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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The warmth of community, the heat of hostility: Yona Speidel’s Jewish journey
(JTA) — Hours after emerging from a ritual bath marking her conversion to Judaism, Yona Speidel was leaving a celebratory dinner with her rabbi when a man across the street yelled “f–ck Jews.”
For Speidel, it was an unexpected welcome into the Jewish community.
“My rabbi looked at me and he goes, ‘Welcome,’” Speidel recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh, great, I’m home.”
The conversion ceremony in Los Angeles in March marked the conclusion of a decade-long exploration of Judaism for Speidel, the prominent transgender Emmy-nominated television writer and producer formerly known as Our Lady J.
“Over a period of 12 years of casually dating Judaism, I eventually got engaged when I realized that Judaism holds so much space for all of me, and then some,” Speidel said.
Growing up in Central Southern Pennsylvania, where two of her great-grandparents had been Mennonites, Speidel said that she had little exposure to Jews. Still, she felt a pull toward Jewish culture from an early age.
“I don’t remember when I first became aware of Judaism as a culture,” Speidel said. “But I knew I loved New York City. Many years later, I look back, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I love Jews, I love Jewish culture, that’s what drew me to New York.’”
Speidel is believed to have become the first out trans writer to be hired in a television writers’ room when she joined the hit TV show “Transparent,” which follows the story of a Jewish family in Los Angeles with a parent who comes out as trans.
During the show’s third season, as she became immersed in researching Judaism for the show, Speidel said she began taking conversion classes but then put them on pause because she “wasn’t sure if there was space for me in Judaism.”
That all changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Speidel said she began opening up to faith and spirituality after becoming “burnt out” by her work on “Transparent” and another hit LGBTQ TV show, “Pose.”
“As the world got more complicated and darker and scarier for a lot of people, and especially for Jews, I found that Judaism was able to hold everything for me that I needed to pour out, to release,” Speidel said.
Speidel, who learned as an adult that she is intersex, said that at the time she discovered Isaiah 56, a passage of the Hebrew Bible that promises a place for eunuchs in the Temple.
She said discovering the passage left her feeling that her “intersex and trans identity feels really seen and awakened.”
“It was not only that I was accepted as, you know, this idea of tolerated, but rather I could see a part of me that would be uplifted, actually, and be embraced, and that’s always been in Judaism,” Speidel said.
In late 2024, Speidel began taking conversion classes again at the American Jewish University, saying that rising antisemitism had strengthened her commitment to Judaism.
“In a post-Oct. 7 world, I felt, even though I wasn’t officially Jewish at that point, I felt how much Judaism meant to me — and how much it informed my life and enriched my life — was under threat, and so it made me want to step up and be more conscious in my relationship with Judaism,” Speidel said.
Speidel is not the only person to embrace Judaism amid rising antisemitism. In recent years, some rabbis have reported increased interest in conversion, with prospective converts saying the post Oct. 7 environment strengthened rather than diminished their commitment to Judaism.
In the midst of her conversion, which she completed with Rabbi Igael Gurin-Malous, the lead rabbi at the Reform Beit T’Shuvah in Los Angeles, Speidel also took aim at what she described as anti-Zionism within the LGBTQ community in a social media post.
“Zionism is not a dirty word,” she wrote. “It is the belief in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
Speidel faced a spate of online attacks following the statement, but she said she felt obligated to be the “bridge” between the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.
“I think that word ‘Zionist’ means a lot of different things to a lot of people, and so people ran with it and did what they wanted to do with it, and that did not feel good, but at the same time I was grateful for the people who got closer to me and understood my intentions,” Speidel said.
While Pride Month celebrations and parades took place in cities across the United States during June, Speidel said that she had not participated in them in years because of the antisemitism she had seen in those spaces.
“The LGBT movement needs to really look at itself in the mirror and say no to antisemitism, you know, before I come back and dance under the rainbow again,” Speidel said.
Looking ahead, Speidel said she remains optimistic about the future of Jewish life despite present challenges.
“A storm is here, and the storm is going to pass,” Speidel said. “But at the end of the day, we carry this incredible legacy with us, and we get to pass it down, and it’s something to be proud of.”
The post The warmth of community, the heat of hostility: Yona Speidel’s Jewish journey appeared first on The Forward.
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Leslie Wexner helped shape these Jewish leaders. Now they want a reckoning over his Epstein ties.
(JTA) — This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
For three decades, Debbie Findling led with it.
The Wexner Heritage Program appeared on her CV, LinkedIn page and professional biography. Her participation in it was part of her Jewish identity, a marker of belonging to an elite network of leaders chosen to carry forward the values of the American Jewish community and a useful credential in her work as an adviser to Bay Area Jewish philanthropies.
But over the last several years, the ties between the program’s sponsor, billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came into focus for Findling. The two men had a close relationship for years. Wexner was instrumental in Epstein’s rise to wealth and prominence, while Epstein managed Wexner’s finances and later served as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation.
Wexner has denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, including those against minors, and has testified that he severed financial and legal ties with Epstein in 2007.
Still, Findling’s pride has soured into something closer to shame.
“I’ve lost something that I was really proud of — it was taken away from me,” Findling said, describing a sense that something “sinister” has corrupted such a positive experience. “I feel like the rug got pulled out from under me.”
Now Findling, 62, is leading what may be the largest organized accountability effort to emerge so far in the Jewish community’s reckoning with Wexner’s ties to Epstein. She’s doing so in partnership with Jan Reicher, 61, also a Bay Area Wexner Heritage alum, as well as a longtime community leader and the immediate past president of Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.
The two women have circulated a public letter to the foundation signed by 80 Wexner alumni so far, including 50 from the Bay Area, urging the organization to take meaningful action to support survivors of sexual violence and trafficking.
They also launched in May what they call Tikkun Funds — directing donations to three nonprofits that support survivors of sexual violence or trafficking — and asked fellow alumni to contribute $36,000 each. More than $356,000 has been pledged so far. A parallel effort, the ASHRU Fund, is being run by alumni of a separate Wexner fellowship for professionals at Jewish communal organizations.
The Wexner Foundation has not responded substantively to the letter’s demands and declined to comment for this story. The foundation held meetings with alumni after the revelations of Wexner’s deep ties with Epstein first emerged in 2019.
Part of what makes the campaign remarkable is that open conversations about Wexner’s legacy amid the Epstein scandal have been rare. Alumni discussed the implications of the revelations in their immediate aftermath, in group chats and on social media. A number of alumni have made donations to groups, including for survivors of sex trafficking.
The Bay Area initiative appears to be the broadest and most robust so far.
Evan Segal, a Wexner Heritage participant in the Bay Area who left the program after its first year for a job in the Obama administration, said the discomfort stems from how many people in Jewish communal life are close to the issue.
“If you want to know why the Jewish philanthropic world has been crickets, it’s because many of the big names that people have respected for years are tied — some more directly, some indirectly — to this scandal,” said Segal, who didn’t qualify to sign the open letter because he isn’t an alum.
The silence, he suggested, is also about what the Wexner name has come to mean.
“For years, the Wexner name has been put in a pantheon of mensch-y philanthropists. People carry it on their resumes as a badge of honor,” he said. “Now it is 180 degrees of that.”
Findling and Reicher’s campaign is not aimed at dismantling the Wexner Foundation, the two women said, nor at repudiating the education they received and the community they formed.
Instead, they describe it as an attempt to apply the very values the program instilled in them.
“I feel like I am acting in the leadership capacity that Wexner taught me, which is to stand up for those who are less fortunate, to stand up for survivors, to stand up for truth,” Findling said.
For decades, the Wexner name occupied a singular place in organized Jewish life. The retail magnate behind the rise of Victoria’s Secret and other major brands, such as The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works, became one of the most influential funders of Jewish leadership development in North America and Israel. His name was pervasive in his home city of Columbus, Ohio, where a Jewish nursing home still bears his name, as does the Jewish student center at Ohio State University. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum named a learning center for Wexner.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Wexner Foundation built a constellation of fellowships and leadership programs for Jewish clergy, professionals, philanthropists and lay leaders. Thousands of participants moved through those programs and into prominent positions across Jewish institutions and wider society.
Among the most visible of them was the Wexner Heritage Program, which combined Jewish learning, leadership development and community building. The program, which is offered for free, has attracted almost 2,500 participants across 35 North American cities.
The San Francisco hub, which launched in the late 1990s, became one of its strongest. When the Wexner Foundation began seeking local matching grants, the San Francisco Jewish community set a “stellar example of commitment by creating an endowment,” according to the foundation. The Jewish Federation Bay Area’s efforts ensured there would be a new cohort every few years. Today, the Bay Area is among the regions with the most alumni.
Among the 10 Wexner Heritage participants interviewed for this story, all described the experience as monumental. Or as Ellen Kahn, a member of Findling’s 1997-1999 cohort, put it, “absolutely life changing.”
“Leslie Wexner, in my view, was this bigger-than-life man who created something that was so extraordinary,” Kahn said.
Alumni describe the far-reaching impact of their two-year Wexner program: It inspired them to serve on nonprofit boards, engage in philanthropy and build both friendships and community networks.
Reicher, who joined the program in 2003 after helping found San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay, described the Wexner Heritage Program as formative.
“For me, the biggest thing really was the cohort that we created,” she said. Her group still studies together, supports one another’s institutions and gathers socially.
It took until this January for Reicher to “wake up” about the implications of Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. She was reading court testimony from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the most outspoken and prominent survivors of abuse by Epstein and his enablers. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, had testified that she was trafficked to Wexner multiple times, a charge he has denied.
Wexner has not been charged with any crime in connection with the allegations.
“Oh my God,” Reicher kept repeating aloud to herself, growing more disgusted and horrified with what she was reading in the testimony. She phoned Findling and said, “We’ve got to do something.”
For Reicher, the decision to act has been bound up with her own experience as a rape survivor. She said she came “within inches of losing my life” at 18 but ultimately did not press charges after her father urged her against it.
“That person that I was at 18 didn’t stand up for herself,” she said. “So now I have this other layer as a survivor that I need to stick up for other survivors, even if it causes me harm, even if it causes me trauma.”
The accountability campaign was launched amid intensifying scrutiny of Wexner, whose name appears 1,746 times in the publicly released Epstein files on the U.S. Justice Department website.
In February, Wexner sat for a five-hour filmed deposition before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, where he denied any knowledge that Epstein was a sexual predator or committed sexual crimes.
The accusations that Epstein raped, abused and trafficked girls and young women across many years are extensive. He was convicted of sex crimes with minors in 2008. Eleven years later, he was charged with sex trafficking of minors but died by suicide before trial.
“I was conned by the world Olympic, all-time con artist,” Wexner testified during the Feb. 18 deposition, which was made public.
Around the same time, the Wexner Foundation announced it would hold a series of private listening sessions over Zoom for alumni who had concerns about Wexner’s ties to Epstein. “Together with my colleagues, we want to listen, to take in your thinking aspiring to move forward even if along a different path,” foundation president Elka Abrahamson wrote in an email to alumni first reported by Jewish Currents.
Neither Reicher nor Findling attended a listening session, believing the events would be counterproductive and that no change would result.
“Listening is an essential component of responsible leadership,” they wrote in the open letter. “But listening is not enough. When sworn testimony and public records raise serious moral and ethical questions, silence risks complicity. Our community needs more than private reflection — it needs visible ethical conviction and action from the Wexner Foundation.”
Some Jewish leaders have emerged since February to defend Wexner, albeit with qualifications.
Wexner deserves the Jewish community’s continued admiration based on the principal of “hakarat hatov,” recognition of good even among those who are flawed, David J. Butler, a lawyer who is member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, wrote in an opinion for the small chain of Jewish newspapers last month.
Jewish ethics “asks people to live within tension. To condemn wrongdoing without erasing merit. To acknowledge failure without pretending that flawed individuals never contributed profound good to the world around them,” Butler wrote.
When Findling and Reicher brought their appeal to fellow alumni in late February, they found a community divided. While dozens signed quickly, the response did not grow beyond an initial burst of support, and the vast majority of alumni have not joined the effort.
For Marci Dollinger, 61, an elementary school teacher at Brandeis Marin Jewish Day School in San Rafael and a board member of several local Jewish organizations, the decision to sign the letter was obvious. It’s a matter of “not being silent when serious concerns arise,” she said. But she added that many alumni she knows were reluctant to sign.
“Even some in my cohort [declined to sign], and it was upsetting because to me it just seemed like why would you be on the wrong side of this? But they have their reasons,” Dollinger said.
Few of those reluctant to sign were willing to go on the record.
Howard Steiermann, 67, of San Francisco said he didn’t want to sign it initially because he doesn’t feel that the program’s name is tainted.
“I’m not sure that my feeling toward the program or the man has changed,” said Steiermann, who added that he has read through the allegations. “For me, I can’t tell you why, it doesn’t tarnish my memory or appreciation for the program that I went through.”
But he ultimately added his name out of a sense of allyship.
“I do believe in innocence until proven guilty,” said Steiermann, who was ordained as a rabbi in 2015, more than a decade after his Wexner graduation. “That said, I think our culture has had such a horrible track record of not listening to women around abuse.”
He added that he wanted to be an ally to what “too many people see as a woman’s issue.”
While Steiermann ultimately signed, his reluctance reflects a wider pattern among some male alumni.
Wayne Feinstein, who said he signed it with no hesitation, noticed that pattern.
Feinstein, 74, served as executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Bay Area from 1991 to 2000 and grew up attending the same Columbus, Ohio, synagogue as Wexner.
“To me, it was an ethical question, plain and simple,” he said.
Feinstein, one of only about two dozen men out of 80 signatories, was disappointed to learn that many male Wexner alumni had refused. They were “reluctant or fearful,” he said, to condemn a businessman in the Jewish community where they themselves worked.
He spent an hour on the phone trying to convince a male friend who kept pushing back. The friend said, “There’s no proof that Leslie Wexner did any of this.” Feinstein replied to him:
“That’s not a reason not to do this.”
Findling and Reicher said they’re not working toward persuading the many holdouts.
“I want to activate the people who signed, who are with me, into meaningful repair,” Findling said.
Their call to action encouraged gifts of $36,000, the amount the program spent on each Wexner Heritage participant, offering alumni their choice of three vetted nonprofits: World Without Exploitation, a national organization supporting Epstein survivors through advocacy, legislative action and public awareness; the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, the national umbrella organization that has been a leader in supporting sexual violence survivors of Oct. 7, 2023; and Shalom Bayit, a prominent Jewish voice on gender-based violence prevention and response based in the Bay Area.
Tricia Gibbs, 67, a Wexner Heritage alum and co-founder of the San Francisco Free Clinic, donated to all three nonprofits and signed the letter — her first time signing anything like it.
“In a way we’d be doing more harm to the program by not standing up, because we wouldn’t show that we learned anything,” she said. “There’s a deeply rooted ethic in Torah that tells us to protect the vulnerable.”
When they began writing the letter, Reicher worried about the impact on the Jewish community. Calling upon fellow alumni meant acknowledging painful truths. “Does this hurt the Jews more?” she asked herself.
A major source of consternation for the Jewish community has been that Epstein, Wexner and a number of other men connected to the scandal — though far from a majority — have been Jews and have had meaningful ties to Jewish institutions.
“It’s incongruous with how we were all raised,” Kahn said.
Naomi Tucker, co-founder and executive director of Shalom Bayit, hears it often.
“We have the exact same rates of violence against women in the Jewish community as everywhere else,” she said. “We would like to think we are better or different. But unfortunately these things happen everywhere.”
One in four Jewish women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, Tucker noted, and one in three will face sexual assault or harassment — all consistent with national figures for all women.
Many alumni continue to reckon with what the program means to them.
“Do I wish the Wexner name no longer was attached to the foundation? Yes,” Kahn said.
That may come to pass.
On May 21, the foundation announced that all Wexner leadership programs will spin off into an independent nonprofit on Jan. 1, 2027, under a new name yet to be released. Wexner and his wife are contributing $40 million to launch the new organization.
The post Leslie Wexner helped shape these Jewish leaders. Now they want a reckoning over his Epstein ties. appeared first on The Forward.
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Rabbinical seminaries boast highest enrollment in years, defying downward trend
When a study released last year showed enrollment at major seminaries in a decade-long decline, it fueled concerns about a crisis in the American rabbinate. As the old guard of Conservative and Reform Judaism aged out of the workforce, who would replace them?
But the rabbinical schools affiliated with those movements say reports of their demise were greatly exaggerated — and they have the numbers to prove it.
The Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College, seminaries of the Conservative and Reform movements respectively, say they have enrolled their largest fall classes in 15 years. Enrollment at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College holds steady with nine students.
“We are seeing a beautifully diverse population of students, which I think mirrors the people who are in our Jewish communities,” said Rabbi Ayelet Cohen, the dean of the JTS rabbinical school.
At JTS, 25 aspiring rabbis will begin a five-year program at its New York City campus; 41 rabbinical students will begin on the Los Angeles and New York campuses of HUC and on a virtual ordination track, where enrollment is still open.
Administrators at each seminary point to a surge of interest in serving the Jewish community since Oct. 7 — and a ceasefire in Israel enabling students to study abroad there. But they also credit recent efforts to open new paths into the rabbinate. At JTS, for example, eight of the incoming students attended the school’s Mekhinah program — a low-cost preparatory semester introduced in 2024 and available remotely. HUC’s virtual track, which launched in 2024, has 16 students enrolled.
“When the field starts moving together, things can change quickly,” said Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, executive director of Atra – Center for Rabbinic Innovation, the nonprofit whose 2025 study showed declining enrollment. “We’re seeing coordinated investment in its early stages. One year’s numbers doesn’t mean a trend, but it is a hopeful sign.”
Bucking a trend — or starting a new one
For JTS, the intellectual center of Conservative Judaism for more than a century, the uptick also comes amid handwringing about the movement that goes well beyond its rabbinate. More than one-third of the country’s Conservative synagogues have closed in the 21st century, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center study.
The other major Conservative seminary, L.A.-based Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, recently paused admissions and has indicated it will move to a nondenominational model. At least two incoming students at JTS had considered Ziegler before it closed.
Similar anxiety exists around the future of Reform Judaism, albeit at a lower pitch. According to Pew, one in five Reform synagogues closed in the same time span.
On top of declining enrollment, the Atra study found that, of the more than 4,000 rabbis working nationwide, only 6% were younger than 35, while 26% were over 65.
“People were saying this was a crisis,” said Wendy Rosov, the lead researcher on the Atra study. “But it’s been happening for some period of time. It’s just that I don’t know if anybody was paying attention.”
HUC widened the pathway into their program through “pipeline fellowships” that appeal to teens, college students and young post-grads and online courses in Hebrew.
“We’ve really seen that in order for people to feel prepared for rabbinical school, having some learning to ground them as well as knowing others who are also thinking about it has been tremendous,” said Rabbi Rachel Maimin, director of recruitment and admissions at HUC.
Rabbi Annie Lewis, JTS’ director of admissions and recruitment, said the school broadened its outreach by working more closely with youth programs like Camp Ramah to identify talent. It also launched a program that flies out college students to do four-days of immersive study with current rabbinical students during winter break. And it increased its scholarship funding.
The incoming class at JTS includes students from Chile and Brazil, a few Ramah alumni, and four people named Sam; their ages range from 24 and 62, with a roughly equal ratio of men to women and a small nonbinary cohort. Most newcomers are also first-career rabbis — a contrast with Atra’s finding that two-thirds of today’s rabbinical students arrived from a different profession.
The average age of an HUC first-year, meanwhile, varies in age depending on whether they’re studying in person (28 years old) or remotely (48). Having a previous career is a prerequisite for virtual students.
Pull factors
For some of the incoming students, the time finally felt right to pursue a longtime dream. Over the course of a decorated career in law and tech, Seth Rosen, 57, would occasionally browse the Hebrew Union College website, daydreaming of going to rabbinical school.
But while he was raising a family, he couldn’t sell his house in Oakland and move to New York for five years. HUC’s virtual pathway made it possible.
An avid reader of the Talmud, Rosen says part of his motivation for becoming a rabbi now was being able to read and interpret it himself. He doesn’t know yet what he will do once he is ordained.
“I’m old enough to know that whatever plan I’ve got is not going to work out five years from now,” Rosen said. “The journey is just as important — bringing an open heart and an open mind.”
Unlike Rosen, Lilah Katz came to the idea more recently.
Katz, who is 24 and uses they/them pronouns, once planned to go to law school. After college, they worked as a paralegal in the New York Legal Assistance Fund’s LGBTQ+ unit, helping trans women who were seeking asylum from Latin America. But living in a house with other Jewish nonprofit workers, Katz — who grew up in the Conservative movement — fielded religious questions so often that roommates started calling them “rabbi.”
For Katz, the faux-honorific was humbling — and sparked something. “Like yeah, it’s a joke,” they said, “but it also kind of makes you be like, ‘Oh God, I do not know enough to be rabbi.’” Wanting to see if full-time Torah study suited them, Katz enrolled at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, a nondenominational yeshiva in Jerusalem. A week in, it was clear: “I was just like, ‘Yeah, I have to do this for my whole life.’”
Katz’s story reflects a spike in Jewish engagement in recent years. Jewish institutions across the country have largely attributed that increase to fallout from the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, with a 2025 study commissioned by the Jewish Federations of North America showing renewed interest in Jewish life holding strong 18 months after the attack.
In addition to the war in Israel, social and political upheaval and technological changes are driving people to think harder about their Jewish identity, Lewis said.
“People are seeking meaning in a volatile world and looking for a way to make a difference,” said the admissions director, “and finding the medicine of our 1000-year-old tradition as what is called for in this moment.”
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