The World Union of Jewish Students Web site lists only one North American member organization. Click on a hyper-link and you’ll be taken to the Web site for Lights in Action, a group that describes itself as “a network of North American Jewish college students who believe that each generation must assume responsibility for discovering and maintaining its Jewish heritage.”
Lights in Action’s Web site, however, outlasted Lights in Action. This past fall, WUJS lost its sole North American affiliate when Lights in Action closed its Manhattan office, packed its materials into boxes, and effectively ceased to exist.
It was a sad ending for an organization with a fascinating history. Over the course of its 10-year existence, Lights in Action pioneered a slew of innovative programming designed to empower Jewish students to take ownership of their heritage. And it evolved from a handful of students working out of their dorm rooms at New York City colleges, to an enterprise that at various points in its existence could boast of an annual budget of approximately $350,000, a full-time staff of three, and student participants on campuses across the country.
The Lights in Action story illustrates the power of Jewish students to build and sustain an innovative agenda over the course of many years. But it also reveals the many challenges that face a student-run organization, and the difficulty of keeping such an endeavor alive.
The story of Lights in Action begins in 1991. That year, Jewish students turned out in droves to protest an anti-Semitic speaker at Columbia University. Ze’ev Maghen, a Columbia graduate student, saw the protesters, many of whom, he surmised, wouldn’t normally participate in an organized Jewish activity. He was spurred by this thought to write an article, printed in the Columbia Spectator, arguing that protesting anti-Semitism was futile. Instead of responding to anti-Semites, Maghen wrote that Jewish students should focus their energy on celebrating their Jewish heritage.
The article sparked intense discussion on the Columbia campus. Inspired by Maghen’s article, students from New York area schools organized a massive celebratory bonfire, or kumzitz, in Washington Square Park to celebrate the eighth night of Hanukkah, complete with fires in trashcans, singing of Jewish songs, and dancing to Israeli music.
Capitalizing on the energy unleashed by the kumzitz, Jewish students at Columbia, Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, and New York University founded a new student group, Lights in Action, taking the name from the kumzitz’s theme of “hundreds of lights going into action.” Working from their dorm rooms, these students took it upon themselves to mail Maghen’s article along with an introductory letter to a list of friends and acquaintances across the country, paying the printing and shipping costs out of their own pockets. The response was immediate: students were enthusiastic about the idea of young Jews taking responsibility for the creation of Jewish life.
These first Lights in Action activists decided to initiate twice-yearly student-written mailings. They hoped to pass on their own Jewish excitement to students across the country, and they spent late nights working on these mailings.
Lights in Action’s 1993 student-written retelling and commentary on the book of Genesis was typical of these early mailings. An irreverent reworking of the story accompanied by student-written commentary served as an invitation to explore the Biblical book and its more complex themes. Jill Jacobs, who was involved with Light in Action as a student and later served as the organization’s director from 1997 through 1999, recalls Genesis as a successful “experiment.” “It was a hit,” she says. “Everybody kept writing and saying, ‘when are you coming out with Exodus?'”
Lights in Action’s innovative work also attracted the attention of potential funders. “Quite honestly,” says Rachel Levin, associate director of the Righteous Persons Foundation, “some of the stuff they produced is the greatest stuff I’ve seen around Jewish identity.”
The first philanthropist to provide substantial funding to Lights in Action was Wall Street wizard Michael Steinhardt, who in 1992 began underwriting much of the organization’s budget. Following Steinhardt’s initial investment, Lights in Action quickly accumulated support from an extensive and highly supportive network of foundations and donors.
As its budget expanded, Lights in Action grew and formalized its organizational structure. Rivki Shustakovich-Ross, who had been involved with Lights in Action as a student, left graduate school in 1994 to become the organization’s first professional staff person and coordinate fundraising and the efforts of student activists. A year later, Lights in Action was incorporated and had established itself in a Manhattan office space.
What had been a loose-knit group of friends working from dorm rooms morphed into a network of campus representatives from around the country. While professional staff–composed of recent college graduates–took on a growing responsibility for fundraising and coordinating the organization’s activities, Lights in Action students continued to be responsible for producing educational materials, planning activities, and governing the organization.
Flush with money, Light in Action was able to send its mailings to more and more Jewish students. According to Jacobs, Lights in Action distributed nearly 100,000 copies of one mailing. At the same time, Lights in Action also branched out, and received grants to initiate new types of programming.
Lights in Action created an annual student-led trip to Israel. It ran a series of “boot camps” to teach students, usually on campuses with few Jewish resources, how to plan their own substantive Jewish programming. The group initiated the “Do it in Your Dorm Room” program to provide students, who might not frequent Hillel, with the resources to plan Shabbat observances in their dorm rooms. It organized annual conferences that brought together students from across the country to share ideas.
Several common themes united Lights in Action’s diverse activities. First and foremost, they were all predicated upon the idea that students could create Jewish life for themselves. Lights in Action programming was planned by students and for students. And it tried to provide students on campuses across the country with the tools necessary to organize their own Jewish programming and activities.
Lights in Action programming also emphasized substantive Jewish learning. Jewish text-study played a major role in most Lights in Action projects–from the mailings to the Israel trips to the conferences and boot camps. The idea was that students should be challenged not talked down to.
Lights in Action strived to recognize and serve the needs of Jewish students that weren’t being met by the larger community. To this end, it sponsored a series of thematic conferences for Hispanic Jews, children of intermarriage, gay and lesbian Jews, artists, and students interested in social justice.
Finally, Lights in Action had a deep commitment to pluralism. Yuval Cohen, who graduated from the University of Maryland in 2001, recalls being attracted to Lights in Action because of the diversity of students who were involved. “I was absolutely amazed,” he says of the national conference he attended in 1997. “There were people of so many different backgrounds. There was a guy with black hat and payos [hair sidecurls often worn by very religious Jewish men]. There was a girl in a miniskirt…I felt so empowered and so fortunate to be sitting in a truly pluralistic environment.”
And Lights in Action found creative ways to accommodate its diverse constituency. The group’s unconventional prayer service is a case in point. It accommodated both Jewish students who pr
eferred egalitarian prayer and those who preferred Orthodox-style worship by utilizing, not one, but two mechitzahs, or dividers, separating a men-only section from a mixed-gender section from a women-only section. Matt Carl, a former Lights in Action intern and 2000 graduate of Vassar College, recalls the first thing that he “fell in love with” about Lights in Action was the group’s pluralistic prayer services. “It was a creative and inventive way to try making everyone happy,” he says. “For the first time in my life I actually felt encouraged to try it, because for the first time in my life I wasn’t being implicitly told, well this is the way we do things and this is what you have to do.”
As the years went by, Lights in Action racked up an impressive list of accomplishments. As it grew, however, the challenges of sustaining a youth-run movement increasingly came to the fore. There was a longstanding tension between Lights in Action’s identity as a grassroots student movement and the need to professionalize in order to be accountable to funders and raise enough money to sustain a growing array of programs.
“We were always struggling between that sense of being a movement and wanting to be established,” says Jacobs. Lights in Action decided to try to stake out a middle ground between these two extremes by remaining a student-run organization with a full-time staff of recent college graduates. But this solution had its drawbacks.
On the one hand, hiring young staff members and rotating them every one to two years made it difficult for Lights in Action to maintain a sense of organizational continuity. Raising money was a challenge because the young staff members generally didn’t have much experience with fundraising. It was also hard for a pair of staff members to handle fundraising, coordinate a network of students across the country, and help plan programming all at once.
On the other hand, as staff assumed more responsibility, students gradually lost some of the sense of ownership over the organization that had animated Lights in Action in its early years. Beth Packman, who was co-director of Lights in Action from 1997 to 1999, says that what made the organization attractive to her when she was a student was the notion that students had ultimate responsibility for the organization. “That’s what excited me. I was running an organization when I was a sophomore in college,” says Packman. “So I think as LIA grew and had more accountability, perhaps the students felt less invested.”
Rochelle Sparko, a former Lights in Action intern and a 2000 graduate of Barnard College, says that while students played a large role in designing Lights in Action programming, the fact that they ultimately had a limited amount of responsibility made them less interested. “We really had an active role,” she says, “but it was not so different from Hillel or another Jewish organization.”
Larger Jewish organizations also began to encroach on the niches that Lights in Action had carved out for itself. A revitalized Hillel and a greater communal emphasis on serving the needs of Jewish college students resulted in more established organizations initiating programming that was similar to what Lights in Action had been doing, whether this is testimony to Lights in Action’s influence or just its foresight. “We were doing text study before anybody was doing text study for students. And then suddenly. . . Hillel is talking about text study,” says Jacobs. “We were doing an Israel program for college students when not so many people were doing Israel program for college students. Then all of a sudden Birthright erupted…the point being that all these niches we were filling, the big organizations were suddenly coming and filling.”
By 1999, Lights in Action was struggling with fundamental questions about its future. Staff members were concerned about sustaining an organization with substantial budgetary needs over the long haul. And as the larger Jewish community began doing the sort of programming that Lights in Action had pioneered, staff and students also began to wonder whether the organization should shift course.
In particular, Lights in Action staff were frustrated that despite all the money and effort they were investing in their programming most of their programs were only reaching relatively small numbers of students. “It was spreading us really thin to be impacting small numbers. So we were looking for a way to have a greater impact on a greater number of students,” says Tali Rosenblatt, one of Lights in Action’s directors from 1999 to 2001.
And so Lights in Action initiated a strategic planning process to consider its future. Out of this process came two major proposals to change the organization.
Lights in Action decided to refocus its energies on creating a dynamic new Web site to extend the organization’s reach and enable as many students as possible to access its peer-produced educational materials. “We figured if we could make those [educational materials] available to students who knew anytime they wanted to plan something for themselves or think about a particular issue we would be able to direct them where they needed to go, or very likely have resources on that topic,” says Rosenblatt. “If we could offer that to someone that would be the greatest service we could be doing,”
It was also decided that Lights in Action would hire an older, more experienced professional to coordinate fundraising, provide continuity, and free up the younger staff to work with students. In the fall of 2000, Lights in Action hired thirtysomething Alex Unger as the organization’s executive director.
Unfortunately, these two innovations were not ultimately able to turn around Lights in Action. The revamped Web site idea never came to fruition. “It just took a while to get off the ground, to find out who the people to talk to were, in terms of what goes into planning a Web site, technically, how it works.” Rosenblatt says. “We had people who were interested in funding on some level, but we barely even got to that stage. It took so long to figure out how it all worked, and by the time we figured out how it all worked…everything changed; it was much too late for us.”
In the fall of 2001, many of the Lights in Action’s foundation grants were due to expire. Finding the organization at the end of a grant cycle, and with relatively few involved students to show for its efforts, attracting funders was a major obstacle for the new executive director. “Because we didn’t have that core group [of students], anymore whatever I was pitching, whatever we were pitching, when it came back to programming and who was this affecting, we couldn’t show [funders] numbers, and we couldn’t show them bodies,” says Unger. And so without enough money to pay its staff, Lights in Action shut down its operations this past fall.
“In a lot of ways, I think Alex was probably coming onto a sinking ship. We all just thought, as soon as we have him everything will be fine, but that’s not the way the world works.” says Rosenblatt. “It’s more than one person can do to turn it all around, basically…I don’t think we realized when he first came on how quick the turnaround would need to be.”
Although Lights in Action eventually came to an end, former staff members and participants certainly don’t think that their efforts were in vain. In the end, what endures of Lights in Action, is the impact its programs, ideas, insights, and innovations had on the students who were a part of it. Jacobs notes that many Lights in Action participants were spurred to pursue careers in Jewish education. On a more personal note, but one that holds true for many, Packman says, “LIA fundamentally changed my life, my Judaism, how I practice, and how I think.”
