Stanford University is home to more than a dozen Jewish campus groups and boasts prominent Jewish and Israel studies departments, but finding the entire array of community resources hasn’t been easy.
“If you really want to know what’s going on at Stanford Jewishly, or in relation to Israel, you either have to be on 20 email lists or go to 10 different websites, or you have to even know that there are 10 different websites,” said Shelley Hébert, a co-founder and former president of the Stanford Jewish Alumni Network (S-JAN), which launched in 2022.
Enter Yad B’Yad at Stanford, a new online directory of organizations supporting Jewish and Israeli life at the university. The website for “Yad B’Yad,” which means “hand in hand” in Hebrew, was created and is supported by volunteer alumni from S-JAN and designed by Hébert.
“It’s really the idea that people are joining together in a new way,” Hébert said of the site, which launched Feb. 1.
Robin Kennedy, a founding member of S-JAN who serves as its vice president for campus outreach, came up with the idea more than a year ago, hoping to challenge a reputation that has circulated for decades.
“Stanford is still thought of as not being friendly to Jews,” said Kennedy, who earned undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford in 1968 and 1978.
That reputation was reinforced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel. Stanford’s climate for Jewish students deteriorated amid the global spike in antisemitism. Pro-Palestinian protests swelled there, and many Jewish students felt alienated from campus life.
While those events dominated the news, they did not tell the whole story. Kennedy and Hébert hope Yad B’Yad gives prospective Jewish students, families, faculty and staff a fuller, brighter picture of life at Stanford.
“We have so much to be proud of,” said Hébert, who graduated in 1976. “I want them to see the whole picture.”
To that end, the Yad B’Yad site includes pages of campus resources, as well as off-campus information such as kosher food options, synagogues and Jewish preschools and day schools in the Palo Alto area. An FAQ section answers questions such as “Is there an eruv on campus?” and “What if I need to miss classes for Jewish holidays?”
Ethan Orlinsky, S-JAN’s president and the parent of a current Stanford undergrad, also assisted with the Yad B’Yad project.
To learn about the breadth of Jewish and Israeli life at Stanford, Kennedy met with as many Jewish organization leaders, including student leaders, as she could over lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club.
“I probably had 15 or 16 lunches there with various people,” Kennedy said. “And pretty much every time I talked to somebody … they told me about something else, and it kind of spun out like that.”
Hébert and Kennedy hope to add a community calendar in the future.
“I have a deep love for our Stanford Jewish community that has given so much to me, and I want to give back to it,” Hébert said. “I want to see it thrive, and I want to see it flourish for the next generations.”