It’s become a cliché that most adults need a 15-year-old in the house to cope with the rush of technological “improvements” that have overtaken our lives.
And while it’s obvious that expertise and comfort with that ever-morphing technology has shaped teens and young adults profoundly, this reality also affects Jewish society in interesting ways.
Their 21st century lifestyle emerged as a major issue in how the Jewish community reaches out to engage young Jews in Milwaukee and Madison during a recent series of interviews with Jewish professionals serving high school and college students and young adults in their 20s and 30s.
Students today have a “TiVo view of life,” said Greg Steinberger, executive director of Hillel Foundation-University of Wisconsin. Steinberger was referring to the interactive television service that lets viewers program and control which television shows they watch and when.
Not only do college and even high school students have a heretofore unimaginable number of choices, and access to an entire world of information, they are also technologically sophisticated, constantly “plugged in” and accustomed to having a high level of control over which TV shows (or activities, friends, groups, products, ideas and learning opportunities) they want to engage with and just when and for how long they want to do so.
“[Today’s] college students are much more in the driver’s seat,” than ever before, Steinberger said. And that presents opportunities as well as challenges for Jewish professionals who are dedicated to reaching out to and serving young Jews.
Although students today appear to be connected to a computer, cell phone, MP3 player or television set for many hours of every day, both Steinberger and Benji Berlow, a Jewish Campus Service Corps fellow spending a year working at Hillel Foundation-Milwaukee, emphasized the need for one-on-one interaction with students.
Steinberger noted that a campus resident life director recently told him, that he struggles with how to even get kids out of their dorm rooms when they have so much electronic communication and entertainment equipment right in their living quarters.
That’s one reason personal interaction is important to Steinberger and why he insists that Hillel-UW telephones be answered by a person at all times, even though some of the younger students working there say they are more comfortable communicating via e-mail.
Berlow regularly meets individual students for coffee on the Marquette University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and other area campuses in order to learn about their interests so he can program directly for them.
Catering to individual interests
“It’s the way it has to be,” Berlow said. “There isn’t one mold that fits every Jewish student. We have students who are shomer Shabbat and others who don’t know what shomer Shabbat means,” he said, using the Hebrew term for Shabbat observant. “We have to cater to their individual interests.”
Steinberger said that he is seeing an increasing number of career-minded students. They are looking for leadership training, internships and volunteer opportunities that will strengthen their skills and help them develop their employment possibilities.
One freshman who read about Hillel’s plans to rebuild its facility contacted Steinberger to say that he wanted to get involved. He said he wanted to help with any aspect of the project from selecting the architect, to fundraising, because he thought he would be doing all of it at some point in his career and he wanted to cut his teeth on Hillel’s project.
“[That student] was saying, whether he knew it or not, ‘I haven’t figured out how I want to connect to Hillel yet, but this is interesting to me,’” Steinberger said.
Another UW-Madison student, a fifth-year senior who had never been to Hillel before, auditioned for a play through Hillel’s theater program. The role called for him to wear tzitzit (fringes worn by religious Jews) as part of his costume and by the time the actors were ready to perform, the student decided that his tzitzit shouldn’t just be a costume; he should have his own.
After buying a tallit katan (“small prayer shawl” or garment to which tzitzit are attached) the student started coming to Hillel for services on Friday nights, Steinberger said.
“This is a tremendous example of how simple these things can be,” Steinberger said.
“They may not be coming [to Hillel] at first blush to get Jewish experiences,” Steinberger said. But even though he said he is sensitive to questions about programs with minimal overt Jewish content, “to me the context that a student is being challenged with is important,” Steinberger said,
According to Hillel Foundation-Milwaukee executive director Heidi Rattner, her organization has hired a consultant to conduct a “visioning survey,” asking Jewish students in the Milwaukee area to tell Hillel about their backgrounds, needs, desires, the challenges they face and how Hillel can help them create meaningful Jewish experiences.
With most UWM students working 20-40 hours per week in addition to a full academic schedule, Rattner said among her members’ greatest needs is opportunities to relax and unwind.
Two programs slated to meet that need are Shabbat 180, on Friday, Jan. 26, which kicks off the spring semester with simultaneous Reform, Conservative and Orthodox religious services, followed by a free Shabbat dinner and a comedy performance by “The Late Night Players,” comprised of a group of Brandeis University graduates.
In April Hillel-Milwaukee is bringing the comedy show “One Muslim, One Jew, One Stage” to the UWM Union.
Over-programmed
High school students are even more heavily involved in online communication than college students. Jewish organizations reaching out to 13- through 18-year-olds are using the Internet at least as much as those that serve their older brothers and sisters.
Last year, BBYO International launched a “MySpace” or “Facebook” style “online community” on the Internet, called “b-linked,” for Jewish teens.
According to the Web site currently 10,782 members are registered worldwide. Of the 400 active members of B’nai B’rith Youth Organization in Wisconsin, 225 have joined b-linked, said Rachael Frydman, regional director of BBYO-Wisconsin Region. She believes it will become an increasingly valuable networking tool for Jewish teens.
Involving Jewish youth in leadership positions is a strategy that all of the organizations The Chronicle spoke with use, but BBYO, which describes itself as staff-run and youth-led, has employed it especially successfully.
BBYO seeks “to have more Jewish teens have more meaningful Jewish experiences,” Frydman said. Like Hillel, it looks to engage students through their ever-changing array of interests.
Focusing on high school students in grades nine through 12, but also programming for middle school students through “Teen Connect,” BBYO has the added challenges of competing for what Frydman refers to as “over-programmed” students who have little free time.
And they are even more conscious than college students of of their contemporaries’ interest in an activity and how “hip and happening” it is.
“Some things change and some don’t,” Frydman said. “Kids love pizza and that doesn’t seem to change. But whether roller skating is in or not changes.
“The kids always have a lot of ideas and we challenge them to have those ideas,” Frydman said. “I tell them, ‘I could do this myself, but that is not what we’re about.’”
Some of the innovative activities BBYO has offered recently include a choir and a creative journal-writing project. Plans for next year include a college tour to Northwestern University, and the Universities of Indiana and Wisconsin, at Madison, among other things.
The Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, was confronted with a big challenge in engaging teens when Merkaz, its evening Jewish supplementary high school program, experienced such a decline in enrollment that it was forced to rethink its teen programming.
In 2003, JoAnne Gaudinsky a Merkaz teacher, became CJL’s teen enrichment coordinator and began to focus on the challenges of engaging today’s teens.
Citing exceedingly busy schedules and the plethora of attractive alternatives available to them, Gaudinsky noted that now teens are less interested in longer term commitments.
With the cooperation of BBYO, Gaudinsky and some teenagers active in Jewish organizations started designing activities which she described as “high quality, intensive, low time commitment Jewish experiences that are emotionally involving.”
Since then CJL has sponsored several one-afternoon events, including Jewish Teen Day of Discovery, Jewish Teen Day of Social Action and Jewish Teen Day of the Arts.
CJL’s latest effort to engage high school students, a film project, is planned to begin in late January. Jewish documentary filmmaker and UWM professor Brad Lichtenstein and some of his graduate students will offer 8-10 Jewish teens the opportunity to make a film using UWM’s facilities in a 16-week, one evening per week class.
Not only will they learn all aspects of pre-production, production and post-production of a movie, they will premiere and screen the movie in Milwaukee.
Gaudinsky’s take is that while Jewish organizations and federations fear that Jewish kids don’t want to affiliate, “I think they do want to have a Jewish identity. I think that Judaism is a product that sells itself.”
They just want to affiliate differently, she said. As they get older they need more than “dreidel spinning,” Gaudinsky said. “It’s about a 4,000 year old philosophical tradition that has gotten us through many historical highs and lows and the students need to get into meatier subjects with real philosophical substance.”
“It’s easy to think Judaism is about holidays that other people don’t have and b’nei mitzvah preparation. But kids are really hungry to hear about these [other] things,” she said.
A menu of opportunities
Jewish professionals charged with engaging the 20- to 40-somethings, echoed similar themes.
“Our goal is to engage people and help them find their place in the Jewish community and in the Milwaukee Jewish Federation,” said Ellie Gettinger, the federation’s young leadership coordinator.
Federation programs that target that population include the Weinstein Fellowship, a two-year leadership development program that includes a trip to Israel, as well as events for singles and young families, she said.
At 25, Gettinger is “somewhere on the border between the gen-Xers and the millenials,” by her own reckoning, and is therefore a member of the demographic she works with.
Raised, she said, without some of the limitations as a woman and as a Jew that her parents faced, Gettinger sees today’s young adults as having a sense of entitlement.
And appealing to their sense of responsibility is not the way to approach this group, she said.
“There are so many things they can connect to and [we] have to find their connecting point [to the Jewish community]. We have to look at [their involvement with us] from a personal perspective” and tell them how it will benefit them, she said.
Among the challenges to reaching this group is the marital and child status variations within the age group. A single 25-year-old may have more in common with a 40-something single than she has with a 27-year-old married couple who has a child, Gettinger said.
“We try and get them where they are,” Gettinger said, “and with people in their 20s and 30s, that’s often in bars.” For the third year, YLD is hosting Latke Vodka, a social event celebrating Chanukah scheduled this year for Saturday, Dec. 23, 8 p.m..
Gettinger said her group is also working on developing some social action activities. On Sunday, Feb. 11, YLD will conduct a one-time project in which participants will build a public bathroom, which does not currently exist, at Habush House, a Jewish residence home for developmentally disabled adults.
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