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Converting to Judaism has defined my high school experience
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — During the pandemic, my mom decided to start baking; my friend Reagan learned Osage, a Native American language; my brother taught himself how to skateboard.
I decided to channel my free time and energy into converting to Judaism.
Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was only ever exposed to Christian theology. Almost everyone around me was a Baptist. Although my parents intentionally raised my brother and me without a focus on religion, I grew up going to Christian preschool, Christian summer camps, and being surrounded by other Christians–just because there weren’t other options. While this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I always knew that Christianity wasn’t right for me.
At first, the idea of eternal life and an all-knowing God provided comfort, but as I got older I started to feel disconnected from Christianity. Concepts like the Holy Trinity never made sense to me, and by age 12 I thought I had given up on religion entirely.
I first started looking into Judaism towards the end of 2020. I’m not really sure what led me to this; I just stumbled upon it and found that its emphasis on making the ordinary holy, repairing the world, and the pursuit of knowledge was a perfect fit for my already existing beliefs. My parents were a little bit shocked but ultimately supportive when I told them that I wanted to convert. My mom’s main concern was that I would become the target of antisemitism. “I’m happy for you and try not to think about the what-ifs,” she said while driving me to the Jewish community center so that I could board the bus headed to the BBYO Jewish youth group’s International Convention.
In the spring of 2021, I emailed the rabbi at a local synagogue about my potential conversion. During our first conversation, he asked me if I’d heard about the custom of rabbis turning away potential candidates three times. I told him I had, but that if he turned me away I would just keep coming back. After the meeting, I signed up for conversion classes and started attending services regularly — and I wasn’t alone.
According to a 2021 Tablet survey, 43% of American rabbis are seeing more conversion candidates than before. The reasons for conversion are diverse. Some candidates fell down an internet rabbit hole that led to a passion for Judaism. Others took an ancestry test and wanted to reconnect with their Jewish heritage. Many were raised as Reform Jews but weren’t Jewish according to stricter halachic, or Jewish legal, standards and decided to convert under Conservative or Orthodox auspices. Despite the common stereotype that Jews by choice must be converting for the sake of marriage, many rabbis said that converts are less likely than ever to be converting for a Jewish partner.
After meeting with a rabbi about the potential conversion, candidates are expected to learn everything they can about Judaism. In my case, that meant 21 weeks of hour-long, weekly conversion classes in addition to independent study on Jewish mysticism, traditions, and ideas. Candidates are also expected to become active members of their local Jewish community and attend services regularly.
Once the candidate and the rabbi feel they are ready to convert, a beit din, or a court usually made up of three rabbis, is assembled. They will conduct an interview, asking the candidate about what brought them to Judaism and basic questions about what was taught during conversion classes. When the beit din has guaranteed that the candidate genuinely wants to convert, the candidate immerses in the mikveh, a pool used for ritual purification. After submerging in the mikveh, the convert is considered to be officially Jewish and is typically called up for an aliyah, ascending the platform where the Torah is read.
According to Rabbi Darah Lerner, who served in Bangor, Maine before her retirement last year, the main difference between teens converting alone and teens converting with their family is the parental approval that’s needed, but otherwise the process is very similar. “I treated them pretty much as I did with adults,” she said. For me, the only parental approval needed was my mom telling my rabbi that she and my dad were fine with me starting the conversion process. She also noted that it was easier for teens to integrate into the Jewish community because people were excited to see young people interested in Judaism.
A mikveh, like this one at Mayyim Hayyim outside of Boston, is a ritual pool where Jews by choice immerse as part of the conversion process. (Courtesy Mayyim Hayyim)
She said that the Jewish community gave the teens a place where they could ask questions and not be shut down. “If they have a pushback, or a curiosity, or a problem we allow them to ask it and we give them real answers or resources,” she said.
“I feel extremely privileged when youth come to me with these questions and these desires,” Rabbi Rachael Jackson, from Hendersonville, North Carolina. Jackson has worked with three teens in the conversion process over the past two years. Like Lerner, she doesn’t require teens to wait until they turn 18 to begin the conversion process. However, it’s not unusual for rabbis to recommend that teens wait until they turn 18 to begin their conversion.
My conversion process has defined my high school experience. I’ve been able to connect with other Jews at my school through BBYO, which has helped me find a community at school and meet people who I might not have met otherwise. Although it’s made me feel farther from the Christian community I was once a part of, Judaism has given me spiritual fulfillment, a love for Israel, and a sense of community — both in my synagogue and my BBYO chapter.
Others who have gone through the process feel much the same way. “I wouldn’t even recognize myself,” said Haven Lail, 17, from Hickory, North Carolina. “My whole personality is based on being Jewish. That’s what I love.” Adopted into a Jewish family at age 12, Lail felt drawn to Judaism because of the loving and accepting community she found.
Raised as a nondenominational Christian, Lail attended church regularly with her biological parents, but not for the religious aspect. “It was all hellfire and brimstone,” she said. Neglected by her birth parents, she only went to church because she knew there would be food there.
Lail started the conversion process at age 12 through a Hebrew high school, and four years later, she submerged in the mikveh and signed a certificate finalizing her conversion. The process was simple, but she was shocked that so few Jews knew about the conversion process. “It was a little weird,” she said.
The Talmud says that because “the Jewish people were themselves strangers, they are not in a position to demean a convert because he is a stranger in their midst.” However, it isn’t uncommon for converts to feel alienated from the rest of the Jewish community. “There’s this fear of going to college and still being othered because you still won’t quite fit in with the people who have been raised Jewish,” said one high school senior from North Carolina.
He was shocked by how alienated he felt after making his conversion public, and wanted to stay anonymous because he worries that once people find out that he converted, they’ll see him differently. “I didn’t ever really explain it to anybody except for the people really close to me,” he said. But after his rabbi called him up for an aliyah — a blessing recited during the reading of the Torah — one woman from the congregation began to bring it up to him every time she saw him. “People don’t realize that it can be a touchy thing and very, very othering,” he said.
I usually don’t mind personal questions about my conversion, but asking someone why they converted or pointing out that someone is a convert is frowned upon by Jewish law. I used to feel like everyone could tell that I wasn’t raised Jewish, but after one of my BBYO advisors thought that my conversion was just a rumor and couldn’t believe that it was true, I realized that wasn’t the case.
All of my friends and peers who were raised Jewish have memories of Jewish summer camps, Shabbat dinners with family, and a lifetime of other experiences. I often struggle with not feeling “Jewish enough” or like I missed out, especially because so many Jewish customs revolve around the home and family. My parents will often come with me to Shabbat services, but don’t participate in Jewish customs or celebrate Jewish holidays with me. “Anything that is a ritual in the home, they don’t really have the ability to have that autonomy,” said Rabbi Rachael Jackson of Agudas Israel Congregation in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Grace Hamilton, a student at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, has struggled with imposter syndrome during her conversion. Ever since she started college, she’s been questioning her place in the Jewish community and hasn’t been practicing Judaism as much as she used to. “I haven’t prayed in a really long time,” she said. She used to tell herself that once she finalized her conversion she would finally feel Jewish enough, but after a conversation with her rabbi, she realized that wasn’t the case.
According to Rabbi Rochelle Tulik at Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York, many converts feel like they will never be Jewish enough. “That, no matter how hard they try, how many books they read or put on their shelves, no matter how often they come to services, or how many menorahs they light, somehow they’ll be caught,” she said in a Rosh Hashanah sermon she named “You Are Not an Imposter.”
Despite the struggles that many converts face, others like Rabbi Natasha Mann, who now serves as a rabbi at New London Synagogue in England, immediately felt at home within the Jewish community. “I felt like people were excited to have me there and wanted to hear what I had to say,” she said. After a family member mentioned that she might have Jewish ancestry, Mann began exploring out of curiosity. “I started looking into it, just because I felt that it was another piece of the puzzle,” she said.
Coming from an interreligious and intercultural family, she wanted to explore another aspect of her heritage, but ended up connecting with Judaism in a way that she hadn’t connected with any other religion. After two years of study, she decided to officially start her conversion process.
The Jewish community gave Mann a place where her ideas were taken seriously and she could have religious discussions, even as a teen. “I don’t know what my life would have looked like if I hadn’t found somewhere to really express and delve into that,” she said. “And luckily, I never have to.”
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Will Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza Actually Lead to the Next War in the Region?
FILE PHOTO: US President Donald Trump is interviewed by Reuters White House correspondent Steve Holland (not pictured) during an exclusive interview in the Oval Office in the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 14, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
Donald Trump wants to create peace in Gaza. He wants headlines that frame him as a historic dealmaker and a global statesman. But behind the carefully staged announcements and the language of “stability” and “prosperity,” Trump’s newly assembled Gaza peace structure reveals a misplaced trust in failed diplomatic elites, and fails to accurately account for Israel’s security realities.
The appointment of Sigrid Kaag to Trump’s Gaza Executive Board is emblematic of this problem.
Kaag is frequently portrayed as an experienced, neutral technocrat. Her defenders point to decades of United Nations service and her time as a Dutch minister as proof of professionalism. Yet in the Middle East, neutrality is not an abstract virtue; it has concrete consequences. And the institutional culture in which Kaag built her career has consistently betrayed Israel, while empowering those who undermine it.
This is not a personal attack. It is a political assessment.
For decades, the United Nations has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a deeply flawed lens. Israel is treated as a permanent suspect, the Palestinian leadership as a perpetual victim, and terrorism as an unfortunate but contextualized byproduct of “despair.”
This framework did not begin with Kaag, but she rose within it, succeeded within it, and continues to represent it.
That same UN ecosystem once elevated Yasser Arafat from terrorist mastermind to international statesman, without demanding that he dismantle the machinery of violence. The results were catastrophic: waves of suicide bombings, incitement, and a peace process that collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty.
The lesson should have been clear. Instead, the same thinking persists.
Figures like Kaag emphasize humanitarian access, reconstruction, and governance mechanisms while consistently avoiding the core issue: Gaza’s problems are not caused by a lack of international oversight, but by the systematic indoctrination of hatred and the glorification of violence. Without confronting that reality, no amount of technocratic management will bring peace.
Donald Trump’s political history shows a consistent pattern at times: grand gestures, dramatic announcements, and a hunger for recognition that can override strategic depth.
The Gaza peace plan features these elements, and that’s a bad omen for the future of peace in the region.
Rather than anchoring Gaza’s future in hard security guarantees for Israel, clear red lines against terror financing, and ideological deradicalization, Trump has surrounded himself with figures whose records suggest the opposite: a preference for “balance,” moral equivalence, and pressure on Israel to accommodate the unacceptable.
Unfortunately, it seems that Gaza is being used as a stage, not treated as a powder keg.
And Israel will pay the price if this experiment fails.
The composition of Trump’s Gaza councils should alarm anyone who understands the region. UN veterans, European moral arbiters, and political figures with long histories of criticizing Israel’s self-defense now sit at the table defining “peace.”
What is absent is just as telling as what is present.
There is no serious focus on dismantling terror ideology. No insistence on ending incitement. No recognition that Gaza’s suffering is directly linked to Hamas’ strategy of embedding itself within civilian infrastructure, and radicalizing the population against Israel.
Instead, Israel is once again expected to prove restraint, flexibility, and goodwill, while its enemies are treated as stakeholders rather than threats.
Trump’s defenders will argue that engagement is better than isolation, and that new structures are better than stalemate. But engagement without moral clarity is not diplomacy. It is delusion.
By empowering figures whose careers were shaped by institutions that consistently misinterpret Palestinian politics and excuse extremist behavior, Trump is not stabilizing Gaza. He is laying the groundwork for the next crisis.
Trump should prioritize hard truths over flattering headlines. He should reject failed diplomatic paradigms instead of recycling them. And he should stop mistaking international applause for strategic success.
Peace built on denial is not peace at all.
It is merely the pause before the next war.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Are We Living Through the Synagogue Burnings of the 2020s?
Smoldered remains of the Beth Israel Congregation’s library in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: Screenshot.
Six months ago, I stood on the grounds of Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. I observed a sign that read in bold, “Bombings In Jewish Community.”
I was curious about the history, so I leaned in and read further: “In 1967, Beth Israel broke ground for a new synagogue on Old Canton Road. The first service was held that March. Six months later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the new synagogue.”
I have visited synagogues across the United States, and spent years studying Jewish history through firsthand experiences visiting sanctuaries, cemeteries, memorials, and communities that thrived in places many already forget that Jews ever lived in.
So coming across a sign of a synagogue being attacked in the 1960s felt horrifying, but not unfamiliar. American Jewish history knows well what living under the shadows of hate feels like — especially in those years when Jews were accused by extremists of “masterminding a plot to ruin America.”
That led to the synagogue bombings of the late 1950s, where justice never arrived in many of the cases.
After reading that sign, I walked the garden of the Beth Israel Congregation, which has a Holocaust memorial formed from seven glass structures, each representing a part of the Holocaust. One of them depicts the Ghetto, another one Kristallnacht. One that caught my eye, was for the victims who wore striped clothes. Another one depicts the book burnings. I found myself thinking of my own family history, as all of my great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
And yet, I stood there grateful. Grateful to be an American Jew living freely, enjoying the unalienable rights this country promises its citizens. Grateful for raising my children in a land that, with all its flaws, has been a safe haven for Jewish life.
Still like many American Jews, I asked myself: Could another synagogue be attacked? Could our books burn again? Could this history return in a new form? And most of all, could the unthinkable become thinkable again?
Earlier this month, that question was answered — painfully.
Federal authorities say a 19-year-old admitted that he set fire to Beth Israel because of the building’s “Jewish ties.” The fire consumed portions of the building, some Torah scrolls, and memories of a defiant and historic Jewish community.
Synagogue attacks are often treated as isolated incidents. A tragedy for a few. An investigation for authorities. A bit of solidarity from some, and the news cycle moves on.
They are no longer reported as “The 1950s Synagogue Bombings,” which is how they were in the past, and even has its own dedicated Wikipedia page.
But looking back, over the past few years, multiple synagogues and Jewish centers in the United States have been targeted by fire.
Some have been prosecuted as arson, while most carried hate crime charges. In Texas, a man was charged and sentenced after admitting guilt to a hate crime and arson connected to an attempt to burn down Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. In Arizona, the Justice Department announced a hate crime charge tied to the Khal Chasidim synagogue fire in Casa Grande. In Florida, prosecutors charged a man tied to the fire at the Chabad Jewish center in Punta Gorda, stating that the man had “hatred towards Jewish people.”
But the latest attack in Jackson, Mississippi is symbolic. It’s not another one — it is a second act by fire on the same platform, nearly 60 years apart.
We live in a faster world now — social media, constant noise, outrage, and excitement. We often skim through things that should make us stop.
We treat extremists’ behavior as news, and hateful rhetoric as theater or comedy. We rarely pause. But standing at the Beth Israel Congregation months ago, reading what happened in 1967, worrying about what could happen again and then watching my worry become a reality — has forced me to pause and ask are we living through “The 2020s Synagogue Burnings?”
American Jewry changed dramatically over the last 60 years. Jews have done very well in this country, with most still holding onto their Judaism. And yet it pains me to say that hatred did not disappear. It changed its vocabulary, its slogans, its platforms, its activists, and its camps. But the basic “Jews are the problem” is maintained. Our houses of worship are burning throughout the land.
Jew hatred travels. It mutates. Sometimes it wears the nationalism hat, other times the “social justice” hat, and other times it wears the libertarian hat. Sometimes it’s just a joke. But the line is not hard to draw when we’re willing to draw it consistently.
When leaders in our country dismiss Nazi rhetoric as “Kids being kids” and brand them as “stupid jokes” or when Jewish leaders and politicians choose to politicize antisemitism and make it a partisan tool, it sends a confusing and ultimately a harmful message.
We should be clear.
Hate towards any group of people is wrong. Hate towards Jews for being Jewish is wrong. Nazi “jokes” are not childish or stupid, they’re corrosive. Praising terror groups is evil. Harassing a visible Jew in the streets with any political chants just because you recognize a Jew and want to intimidate him — is evil.
We the Jewish community have work to do, too. We cannot let our public voice become only “look at what they did to us.” We cannot let bigots frame the story of American Jewish life as one of living in the shadows.
While speaking of and confronting bigotry, which is real and dangerous, we should also insist on our truth and shine light — that Jewish life here has contributed quietly and profoundly to the country’s civic and moral fabric, and that our contributions, just like the contributions of many others in the country, have shaped our country for the better.
And while we do not have to justify our existence and right to belong, it is still a mistake that we allow our identity in the American public to be reduced to one of victimhood.
I am a Jewish father, and a patriot of this country. And I keep returning to the most difficult question: will my children and grandchildren read this 60 years from now and conclude the same — that nothing has changed? Or will we as a collective finally do better?
The writer is an Orthodox Jewish New York businessman.
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Palestinian Authority Admits Its True Goal: Israel ‘Is Doomed to Perish’
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
The Palestinian Authority (PA) consistently indoctrinates Palestinians to believe that Israel’s demise is inevitable and is an inherent form of justice.
This message is delivered by senior PA leaders and is reinforced repeatedly across official PA media, including news programs, children’s education, political commentary, poetry, and international forums broadcast to the Palestinian public.
This doctrine has been articulated again recently by Abbas Zaki, a senior Fatah leader and member of the Central Committee, the PA’s ruling party:
Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki: “In the end, the winner is the one who remains on the land … and those who will remain are the ones with the idea, the idea that says there is no escaping the fact that this land will be liberated, and that the land of peace cannot be based on revenge.
Israel is doomed to perish.” [emphasis added]
[Arabi 21, London-based Arab news website, Jan. 9, 2026]
Zaki’s statement presents Israel as a temporary presence and Palestinians as the enduring owners of Israel’s land, so that justice will ensure Israel’s disappearance. This is a foundational belief promoted systematically by the PA.
PA/Fatah education teaches children to see Israel as temporary:
“Palestine fell under the Zionist occupation [in 1948], which continues today … The occupation will cease to exist just as what was before it ceased to exist …”
“All of the invaders were defeated, and Palestine returned to be free and Arab.”
“[Israel] the evil occupation state … this artificial state … It is artificial because it is foreign …”
“The liberation of Palestine will only be achieved through armed struggle.”
“The Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history.”
“Palestine will be liberated and purified from the occupation’s defilement.
“Palestine is destined for full liberation … from the yoke of Zionist colonialism”
“Algeria’s experience [of the French leaving] assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end.”
[Fatah’s Waed Magazine for children ages 6-15]
On official PA television, Israel’s demise is conveyed as fact.
PA TV narrators repeatedly describe Jewish presence as a transient colonial episode destined to end, with this specific script reiterated every two years on average:
Official PA TV narrator: “The illegal immigration of the Jews to Palestine: The beginning of the illegal immigration to Palestine was in 1837 … The Jewish immigration to the land of Palestine continued as part of a colonialist Zionist plan led by the world powers at the time …
But history has never let the colonialist remain, and the occupiers have always left in the end. One day they [the Jews] too will return to where they came from.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV]
The same doctrine is embedded in PA cultural programming. On official PA TV, Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi recited a poem listing past rulers of the land — Greeks, Romans, Persians, Crusaders, and British — before concluding that Jewish rule will meet the same fate:
Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi:
Do not believe that the land will not return
How much has this land been occupied!
How much defilement!
How many soldiers have trodden upon it!
So where are the soldiers?
Where is the rule of the Greeks over us?
Where is the rule of the Tatars?
Where is the rule of the Romans?
Where is the rule of the Persians?
Where is the rule of the Crusaders?
Where is the rule of the English?
Where are the soldiers?
One day you will grow up and ask:
Where is the rule of the Jews?[Official PA TV, Dec. 7, 2025]
By placing Jewish sovereignty alongside former rulers who disappeared, the poem teaches that Israel’s rule is merely another temporary phase awaiting its end.
Official PA TV amplifies this message by hosting guests who present themselves as analysts, while repeating the same conclusion:
Tunisian journalist Khaled Krouna: “This entity [i.e., Israel] was planted in the region to be a policeman for the interests of the world’s powerful forces … Now the services it [Israel] can provide, after its failure has become apparent, after its army only scares cowards … the cost of maintaining it is much greater than the benefits its existence can bring to the superpowers.
In time, they themselves will disown it and leave it to its fate, and its fate is to fall into the hands of the Palestinians. Its fate is to disappear.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Nov. 19, 2025]
The same theme is projected internationally and broadcast back to Palestinian audiences. Speaking at the United Nations and shown on PA TV, Arab League spokesman Mohamed Nasr declared:
Arab League Spokesman at the UN Mohamed Nasr:“The occupation [i.e., Israel] – no matter how much its violence intensifies – will cease to exist, while the Palestinian state will become a reality.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Dec. 1, 2025]
Across senior leadership statements, education, historical narration, poetry, political analysis, and international advocacy, the Palestinian Authority delivers a unified talking point to its people: Israel is temporary, Palestinians are permanent, and time itself will erase Israel’s existence — a doctrine that Western governments continue to ignore while proposing to restore the PA as a governing force in Gaza.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.