’s focus is on supporting the community rather than unifying it, Kasper offered in response to Yanklowitz’s query regarding whether unity should even be a goal.

While unity is something to aim for, it is important to set the community’s sights on something achievable, Kasper said.

“We want everyone to have an opportunity to live a meaningful Jewish life in our community; however they define that,” he said.

All of the panelists at some point highlighted diversity as a strength of the Jewish community and something to be embraced.

Allouche started by defining Judaism as a large and diverse family.

“Maybe the goal should not be unity, but should be harmony, almost like a symphony, where I’ll play the violin, and another the piano and someone else the drums and we can play together and recognize that there is indeed beauty in diversity.”

Two audience members, however, challenged the panelists on the idea that the entire Jewish community valued diversity. One raised the exclusive policies of Israel’s new government toward LGBTQ Jews and asked how she, someone who had lived in Israel and considered it her home, could still view it as such when her own gay child was no longer welcome.

Allouche said it’s a “travesty that Israel is relating to the gay community as it is at this stage.”

Addressing her concerns, he recounted visits to France, his home country, saying he often feels unwelcome there because of being visibly Jewish but that he would not consider himself any less French than any other French citizen.

“My connection with France is deeper than that. And I would even dare say that my connection with Israel is even deeper than that. Hopefully, that brings

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Another audience member identified as a gay Jew of color, who finds his Judaism continually questioned in Jewish spaces said, “We don’t all look the same.”

The panelists all acknowledged these were troubling realities. Linder called it “a mountain of an issue.” Kasper stressed the need “to create a climate where people feel welcome,” and Stein Kokin said it should be a priority to “honor the dignity of our fellow human beings.”

Israel kept popping up as something dividing Jews, especially since new government players there, such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have made it clear that the Orthodox interpretation of Jewishness is the only legitimate one.

Linder called it “the most complicated issue that pushed the envelope for the Jewish people,” and pointed to the recent protests against Israel’s new government that drew an estimated 80,000 Israelis to the streets.

Stein Kokin intends to keep “knocking on (Israel’s) door” to fight these policies and called recognizing women as fully legitimate prayer partners her “red line.”

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PROUD MEMBER OF in Israel, “as a Jew, I need to grapple with it and educate myself, and we need to talk to each other and not just walk away, but really engage this issue, even though it can be painful,” she said.

“Israel is the spiritual home of the Jewish people,” Allouche said, arguing that it “belongs to every Jew. We have to divorce the politics from the home, which is ours. I agree that everyone should find some way of a connection to Israel in their own way.”

One audience member raised two points specific to the local Jewish community: There should be a single rabbinic board and a single Jewish communal high school.

Greater Phoenix has two rabbinic boards, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of Greater Phoenix for the Orthodox and the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix for Conservative, Reform and community rabbis.

As a representative of the latter board, Linder invited Allouche to a meeting as a first step to resolving the schism. Allouche said that while there are strong personalities on both sides, he would do his best to show up and bring others to the table.

He said that labels are the enemy of unity and welcomed “the day in which we, as Jews, move past the denominational labels that exist because a Jew is a Jew.”

In putting together the panel, Yanklowitz said it was important to have an Orthodox representative but that it is challenging to find Orthodox rabbis who will sit down formally with non-Orthodox rabbis.

There are two Jewish communal high schools in Scottsdale, Nishmat Adin High School and The Oasis School.

Allouche clarified that Nishmat Adin is a community-wide school open to all denominations and said it is not Modern Orthodox. He was surprised by the question and told Jewish News that it “was based on rumors.”

The panelists put forward proposals about specific steps to be taken towards unity: creating more Jewish communal spaces, more Hebrew education, financial support to overcome costly barriers of entry to Jewish life and possibly replicating the model developed by Rabbi Elana Kanter’s Women’s Leadership Institute to foster Jewish leaders.

Yanklowitz admired the willingness of all the panelists to take part, especially since many people ascribe to the theory that it’s dangerous “to rock the boat and talk about Israel and distrust and politics,” he said.

“But unity has to be worked towards with hard work and public conversations and that means we stay in the room together even when hard conversations are happening.” The challenge is with those who are not willing to show up to the conversation at all, he said.

A follow-up to this event could include rabbis, community leaders and lay people “to find out what might be needed and start putting something new in place as a pluralistic communal effort,” Stein Kokin told Jewish News.

A few younger people in the audience told Jewish News that the panel provided an opportunity they couldn’t pass up to voice their concerns on the idea of unity, though they thought their age cohort was underrepresented. Yanklowitz agreed and planned to set up a panel specifically for Jews in their 20s and 30s.

Elijah Kaplan, Yanklowitz’s brotherin-law from New Jersey, told Jewish News that he was not surprised by any of the topics raised on Tuesday night, and suspected they were all very similar to what Jews in New Jersey are thinking about.

Alan Silberman loved what he heard but was “shocked” by how few people turned out.

“I would have expected 250 people here because it’s such an interesting topic, but there’s a lot of apathy out there,” he said, echoing another audience member’s comment that came up during the Q&A.

“The problem is not that we are not united — the problem is that nobody is showing up.” JN member of Emhoff’s staff on Tuesday afternoon and set about organizing what was intended to be an intimate conversation between Emhoff and a few students.

“His visit was very exciting and we were honored to be selected to facilitate this conversation,” she told Jewish News. “It means a lot that antisemitism is a priority for him, and it means even more that he wants to hear from college students about it and that he chose to visit ASU and hear from the amazing student leaders that I get to work with every day.”

Yunker Kail has been dedicating more of her time recently to providing proactive education about antisemitism. She has added a session in each of Hillel’s classes during which she teaches the history of antisemitism, lets students process their personal experiences and trains them to report incidents.

In addition to an on-campus reporting system, there is ReportCampusHate.org, an online portal to report antisemitic and/or bias incidents targeting Jewish community members on North American college campuses, created through the partnership of Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League and the Secure Community Network.

“Often, students don’t know that we can help them report incidents, and we want them to know they can come to us no matter how small it is. We want to give them all the resources they need,” she said.

Bell told Emhoff how Hillel works with ASU’s administration to address antisemitic incidents and that students can meet with various deans and administrators to report and discuss any issue.

“I have not had any meetings with deans personally, but I know some students have and during the meeting, I mentioned that I’d like to see those resources be more publicized and utilized — so we can try to make things better,” Bell said.

Yunker Kail hears about incidents in which students know something uncomfortable or inappropriate has happened but can’t quite explain why it upset them. These microaggressions might happen in unguarded moments, such as a conversation between friends. Hillel leaders want to help students understand the experience and coach them on how to follow up with the person who made the inappropriate or offensive comment, or know how to speak up should something similar happen again.

Three separate times in the last few years, antisemitic flyers were posted on ASU’s campus. Each of those incidents were reported immediately to the police, as well as the ASU administration.

However, that’s not representative of daily life at ASU, she said.

“There’s so much to be proud of at ASU and there’s never been a better time to be a Jew on campus. We have wonderful future Jewish leaders, who are very proud of their strong Jewish identity,” she said.

“Antisemitism is a real facet of life, but it’s not the only one, and I don’t want people to end up with a lopsided picture of what it’s like for students on ASU’s campus.”

Emhoff was in town with his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, who made her first official visit to the state since assuming the vice presidency to attend the groundbreaking of the 125-mile-long Ten West Link transmission line, which will help transport wind and solar energy to the Phoenix area and Southern California.

Emhoff’s meeting at Hillel was closed to the media, but a White House official told Jewish News on background that “Emhoff talked about the importance of living openly as a Jew and the administration’s all-of-government approach to combating antisemitism.” It was Emhoff’s second time meeting with Hillel students after holding an interfaith roundtable at the vice president’s residence last year.

Hillel students and staff were not allowed to announce the visit until the next day’s press release.