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Growing number of young Jews turning to service to express their Jewish values

When Jon Cohen was in college a decade ago studying biology and chemistry with plans for medical school, he knew he wanted to make a difference in the world beyond the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee.

So he and some friends decided to launch a community project teaching science to children from low-income households living nearby. Every Friday, they’d conduct experiments with the kids designed to spark excitement and curiosity about the world around them in a way that would leave an impact on them beyond school.

The idea of service was something Cohen had grown up with in his more affluent Miami suburb, and he wanted to take some time off between college and medical school to devote to it. When, as a college senior, Cohen saw an email about a Jewish service fellowship with Repair the World, he applied.

“I was really interested in seeing what justice-minded Judaism was like,” Cohen recalls.

His family didn’t practice Judaism framed through the lens of morals and values, he said, but rather through rituals like Sabbath observances and attending synagogue. He didn’t go to a Jewish day school or summer camp, he didn’t know Hebrew, and when his parents divorced, they stopped observing Shabbat, leaving Cohen with few pathways for Jewish connection.

When Cohen started his fellowship in New York for Repair the World, he realized he had found a different model for Jewish action — one that felt more meaningful. Cohen worked with Digital Girl, an organization that teaches computer coding to kids of all genders in underfunded schools in neighborhoods like Chinatown, Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York where many people live in poverty.

Cohen is one of over 230 people who have “served” full-time through Repair the World’s fellowship. Another 740 have completed Repair’s service corps, a three-month, part-time Jewish service learning program for young adults. Since 2009, Repair has partnered with approximately 2,880 service organizations, resulting in over 516,000 acts of service and learning. The goal is to reach 1 million by 2026.

This kind of Jewish engagement is indicative of a sea change in the Jewish communal world: Service is now an integral part of American Jewish life and a meaningful form of Jewish expression, especially for younger adults. Service projects increasingly are how American Jews put their faith into practice and find purpose through humanitarian acts.

“Younger generations are deeply passionate about making the world a better place and improving their communities,” said Robb Lippitt, chair of Repair the World’s board of directors. “Connecting this passion to their Jewish values is something that Repair does really well.”

The organization sends Jewish young adults to serve both with Jewish and non-Jewish organizations addressing needs such as food, housing, and other local needs. Repair the World’s activities are structured with an eye toward making them meaningful Jewish experiences.

“Everything we do is done through both a Jewish and a social impact lens,” said Cindy Greenberg, Repair’s president and CEO. “In addition to hands-on service, we look at the issue area at hand and ask: Why is my service needed? What are the underlying societal challenges impacting this issue and how might it be healed? And what does Jewish wisdom have to say about these challenges and our obligation to repair the world?”

Janu Mendel, the Southeast regional director of Repair the World, tends to vegetation at a local community farm in Miami. (Courtesy of Repair the World)

Greenberg said expanding the Jewish service movement will lead to a flourishing Jewish community and strengthen society generally.

Repair the World was founded 13 years ago to make service a defining element of Jewish life. Since then, studies have shown that Jewish young adults increasingly express their Jewish identity by caring for the vulnerable.

“Over 13 years, Repair the World has been the driving force of the Jewish service movement, ensuring that these experiences are grounded in serious Jewish learning,” said Barry Finestone, president and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation, one of Repair’s funders. “Repairs organizational partnerships, fellowship programs, and proven best practices define the movement today — and enable so many to find purpose in Jewish life while creating change.”

While most of those who serve with Repair — about three quarters — are Jewish, much of the impact is in non-Jewish communities. About eight years ago, for example, the organization began partnering with St. John’s Bread and Life, a faith-based emergency food provider in Brooklyn that operates a food pantry, serves hot meals and hosts a mobile kitchen.

St. John’s serves approximately 1,000 hot meals a day, according to Sister Marie Sorenson, the chaplain there. The current Repair the World fellow serving with St. John’s has continued volunteer outreach, ensuring that unhoused and food-insecure individuals and families in the neighborhood have their nutritional needs met with compassion and respect. Repair also has organized volunteers to give thousands of toiletries, personal hygiene kits, baby wipes, diapers and baby formula to clients of St. John’s.

“Because we are both faith-based service organizations, we have really connected well with each other,” Sorenson said.

This commitment to food justice is connected to Repair’s service impact nationwide. Repair has mobilized volunteers to donate 200,000 pounds of food and prepared or served more than 100,000 meals to people in need throughout the country.

In the partnership with St. John’s, the Christian participants tend to be locals who have extra time or are retirees, whereas the Repair volunteers are “young people who value service, who value giving back to the community,” Sorenson noted.

Repair is funded by a wide array of supporters, including Jewish federations across the country, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. Repair’s expansive pandemic response, Serve the Moment, drew funding from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and the Jewish Communal Response and Impact Fund, known as JCRIF.

Repair has also invested significantly in partnerships with other Jewish organizations to maximize reach and impact.

“The power of Repair’s model is the opportunity it provides for young adult volunteers to learn from and work in deep partnership with the communities they are serving — while engaging in Jewish life and learning,” said Lisa Eisen, Repair’s founding board chair and co-president of Schusterman Family Philanthropies. “We saw this so clearly through the pandemic, when Repair mobilized tens of thousands of young Jews to support people in need while also providing an avenue for them to stay connected to each other and Jewish community.”

Eric Fingerhut, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, described service programs as a gateway to greater Jewish involvement. “We believe service is a powerful tool for expanding engagement in Jewish life across the system,” Fingerhut said.

Volunteers paint and restore a community space during MLK Weekend of service in New York. (Shulamit Photo + Video)

Lippitt, Repair’s board chair, noted that Repair’s service work is especially important given the divisions in the country right now.

“It’s a vitally important bridge-building experience with our neighbors in these divided times,” he said. “The benefits that come at this moment in American history of getting out in the community and serving alongside people who may not see the world as you do are just immense for the community and for society.”

Many of the young Jews who work with Repair the World come from cohorts that traditional Jewish organizations have struggled to reach. In the most recent data collected by the organization, Repair found that between 19 and 25% of participants identify as having a disability; 25% of participants and 44% of corps members identify as non-white; and 75% of fellows, 42% of corps members, and 22% of participants identify as LGBTQ.

After Jon Cohen finished his yearlong fellowship with Repair, he went to medical school as planned, but he soon realized it wasn’t the path he wanted. When an opportunity came up to join Repair’s staff in Miami, he jumped at the opportunity, staying for three years. He now is the director of community mobilization at Keshet, the Jewish LGBTQ+ rights organization, and serves on Repair’s board of directors.

“Service has always been something that was important to me but never existed through Judaism until I did the fellowship,” Cohen said of his experience. “It was groundbreaking for me to learn about tikkun olam and all of my Jewish values. It was such an educational experience, and now I feel so proudly and passionately Jewish because of the foundation Repair the World gave me.”

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The post Growing number of young Jews turning to service to express their Jewish values appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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HaKarot HaTov: Artificial Intelligence Can Never Replace Human Love and Wonder

Illustrative: Fourth grade students from Kibbutz Parod with certificates they received from the Israel Antiquities Authority for finding and turning in an ancient oil lamp. Photo: IAA.

One of the things that primary teachers regularly encounter is children calling them “mom” or “dad.” This is usually followed by serious embarrassment on behalf of the child, and possibly nervous laughter from their classmates.

Most teachers will just smooth incidents like this over, but the good ones will perhaps reflect on its underlying meaning — how in a very real sense for the child, they can temporarily become the child’s mother or father. It’s an expression of the incredibly important role teachers play in the lives of children, acting as the adult presence that bridges across from their family existence to their encounters with the larger world. This is what, unconsciously, children are tapping into when they mix up “mom” and “miss.”

Teachers are really important to kids — and the emotional investment that teachers make in children, and that children make in teachers, is enormous. Sometimes teachers can even provide the love and care that a child’s parents cannot. Teachers matter. Or at least they did.

What it seems the future holds, as AI models improve exponentially, is children each having their own AI-powered tutor responding in real time to their learning needs. AI’s ability to gauge the progress, challenges, and requirements of each child are likely far beyond anything a human teacher could ever hope to achieve. I don’t doubt that this is coming soon, and that many parents, and many governments, will be thinking of the undeniable benefits that these AI tutors will bring.

They don’t need a salary, they don’t need time off, and they can be there at any time of day. On top of that, millions of children are already using AI chat bots for emotional support. AI tutors will soon combine academic and emotional and pastoral support in one package. Unlike human teachers, they will never get tired, or angry, or disappointed, or get distracted from their charges’ needs.

We might wonder why any of this might be a problem. In a near future where robots will care for the elderly, do our shopping, and undertake surgery, and other AI bots will be our lawyers and accountants, as they already are our software engineers, why does it matter if children are taught by AI tutors?

Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps children and parents won’t be able to tell the difference, or even care if they can. Having human teachers won’t be important. Maybe we will just need a few humans to check if the AI tutors are on track to ensure that the kids of the future (or the kids of next year) learn enough to read and write, and to count well enough so that they don’t spend their universal basic income all at once.

I had a friend who was a great teacher who taught in Jewish schools in London. He died a decade ago, far too young. He was dyslexic and he told me how he used to share this with his pupils and get them to help him with his spelling on the board. A small thing perhaps, but I just think how much this communicated to those young people — about dealing with adversity, compassion, and empathy. I also remember how, when I was walking with him, we might bump into some of his old pupils. Always, they were so pleased to see him.

He was still “sir,” someone important in their lives, who had helped them navigate the path from their families, out to the world as independent adults. There was also, I would venture, something there that no robot teacher or AI tutor could ever truly have. That thing was love. The love that teachers bring to their work, that drives their professionalism and their commitment and care for the next generation.

Children know that teachers are not parents — that they only come into their lives for a short time and then leave. Yet they also know that just like their parents, teachers can love and care about them — really care about what happens to them. Children also learn how adults apart from their parents can, like my friend, not be perfect, and not know everything, but still set an example through their own behavior, and push them to achieve or keep going, even when it is challenging. They can feel how this connection with adults, with other human beings, molds and creates their adult selves.

Another thing that my friend’s pupils had was gratitude. As Dostoevsky wrote, gratitude is a fundamentally human quality, because someone has to give it, and someone has to receive it.  But Judaism recognized this decades before the Russian literary geniuses of the 19th century.

The Jewish concept of HaKarot HaTov or “Recognizing the Good” means gratitude, but it also implies something transcendent — the wonder of just taking the time to stop and reflect on what we have. HaKarot HaTov teaches us that it’s through gratitude to other people that we come closer to G-d. Large language models and algorithms don’t have aims, or desires, or feelings. They can’t love. AI tutors quite literally are incapable of caring whether the children they work with live or die. They can’t receive gratitude from their students, or give it, not really, because there is no “them.” Perhaps we should think more than twice before we sign up to an education system where children have no one to say thank you to.

Joseph Mintz is Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL. Follow him @jmintzuclacuk. His views are his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

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The Palestinian Authority Just Paid ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Salaries to 8,000 Terrorists

The opening of a hall that the Palestinian Authority named for a terrorist who killed 125 people. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.

The mask is off: The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that 8,000 terrorist prisoner pensioners would receive their monthly Pay-for-Slay “pension” salary this week — and confirmations of receipt of the deposits are already being observed over social media.

A Palestinian social media post confirming Pay-for-Slay payments have gone out.

The minimum amount for such salaries is 4,000 shekels for terrorists who spent five years in prison. Going by that minimum, the PA just paid these terrorists — which constitute only one third of all Pay-for-Slay recipients — at least 32 million shekels — over US $10 million.

However, in actuality, this most conservative estimate is far lower than the amount that was likely paid out, as some of the more infamous terrorists released in recent hostage deals have spent 30 or more years in prison. Terrorists with such status receive at least 12,000 shekels each month.

A chart detailing Palestinian payments to terrorists.

One year after PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and the EU that he was ending Pay-for-Slay, there is no escaping the fact that this was just another deception and a lie.

The PA remains an unreformed sponsor of terror.

The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared. 

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Is Hebrew a European Language? Debunking Five Myths About Modern Hebrew

A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

If you spend enough time on social media, you’re likely going to come across claims about Hebrew that will make your head spin:

Hebrew is a European language.

Hebrew is actually stolen Arabic.

There is no connection between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew.

For any student of Jewish history or a Hebrew speaker, these outrageous assertions are not just patently wrong — they’re utterly absurd.

Yet they are not random. They form part of a broader effort to delegitimize Zionism and deny the Jewish people’s historic ties to the Land of Israel. This piece examines some of those claims, and the facts that dismantle the myths.

Myth: Hebrew Was a Dead Language Until Eliezer Ben Yehuda Revived It

Hebrew was not a dead language before the late 19th century. But it was not yet the dynamic, everyday vernacular spoken today by millions in Israel and around the world.

To understand the roots of modern Hebrew, we first must go back to the second century C.E. Following the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hebrew gradually declined as a spoken language among Jews in the Land of Israel, as Aramaic and other languages took precedence.

But Hebrew did not disappear and did not cease to exist as a language. Rather, it transitioned from a daily spoken language into a primarily literary and liturgical one, preserved in prayer, scholarship, poetry, legal discourse, and correspondence.

The Jewish legal corpus, the Mishnah, was written a number of centuries later in Hebrew.

Rabbinic commentaries, correspondence between different Jewish communities, and scholarly texts (including a medical textbook) were all written in Hebrew throughout late Antiquity and the Medieval periods. The first Hebrew printing press in the Land of Israel was established in the 16th century.

The Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of Hebrew newspapers and a new Hebrew literature.

All of this occurred before Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s time.

What he sought to do was take the Hebrew language and turn it into a spoken tongue that would aid in the communication between Jews from different communities.

It is true that before Ben Yehuda arrived on the scene, there were Jews in the Land of Israel who spoke Hebrew. There were even attempts in the late 19th century to establish purely Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine. However, there were no speakers whose primary tongue was Hebrew or who were native Hebrew speakers. People could speak Hebrew on the street but would go home and speak in other languages to their family and friends.

Ben Yehuda’s Hebrew project saw the establishment of the first “Hebrew-language home,” with his son brought up in a strictly Hebrew-speaking environment.

The revival of Hebrew gained decisive momentum during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), when waves of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel embraced it not merely as a literary language, but as a spoken vernacular, with Hebrew officially adopted as the language of the Zionist movement in 1904.

By the time the British Mandate of Palestine was established in 1922, Hebrew was designated as one of the Mandate’s three official languages.

By 1948, 93 percent of Israeli children under the age of 15 used Hebrew as their primary language.

While Ben Yehuda is largely credited with starting this linguistic revolution, it was essentially a collaborative effort with his family members and other Hebraists expanding Hebrew’s vocabulary to turn it into the modern and dynamic language that we know today.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is a European Language

Truth: One of the ways in which those opposed to the return of the Jews to their indigenous homeland cast doubt upon the connection between modern Israel and ancient Israel is by claiming that the Hebrew spoken today is not the same as that spoken in the land 2,000 years ago — and that modern Hebrew is, in fact, a European language.

This claim points to the revitalization of Hebrew by a European Jew, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and the adoption of words from European languages (such as English, German, Russian, and French) by the modern Hebrew dictionary.

However, this is a red herring.

All languages adopt terms from other languages. In ancient times, Hebrew manuscripts borrowed terms from neighboring languages such as Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin.

So, too, today modern Hebrew is influenced by foreign languages. The same with Arabic, English, Russian, and Japanese. Nearly all languages make some use of “loanwords.” Hebrew’s use of “loanwords” does not turn the language suddenly into a European tongue.

As we will see in the next section, despite the modern Hebrew dictionary being developed by a European Jew, modern Hebrew is based on Biblical Hebrew and is, indeed, a Semitic language.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is Not a Semitic Language

Truth: Similar to the myth that modern Hebrew is a European language, people also make the absurd claim that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language.

One of the main pieces of “evidence” cited for this claim is that the pronunciation of some Hebrew letters is different from the pronunciation in other Semitic tongues, like Arabic. The two most prominent letters that are brought up in this argument are the guttural Ayin and Het.

Of course, there are several points that undermine this claim.

First, pronunciation is not an indication of whether a language is Semitic or not.

As pointed out by Hebrew language researcher Elon Gilad, Semitic tongues are defined by their three-consonant roots, a structure that existed in Biblical Hebrew and continues to exist in modern Hebrew.

Second, even other Semitic languages feature different pronunciations based on geographic region. There are certain pronunciation differences between the Arabic spoken in Egypt and the Arabic spoken in Jordan and the Arabic spoken in Iraq. However, they are still considered Semitic languages.

Third, even some ancient peoples who spoke Semitic languages, such as the Akkadians and Samaritans, lost the glottal stop in their pronunciation. Yet, no one considered de-classifying their pronunciation as “Semitic.”

Lastly, the more guttural pronunciation of Hebrew is still practiced by some Israelis whose families came from Arabic-speaking lands, particularly the Yemenites. This does not make their Hebrew Semitic while the Hebrew of another Israeli, speaking the same exact words just in a different accent, would be considered a non-Semitic tongue.

Myth: Modern Hebrew is Based on Arabic

The opposite of the “Hebrew is European” myth is the equally false myth that modern Hebrew is based on Arabic.

According to this myth, a large percentage of modern Hebrew (some claim up to 80%) is made up of Arabic words.

As mentioned above, modern Hebrew does use “loanwords” from Arabic (as well as other languages) but its vocabulary and grammar are not a large-scale coopting of Arabic.

This myth is meant to deny the ties between Biblical and modern Hebrew, thus also severing the historic ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and depicting Israeli Jews as somehow fraudulent.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Speakers Cannot Understand Biblical Hebrew

It is true that modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are not the same.

However, it is not true that a modern Hebrew speaker would not understand the Bible.

While there are structural differences between the two Hebrews and there isn’t a 100 percent overlap between the two vocabularies, an educated Israeli would be able to open the Bible and understand a good portion of the Hebrew text.

Analysts have noted that the relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is much closer than the relationship between ancient Greek and modern Greek (which are considered linguistic relatives).

The relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is likened to the relationship between Shakespearean English and modern English. While the modern English speaker may not be able to read an entire play without assistance, they will recognize the language used by the Bard as being similar to their own tongue.

However, there are some who claim that a student of Biblical Hebrew (with no grounding in modern Hebrew) would not be able to understand a contemporary Hebrew text due to the developments that have taken place in the language.

That observation is hardly surprising. Languages evolve over centuries – English today would be barely intelligible to a reader of Chaucer. Yet evolution does not mean rupture. Modern Hebrew rests on the same grammatical foundations and core vocabulary that have bound Jewish texts and communities together for millennia.

Its revival was not the creation of something new, but the renewal of something enduring.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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