Moishe House and the limbo of post-college community
This article has been edited to reflect a correction. Moishe House Hoboken was founded four years ago, not five. New Voices regrets the error.
On a Friday night, a group of young Jews gathered in a small room for Shabbat dinner. One of them cooked the meal, one brought a pack of Miller High Life and a few brought wine. The conversation ranged from Judaism to weed to Israel to Christopher Hitchens to the perils of JDate.
This isn’t Hillel. It isn’t even on a college campus. This is the Moishe House of Hoboken, New Jersey, one of 32 such houses worldwide—each of which provides programming for the local Jewish post-college community. There is a do-it-yourself feeling to the dinner, though—as with Hillel—a larger organization with large donors pays for it.
The organizational support comes from the MH headquarters, located in Oakland, Calif. and Washinton, D.C. MH’s goal, according to its website, is to “provide meaningful Jewish experiences for young adults around the world by supporting leaders in their 20’s as they create vibrant home-based Jewish communities.” According to the “Moishe House Logic Model”—a flowchart on the MH website—the organization aims each year to open four to eight new houses, engage up to 750 new adults per house and 12,000 adults in total.
MH calls its target audience “young adults” and the organization exists—it seems—to facilitate community for people who have left Hillel and have yet to join a synagogue. Studies have shown that recent college graduates today experience a prolonged period of single mobility before marrying and settling down. Jewish organizations see this time as a period of potential unaffiliation. MH may aim to counter that unaffiliation by providing a space for post-college Jews to come together and participate in organized programming.
In the case of Hoboken, that space is a three-bedroom modern apartment on a gentrified block. There’s no dining room—forcing everyone to eat on couches, futons and folding chairs. Posters advertising the Jewish Agency, David Ben Gurion and recent movies adorned the walls. Josh Einstein—one of the house’s founders—told of how he found an advertisement of smiling local FOX anchors and brought it back to the house.
Einstein, Shira Huberman and David Rosen run the four-year-old house. Rosen is a teacher and youth worker by day and a musician by night. Huberman is a graduate student in Early Chidhood and Special Education. The trio exemplifies the people that MH is trying to reach: mid-20-somethings eager to share in Jewish communal activities.
Huberman portrays herself as an MH success story. “I wasn’t very involved in Jewish life in college,” she said. “I decided it was time to get involved and I heard about Moishe House and said, ‘This is perfect.’”
Einstein said, “I would be having Friday night dinners no matter where I was living, but here I have a framework to do it for a larger number of people.”
He explained that Hoboken is a perfect place to reach those people. It is a small, affordable city close to New York and it’s full of recent graduates. “There are a lot of young Jews in Hoboken,” Rosen said. “There are a lot of bars and a lot of Jews who go to bars,” Einstein added.
When MH began, Rosen explained, people who already lived together could apply to the organization to become a house. By the time Einstein and friends came along, a group who wanted to live together could apply. Now, MH identifies cities that it thinks could use a house, and then seeks out potential founders.
Aside from a synagogue-based social group called Jewish Young Adults of Hoboken, which works with MH, the house is the only game in town for post-college Jews. It has 20- to 30-person Shabbat dinners two or three times a month, an annual beach trip with MH Silver Spring, Maryland, a winter retreat in the Catskills and social action events like volunteering at a homeless shelter. These all fit MH international’s three categories for events: spiritual and Jewish community, tikkun olam programs, and social and cultural events. The house’s funding—including part of its rent—comes from MH international.
Among MH Hoboken’s most successful events is its bimonthly Spiritual Salon. “They started out as Intellectual Salons, but we found out that people wanted something more spiritual, which is anathema to me, but we’re here to serve the community’s needs,” the secularist Einstein said. Each salon has a different topic and draws a different crowd.
MH international, according to its site, hopes that because of its program “More Jewish adults actively live vibrant Jewish lives in their homes and communities.” Despite sounding like kiruv, or religious outreach, MH does not prescribe what “vibrant Jewish lives” should look like. Many at that Shabbat dinner, however, did grow up in Conservative youth groups and camps, so much of the crowd was from a single Jewish demographic. The only other potential caveat to MH’s non-denominationalism—in the case of MH Hoboken—is that its food is not strictly kosher, though the house makes special arrangements to cater to kashrut-observant Jews.
Part of MH’s attraction, Huberman says, is its inclusivity. “It’s a way to be involved in Jewish life, but it’s non-denominational,” she said. The organization demands nothing from its participants other than their participation.
Stacey Green, one of JYAH’s organizers, has attended MH events since 2008. She grew up in Jewish summer camp and day school, and “found a contintuation of that community at Moishe House.”
The Shabbat dinner was Hoboken newcomer Rachel Haller’s first MH event. She said that she had heard about the house in Philadelphia, her previous city, but had never attended. “It feels sort of like college, but now it’s harder to meet other Jews in a new place,” she said over a cacophony of JDate horror stories. “This makes it more automatic. I would come back, of course,” she said.
While discussing these programs at the dinner, Einstein said, “I hate the infantilization of our community.” He then launched into a discussion of Birthright, which draws the MH demographic of “young adults” on packaged tours of Israel well into their 20s.
Establishment Jewish organizations will have to make a choice about how they approach these 20-somethings. Either they are adults or they are not. Do they need another set of training wheels, or are they ready for the big time? As the Jewish community decides, MH can serve, at least, as a meaningful waiting room.
David AM Wilensky is a senior at Drew University and the features editor of the Drew University Acorn. He is the editor-at-large of New Voices.
