Two years ago, Alma Ben-Levi and her family moved from Israel to Sunnyvale. As a new sophomore student at Homestead High School, she wanted to find a welcoming community.
Otherwise, the now 17-year-old high school senior told J., “you’re pretty much on your own.”
When a friend invited her to a Jewish Student Union meeting at her Cupertino school, Ben-Levi knew she found what she was looking for. Soon after joining the club’s weekly lunchtime meetings, she made new friends and was invited to Shabbat dinners.
“I love it,” Ben-Levi said. “It just keeps me going every day.”
The Jewish Student Union at Homestead High isn’t an anomaly. It is part of a network of more than 320 JSUs throughout North America. Club meetings and activities focus on having fun, connecting with peers, celebrating holidays, exploring culture and building identity and pride.
To advance the cause, some 40 people gathered on Dec. 8 at the Piedmont home of Eileen Ruby to raise money for JSU Global Campus, an online platform designed to reach more teens interested in starting JSUs at their schools. The guest speaker was East Bay native Tessa Veksler, a recent college graduate and prominent Jewish voice on social media who started a JSU in 2019 at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek. The event sought to raise $150,000.
“There’s a lot of identity forming that happens in the teen years, which is why teen programs are important,” said Ruby, board chair of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. She is a major supporter of Jewish teen programming, as she was alongside her late husband, Robert.
“It is about building identity in a Jewish context,” Ruby added. “If you get Jewish teens together… give them opportunities to have leadership development, run programs, be with their cohort, that’s a stronger indicator that they will want to … lead Jewish lives.”
There’s a lot of identity forming that happens in the teen years, which is why teen programs are important.
The first JSU clubs launched in Los Angeles high schools in 2002. NCSY, the Jewish youth group founded by the Orthodox Union, oversees JSU, which promotes inclusion and “actively welcomes and accepts Jewish teens of all backgrounds and affiliations,” according to its website.
Rabbi Akiva Naiman, NCSY director of development, said that JSU is one of NCSY’s most robust programs, even more so since the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent global spike in antisemitism, which has particularly impacted Jewish teens and young adults.
In the past year, Naiman said, NCSY received 267 requests from students who wanted to start a JSU at their school, including seven at Bay Area schools. There are currently active JSUs at 25 schools across the region, from San Jose and Palo Alto to San Francisco and Walnut Creek.
Each JSU is teen-led, though NCSY tries to send a staffer to club meetings to offer resources and support. But if requests to start new clubs continue to grow, NCSY may not have enough personnel to reach every school. That gives the online platform even more value.
“We are a relationship-centric organization,” Naiman said. “With [Global Campus], we’ve been able to expand way further but not lose the relationship piece. … At the bottom of that pipeline, there’s still an actual human staff member.”
Naiman said JSU has been working to develop the Global Campus tool for a few years. The platform is already live but still in its early stages. Once fully developed, Naiman said, it will be able to provide teens with resources to start a JSU, connect with teens and staff across the country, learn to develop programming and take leadership skills courses online.
Naiman said teen leadership and empowerment are central tenets of the JSU philosophy, something that Ben-Levi has learned. After a year participating in her school’s JSU, she joined the Bay Area regional board and hopes to become president of Homestead High’s club next semester.
“I can say for sure that being a part of the JSU club or going to these meetings really helps me out,” she said. “It helps me figure out who I am.”