Content warning for mentions of alleged sexual assault and harassment. Some names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of interviewees, marked with an asterisk.
Maya* walked into Shabbat dinner at BBYO’s international convention in February 2020 with a group of friends and began scouting out a place to sit among the gathering’s 6,000 teens. They found spots at a table, and Maya introduced herself to the boy from Texas seated next to her. A few minutes later, as Shabbat services began, his hands were on her thighs, between her legs, and groping her breasts. She asked him to stop; he did not. When Maya was able to extricate herself from the table, one friend asked if she knew the boy. She said no. “That’s just what happens,” her friend replied. “We shouldn’t have sat with strangers.”
This same group of girls had made a pact before the convention began: None of them would walk through the convention center alone, because they were afraid of incidents like this happening as they walked the hallways flooded with teens. According to our investigation, Maya’s assault, and the pact that preceded it, aren’t isolated or uncommon experiences in American Jewish youth groups. Rather, this sort of situation is a natural progression of a culture where teens report feeling oversexualized, pressured to hook up with one another, and are not provided education and analysis around consent.
Youth groups such as the pluralistic movement BBYO, the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth (USY), and the Reform Movement’s National Federation of Temple Youth (NFTY) have played a significant role in influencing and setting norms among Jewish youth since the first half of the 20th century. These organizations are often lauded as one of the best tools to create engaged Jewish adults — they strengthen teenage connections with Jewish culture, tradition, and to Jewish peers. Tens of thousands of teens participate in youth groups each year. Decades after their formal participation, many alumni of these youth groups can be found serving as synagogue presidents, running Jewish organizations, and sending their own children to Jewish youth groups, camps, and day schools.
In recent years, talk of a particular aspect of the youth group experience has come into critical examination: ‘toxic hook-up culture.’ The term “hook-up,” which interviewees used as both a verb and a noun, is an umbrella term used to describe more casual sexual activity, ranging from light kissing to heavy petting, sometimes including penetrative sex.
Pressure and anxiety around engaging in sexual behavior may be par for the course for American teenagers, but for teens participating in Jewish youth groups, the pressure goes beyond what they experience in other parts of their lives. Abigail, both a former NFTY participant and recent advisor who asked that we use just her first name, described the culture as more sexually charged than the culture in her high school.
“I did feel like the openness and the welcoming undertones of teenage sexuality was definitely a more upfront vibe,” she said. “At first I kind of thought it was weird. But I drank the Kool-Aid and I got used to it.”
Accounts of sexual harassment and assault in these spaces are pervasive, and often go unreported or ignored. The fallout from this culture is widespread: Some teens leave with such a negative impression of Jewish spaces that they turn away from Jewish community entirely. Beyond the damage inflicted by sexual harassment and assault, according to interviews, in part due to these experiences and the sexual norms set in youth groups, young Jews enter the adult world of relationships without sufficient understanding or guidance around consent and boundaries. For a community that cares deeply about continuity, this cultural reality may prove counterproductive to ensuring a thriving Jewish future.
While issues of hazy boundaries and non-consensual sexual norms are not unique to USY, BBYO, NFTY, or Jewish youth groups more broadly, recent discussion among youth group alumni has centered on those three specific organizations, and New Voices Magazine’s investigation does as well.
Teens exploring sexuality is natural and normal. While the average age of sexual exploration and dating among Jewish youth is consistent with the broader American trend, what repeatedly emerged through interviews with staff, alumni, and current participants was a concern for the competitive, even coercive environments within youth groups which facilitate unwanted sexual interaction.
As conversations about youth groups’ pressure-filled sexual cultures begin to crack the Jewish community’s tacit acceptance of the issue, these unearthed stories reveal a problem far larger and more damaging than previously acknowledged. As of the publishing of this article, dozens of young American Jews have shared their stories of feeling pressure to engage in sexual activity to witnessing or experiencing full-fledged sexual assault. At least 50 of these stories allegedly took place at events hosted by the youth groups mentioned in this article (other stories take place at camps, or in other Jewish spaces geared towards youth).
These story-sharing efforts are also hinting at a changing culture and a new generation of leaders trying to build healthier sexual outcomes for Jewish youth: Youth group policies and norms are changing with the work of participant-activists and concerned staff members. Our investigation reveals that the American Jewish community is approaching a turning point in its attitudes towards teen sexuality and consent.
Over the course of our research, New Voices Magazine spoke with over 35 current and former youth group members, staffers, and educators and asked them about their experience in youth groups: whether they learned or taught about consent, felt or saw pressure to hook up with others, witnessed or experienced sexual harassment or assault, and how they relate to the idea of Jewish continuity as it was presented to them in youth group. Through these conversations, New Voices found that youth group events are enabling spaces where some Jewish teens are uncomfortable and even harmed by a systemic failure to teach Jewish teens about healthy romantic and sexual relationships necessary for a strong and loving Jewish future.
Traditions, Games, and Pressure
In the early 1990’s Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, then a member of USY’s teen International Board, was at a USY board retreat when he was passed a piece of paper: it was a list of the “points” of everyone in the room.
Nearly every current and former USYer interviewed within this investigation was able to instantly rattle off all the numerical values of the unofficial “point system,” a competition that has been around for at least three decades, circulating informally among participants, in which youth group members score points via hookups. A teen’s “point value” varies based on the leadership positions they hold. The higher up in leadership someone is, the more you have to gain by hooking up with them. If you hook up with someone of the same gender, your points are squared. The point system even cheekily incorporates aspects of Jewish law: If you hook up with someone on Shabbat, you get double points. A non-Jew? You lose all your points. In Jerusalem? Extra points. The point system’s pervasive presence is not just a joke; for decades, teens have been actively tracking how many points they and their peers have accrued, and using these statistics to evaluate their peers’ social capital.
“There was definitely a quantity emphasis to it… it definitely seemed like a sport, more than a way of actually connecting with people,” said Ben Shechet, who participated briefly in USY in Kentucky in the early 2000’s.
National leadership of BBYO, USY, and NFTY are aware of the issues caused by the point system. Rabbi Joshua Rabin, Director of USY, acknowledged its prevalence.
“I’m not going to pretend that it’s not something in the air,” he said. “I can’t tell you to what degree because I’m not a teen anymore.”
He added, “Whenever there is a whiff of a whiff of a conversation about it, we try to be very clear that this is not condoned or sanctioned in any way.”
In addition to creating unnecessary pressure, the inherently power-based point system has highlighted existing gender dynamics within certain Jewish youth group cultures.
“Boys who are in positions of power were like walking objects of sexual desire and knew that about themselves or sometimes expected it,” said Rabbi Bernstein of his experience in USY.
While the point system does create some space for girls to be empowered initiators of hook ups, he continued, “A lot of boys actually thrived on girls taking initiative, but that initiative was still about [sexualizing] that power into a commodity of desirability instead of kindness and curiosity.”
Several NFTY alumni referred to the NFTY’s unofficial point system, though they couldn’t recite it themselves and said it was mostly a joke, not something that was taken seriously. Even though it isn’t as central to the culture in NFTY as in USY, others still found it alienating and intimidating. Fletcher Block, NFTY’s current national President, said that while he didn’t experience pressure from the point system himself, he knew that others did. “Maybe I took [the point system] as a joke, but maybe it’s really something that everybody else feels is exerting pressure on them,” he said. “If the point system hurts just one person in any sort of way, then it needs to go.”
In a 2017 Resolution on Preventing Sexual Violence, NFTY committed to “working to eliminate systems or games that encourage objectification in a sexual context,” a reference to their concerted effort to stamp out the point system over the past few years.
While recent BBYO members also noted an unofficial point system, other aspects of BBYO hook-up culture were more salient than collecting points.
At local BBYO gatherings and conventions, chapters and regions have canonized cheers that they shout on Saturday nights. As Sophie Mann, a BBYO alum from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010-2014 reflected, “[The cheers] definitely have some weird sexual undertones.” One cheer even includes a warning to the young girls (in BBYO, girls are BBGs and boys are AZAs):
“Now gather round my girlies, and listen to my plea:
Don’t ever trust an AZA an inch above the knee.
I knew a girl who tried it, and dearly did she pay,
The son-of-a-gun left her with a son-of-an-AZA.
That little AZA boy, he did grow up one day.
And met a BBG girl, in much the same old way.
This little BBG girl, she did not hear my plea,
And now they have between them, a bouncing BBG.
The moral of the story, is very clear to see:
Don’t ever trust an AZA an inch above the knee.
Why not? It’s fun! No it’s not! Well, sometimes…”
While this local chapter’s official cheers include explicit references to youth groups as epicenters of Jewish reproduction, there are also unofficial cheers that go unrecorded. Madeline, a former BBYO participant, described these unofficial chants as even more overt in their misogynistic, heteronormative, or homophobic language. “They were so hyper-masculine, toxically masculine, talking all about their sex adventures and celebrating it,” she said.
“BBYO is a 90-plus-year-old organization,” Drew Fidler, the Director of BBYO’s Center for Adolescent Wellness, said in response to a question about unofficial cheers. “Things that may have been acceptable at one time period really are no longer and really don’t have a place in the movement. … I think that cheers and chants are one of those things.” Despite this sentiment, recent participants still reported these cheers as commonplace at local and regional events.
Saturday night dance traditions vary between chapters and regions. A current BBYO regional board member who spoke anonymously described her region’s tradition of a “hook-up line”: “Everybody from a certain chapter will plan their hookups with specific people at the same time, and they all hook up on a wall in a line next to each other. And they make sure people take pictures.”
Sophie Mann, a BBYO alumnus, explained that at events in the San Francisco Bay Area region, Stairway to Heaven played at the end of every dance, signaling to participants to grab someone they’d been dancing with or that they liked and start making out. While many of these instances are consensual, according to interviews, the dancefloor at BBYO conventions is often the site of much unwanted touch: participants grinding on one another, kissing and groping — and recording it all on camera — without warning or consent.
“At the International Convention, it’s kind of a known fact that at the concert … everyone hooks up and you’ll see kids on the dance floor,” shared a former BBYO International president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of damaging personal relationships with BBYO. “It’s very public, and it’s very normal for people to record other people … That was [what happened with] my first kiss, which is super bizarre that it was a kid that I didn’t know, and someone filmed it. And later, I realized that’s just not okay. It just felt normal.”
“We continue to look at being a gendered organization in a non-gendered world,” said Drew Fidler, “and how we create a safe space for our teens, no matter where they fall on the gender spectrum.” Fidler noted some language changes that the organization has implemented, including referring to gendered chapters as “AZAs and BBGs” rather than “girls and boys”. However, most BBYO chapters continue to be separated by gender, so the heteronormative hook-up culture often peaks when gendered chapters combine at co-ed events or at conventions.
Danielle Hamer explained that in 2012-15, when her BBYO girls chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area was planning an event with a boys’ chapter, social expectations immediately felt different. “You knew you’d have to be on your best behavior, with your best outfit and like, trying to scope out someone to hook up with,” she said. “There was this idea that during hofesh [free time], I would go and make out.”
This pressure permeates all events. Jacob Finkelman, a former BBYO participant, described the culture as “Greek life for kids.”
These rituals made some participants feel as though they had failed socially if they hadn’t hooked up with someone by the end of the evening. The same former anonymous BBYO International president shared the sentiment. “I felt like if I wasn’t leaving to go home [from a convention] and tell all my friends about this boy that I got with, then I had missed something on that program or I was missing out on that part of the experience, which isn’t true, but that’s the sort of culture that’s created.”
Sexually-charged space as a Jewish institutional choice
The issues around relationship norms in Jewish youth groups extend beyond teens feeling pressure from sexually charged traditions: lines around consent are not clearly demarcated, and teens are not often taught how to engage with one another’s bodies and emotions healthily and respectfully.
Madeline Canfield, a recent BBYO alum from Houston, Texas, added that, in the absence of adequate consent education, youth group cultures are teaching Jewish teens that they have the right to other people’s bodies. “[There’s an] idea of I see you and I like you and I’m entitled to you,” she said. “That’s the problem: the ingrained idea of entitlement.”
For many teens, their experiences at youth group events are their first forays into sexual relationships and are formative in their expectations for their romantic and sexual futures. According to interviews, youth groups are not providing Jewish youth with models of what healthy, consensual relationships should look like. Rather, these cultural experiences are leading teens to believe that relationships built around power and pressure are normal.
Jewish youth organizations are part of an historic communal effort to inundate children with lessons about the importance of having their own Jewish children. Some of these lessons on being fruitful and multiplying come from parents and grandparents at home, but others come from institutions dedicated to the cause of preserving Jewish continuity.
In 1990, the National Jewish Population Survey came out with a statistic that sent shockwaves through the Jewish community: an intermarriage rate of 52%. Considering intermarriage as a threat to Jewish continuity, major Jewish institutions and thinktanks scrambled to find new strategies to create engaged Jewish adults and fight back against the perceived ultimate enemy of assimilation. In the following decades, this discourse became a boon for Jewish youth programs, especially those which could prove their success in increasing the intra-Jewish marriage rate. This larger cultural frenzy was not lost on the day-to-day youth group experiences of teens.
Emma Furman, who was active in BBYO in Evanston, Illinois in the early 2000s, described the atmosphere bluntly. “There’s a low-level understanding on everyone’s part that the point of Jewish youth groups is for Jewish people to procreate,” she said. “And so it very much felt like a sexualized space.”
Former NFTY member and NFTY Northern Regional board member Andi Seiler also recalled explicit messaging around procreation from staff. “It’s good to go to programming and show up for services,” they said, “but really the point of [NFTY] is to make connections that are so long lasting that one day you’ll have a baby with one of them.”
Jacob Labendz, a professor of Jewish Studies at Youngstown State University and alumnus of USY from the early 1990s, once went over to his regional director’s home for a holiday meal. Amid casual conversation about the hook-up culture in USY, the director chimed in, saying this was exactly what that director wanted: for teens to be kindling relationships and finding partners.
“[The Jewish community is sending] messages that we bring together Jewish youth in order for them to find their partners and in order for them to make Jewish babies,” said Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Woman (NCJW) and one of several women who experienced and spoke out about sexual harassment by Michael Steinhardt, a former hedgefund manager and major donor to leading Jewish nonprofits.
Author and NCJW’s scholar in residence Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg added: “There is a tacit assumption that cisgender women’s greatest contribution to Jewish life is in the use and deployment of a functioning uterus.”
Jewish youth group executives have openly discussed their goal to strengthen teen Jewish identities in order to bolster intra-religious marriages and future synagogue involvement. Matt Grossman, the CEO of BBYO, argued that creating Jewish social environments for teens greatly increases the odds that they will marry Jews down the road: “These bonds are very sticky,” he said in a 2013 article published in The Atlantic.
“In any Jewish space you fear your community and your culture and your traditions are going to disappear… that’s kind of an underlying fear of, ‘Oh my god, we’re gonna lose what we’ve worked so hard to build over thousands of years’. If BBYO weren’t to have that mentality, it wouldn’t be accomplishing its underlying mission,” said a former BBYO International president who wished to remain anonymous.
Director of USY Rabbi Joshua Rabin, who himself met his wife in USY, argued that there’s a delicate balance between encouraging teens to form long-lasting relationships with other teens, and sending a message that you haven’t gotten the full USY experience if you haven’t coupled up. “I know people who met each other in USY in high school and got married and they’ve been together since 15-16 … and that’s wonderful,” he said. “But we shouldn’t be putting it out there in a way that makes people feel like they’ve not gotten the gist of what we’re trying to do because of that.”
On paper, the strategy of encouraging Jewish relationships leading to marriage is incredibly effective. In BBYO’s 2011 Alumni survey, 84% of alumni surveyed were married to or living with a Jewish partner. These rates are dramatically higher than among the general public, where only 42% of Jews who married between 2005 and 2013 married other Jews.
While the results of the institutional drive for propagation of Jewish babies appear impressively effective, the collateral caused by this culture is harming Jewish teens just as they begin to explore their sexuality, and may even be turning some teens away from participation in the Jewish community altogether.
Ben Shechet, for example, attended a couple USY events in Kentucky before the sexualized atmosphere informed his decision not to return. “[It] definitely made me feel like there was not a teen Jewish culture that I could connect with, or where there were people like me,” he said.
Similarly, Dahlia Soussan, a recent high school graduate from the San Francisco Bay Area, left BBYO after just three weeks. “I was at my chapter’s traditions night and we were learning all the cheers, and they were pretty horrific … blatantly homophobic,” she said. “At that point, I never came back. I texted my parents and I left.”
For many, the gendered nature of youth groups’ sexualized culture feels both heteronormative and sexist, with particularly harmful and alienating effects for LBGTQIA+ teens and young Jewish women, generally.
“It’s time for the Jewish community to stop pretending that hookup culture is not a threat to our young people, or to all people,” Sheila Katz said. “Hookup culture is not about individuals. It is about systemic misogyny that objectifies women and girls. And this is particularly exacerbated in settings where the unspoken, or even understood, goal is to introduce young people so that they will form relationships that will lead to marriage and children.”
Home Alone: Where are all the staff?
When Hannah* was active in USY from 2011-15, she often flew between states to attend conventions and events. Once, a female senior staff member picked her up from the airport. As they drove several hours to the venue, the staff member began inquiring about her crushes, then explained that Hannah was currently at her peak fertility and it was a great time to have children. Hannah was 17.
Most of the other staff members in Hannah’s recollection were college students, interested in the drama and gossip of their participants. As recent alumni of USY themselves, they knew about the point system and other core aspects of USY hookup culture and often seemed to encourage relationships and sexual activity between participants they supervised. Staff did night duty to make sure teens weren’t sneaking out of rooms or cabins. “It always felt like they purposefully didn’t really do a good job,” said Hannah. Sometimes, teens felt as though staff simply walked away when they wanted participants to hook up.
Staff across youth groups are given inconsistent amounts of training about consent or the sexual culture they’re striving to build, while some are given none at all. As a result of this variation, according to our interviews, individual staff members take different approaches: some try to establish rapport with participants by gossiping about and encouraging hook ups, while others pretend not to see what is happening in plain sight.
Several advisors and staffers interviewed could not remember receiving any official conversation or training around sexual harassment, sexuality, or consent as part of their onboarding or professional development.
Lack of training appears to be due, in part, to a decentralized organizational structure: individual NFTY chapters are not under direct supervision or direction of the national NFTY staff, for example.
Across all youth groups, staff are usually young, not much older than the participants. Especially for short-term retreats and Shabbatons, lots of college-aged alumni join the year-round staff as supervisors for the weekend. As recent youth group participants themselves, they’re often still entrenched in the dynamics of pressure-filled and sexualized environments.
National NFTY staff has even noted that these occasional staff members can even create more sexualized pressure amongst their youth, and the organization is working to address the issue. “Some of this culture perpetuation is from occasional staff that we hire for events,” said Lynne Butner, NFTY’s director of engagement. ”We’ve done a lot in the last four years of NFTY to really address this topic,” she added. “People who were in NFTY 10 or 20 years ago may not know that we’ve done all this work and we want to make sure that our occasional staff knows that as well.”
Abigail, previously mentioned, who was involved in NFTY in Wisconsin first as a participant and then as an advisor and staff member from 2005 to 2018, said, “It’s sort of hard to know as an advisor, like are the conversations not happening or am I just not part of them because I’m an adult.” While advisors are around and know the general goings-on, they might not see everything that happens in a given event. Without clear institutional support or training, some advisors and staff may be unsure how to act on their concerns, especially when incidents go unreported or unseen. “It was a little shocking,” another former NFTY advisor added, “how little supervision there was.”
BBYO staffer Fidler asserts there is always an adult presence. “There are staff present at all of these events, there are staff present in the dance room.”
Even so, Emma Furman, a BBYO participant in Evanston, Illinois from 2002-2006, tried to recall staff presence at BBYO’s Saturday night dances. “They must have been there,” she asserts, “but I don’t know where.”
Dahlia Soussan shared that in her recent experience as a participant at BBYO events in the San Francisco Bay Area, “[It felt] very clear that [BBYO] was a space where adults were intentionally limited.”
Policy: Harm and Progress
When sexual boundaries are crossed, there isn’t always a staff member to whom youth group members feel comfortable or safe turning to for help.
NFTY’s Lynne Butner outlined a general process of what happens when there are complaints of non-consensual behavior: Participants tell a regional staff member or trusted adult, they try to ascertain what happened, and work to make sure everyone involved gets the support and learning they need to ensure growth. “We want to make sure that teens feel comfortable telling us when something’s not okay,” Butner emphasized, though she couldn’t give more specific details since they vary from case to case.
Still, participants across youth groups do not always feel confident staff members will be able to help them work their case through to the higher-ups. “There really is no system for reporting sexual assault and so if you are uncomfortable speaking with an adult, it just doesn’t get reported…they don’t really create a safe and supportive space,” said an anonymous current BBYO member.
USY and BBYO have both set up anonymous hotlines where people can report sexual assault and harassment. A former USY staffer, however, said that in her experience, the USY hotline is rarely used, and it’s not particularly anonymous – most participants know who’s on the other end of the line. BBYO’s hotline goes to an anonymous third party HR reporting system. BBYO also has an online form teens can fill out detailing an incident that goes directly to Director of BBYO’s Center for Adolescent Wellness Drew Fidler and their Director of Inclusion, in case teens feel they aren’t being heard by their local level staff.
Fidler is also working to create a peer mental health support network, in response to a recent survey in which 79% of responding BBYO members said their friends were the first people they turned to when in need of support. According to Maya Zucker, one of the current BBYO International Presidents, BBYO strives to be “teen-facing”: ensuring all the resources are accessible, relevant, and visible to teen participants.
In addition to the resolution passed in 2017 about sexual violence prevention, NFTY amended their Community Brit (Communal Norms) in 2018 to include a clause about consent. NFTY now provides opportunities for graduating seniors to sign a sexual violence prevention pledge. Adam Friedman, who was NFTY’s North American Social Action Vice President when several of these changes were made, discussed the process behind the scenes: “There was a lot of conversation around how to ensure that this wasn’t something that was performative… if they chose to sign a pledge to uphold the definition of affirmative consent outside of NFTY they were doing so because they wanted to.”
Changes are in the water, in part because of resolutions like the one Friedman voted for. For example, “Lap Tag,” a game involving sitting in people’s laps and grabbing at one another’s bodies, has been recently banned from NFTY.
Earlier this year, the BBYO Executive Body passed a motion requiring consent talks at all Council, Regional, and International Events.
Both NFTY and BBYO staff members referred New Voices to the web pages they have built in recent years to centralize policies, resources, and educational materials related to sexual harassment and healthy relationships. These two sites contain links to articles and videos about consent, information about mental health and crisis hotlines, as well as documents written by the organizations regarding their own efforts at sexual violence prevention.
The Director of USY declined multiple requests from New Voices to see official policies on sex education or sexual harassment and assault.
Even in cases where sexual misconduct incidents are reported, they are often left unresolved or not dealt with in a way that feels satisfactory to those who experienced the violations. One current BBYO member mentioned a male member who has been reported for sexual assault numerous times over the past few years, with teens, parents, and regional staff all aware of his misconduct. The current BBYO member felt as though there wasn’t a sufficient process to address the allegations against him and the harm caused. He was still allowed to remain on the chapter board and come to every event, even though his presence made many people feel unsafe and uncomfortable. BBYO senior staff members said they weren’t familiar with a situation matching this description and they “expect staff to listen to the teen reporting and take action to keep all teens safe.”
Changes in the Water
Michaela Brown, a former BBYO International President from 2013 to 2014 and current rabbinical student and educational consultant for BBYO, noted that the broader cultural changes have noticeably made their way into youth groups. “So many teens have the language of consent in a way that was not present when I was a teen,” Brown said.
Six young activists who met in the Jewish Women’s Archive Rising Voices Fellowship, an annual program for young feminist writers, are charting a new course in speaking out against continuity-driven and coercive hook up culture within Jewish youth groups. After realizing they were not alone in their experiences of toxic hook-up culture, they penned an article calling for a change and founded Jewish Teens for Empowered Consent (JTEC). Since September, they’ve gone on to launch an Instagram page collecting stories of sexual assault and harrassment, met with youth group staff, and debuted a curriculum for youth groups on objectification and consent. They’re currently collaborating with BBYO to create a program for teens about mandated reporting, assault, harassment, and reporting. Ellanora Lerner, one of the JTEC founders, spoke about the importance of providing a community for teens to realize that they aren’t alone in their experiences of toxic hook up culture: “We want to give people a chance to validate their experience… a lot of people felt really alone or uncomfortable, but were being told they shouldn’t be uncomfortable.”
USY’s Rabbi Rabin felt as though the JTEC founders’ article’s critique was fair and met with a number of the activists after it was published to discuss the matter further. “I think it’s actually a good reminder to me that what those young women wrote needs to inspire everyone who works in this space, to… really take an accounting of where we are right now,” he said. Following a meeting with JTEC, a group of USY staff working with teens across the country have formed a team to create space for teens to take a more critical look at the hookup culture.
For USY, JTEC’s article served as a wake up call. For NFTY and BBYO, which have already been working on making change for the past several years, it served as more of a nudge, and a reminder that the task is far from complete.
JTEC and others’ calls to action have made an impact. “I think that people are taking it very seriously now, because they have to and I think they realize that… They’re trying to figure out the systems in place,” said Brown. “BBYO had a whole program about [sexual harassment and consent] at their advisor conference.”
For the past few years, Rebecca Lubar, a former NFTY participant and board member in NFTY Northern region from 2013-2015, has been teaching a consent-informed Jewish sex-education curriculum to youth at Mt. Zion Temple in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has noticed a shift. “Our teens are going in a lot more informed about what a healthy relationship can look like,” she said.
The curriculum Lubar teaches is a combination of the URJ’s Sacred Choices Curriculum and the Unitarian Universalist community’s Our Whole Lives curriculum, and consists of a series of workshops and retreats starting in 7th grade with age-appropriate content about romantic relationships, consent, and Jewish values. This program provides one potentially replicable model for how the Jewish community could address the issue of culture change head-on.
While some change was already happening internally in each organization, JTEC provided an external platform for sharing and amplifying hundreds of stories and conversations around change-making.
But change will continue to be slow as long as barriers to reporting experiences and openly discussing the problem persist. The Jewish community is close-knit, and often personal allegiances get in the way of progress. Both current and former youth group participants and staffers still express significant reluctance to speak out because they still hold close relationships with people in positions of power in these organizations.
“This is about systems of gender, sexuality, and power, and how they play out uniquely within the Jewish community because of our history and the way we set ourselves up in the US,” JTEC activist Madeline Canfield said. “It’s no one’s fault, per se, but it is a lot of people’s — especially youth group leadership’s — responsibility to choose not to perpetuate the culture and try to take action to reform.”
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If you are an individual who may be currently experiencing harassment or abuse in your Jewish workplace or communal space, please contact Ta’amod’s free, anonymous, and confidential helpline powered by the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA) at 1-833-760-0330 or submit a confidential message to http://taamod.org/call-line/. You can also call the RAINN National Sexual Assault hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673).
