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The Conservative movement youth group was already struggling. Then came COVID.
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) — Weeks before United Synagogue Youth’s International Convention in December 2021, Alexa Johnson picked out some of the exciting seminars she wanted to attend. It would be her first big USY event and the current high school sophomore was excited to visit Washington, D.C. from her home in Los Angeles.
But then the Omicron variant hit and the event was canceled. She was disappointed but figured she would go the following year. Then she learned that there would be no 2022 convention and she started questioning her affiliation with the national organization. Why should she stay affiliated with the Conservative movement youth group if they failed to provide her with engaging programming?
“I just feel there really hasn’t been enough programming as a whole,” said Johnson, who was looking forward to meeting other Conservative Jewish teens like her. Overall the programming dissatisfaction from her and other members of the 35-person chapter at Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center started after the pandemic. “We just feel like it’s really hard to get people involved because there isn’t much programming at a regional or international level that people want to go to or look fun to them,” said Johnson.
United Synagogue Youth serves almost 8,250 Jewish youth from 3rd to 12th grade as the primary Conservative youth group since its founding in 1951. Through local, regional and international events, generations of Jews have participated in USY, but for some, this may be the end of the road for their involvement.
For decades now, Conservative Judaism has seen their numbers fall as members flock to other denominations like Reform and the United States becomes increasingly less religious. In the 1950s and 1960s, Conservative Judaism — which, despite its name, is a centrist movement between more liberal Reform and the traditionalist Orthodoxy — was the largest Jewish denomination. Now, only 15% of American Jews identify as Conservative, according to the Pew Research Center.
With Conservative numbers on the decline, United Synagogue Youth is struggling to stay on its feet. Julie Marder, the interim senior director of teen engagement, was open about the organization’s membership struggles. “Coming out of the pandemic, numbers just weren’t where they used to be,” Marder said. “They were lower than we can continue to sustain.”
While the membership decline predated the pandemic, COVID undid a lot of their work to gain back members.
Stacey Glazer, associate director of synagogue support, who also oversees the southwest region of USY, said that the southwest region was successfully building up their membership pre-pandemic, but once COVID hit, the region’s progress was erased.
A staff shortage also led to reduced international and regional programming across the organization. As of publication, there were seven events listed for the 15 regions.
The challenges the staff face turn into frustration and disappointment for the teenage members.
Dan Lehavi, a high school senior who serves on the USY board of his Los Angeles synagogue and on the Far West Regional General Board, witnesses the changes firsthand. He said in 2018 and 2019, his region filled a banquet hall for the annual regional convention, but coming back after the pandemic, the group could fit into a much smaller room. “They did their best to make it a memorable weekend as possible, but it just doesn’t have the same energy when there are so few people,” said Lehavi.
As someone who has grown up with USY, Lehavi is disappointed by the decline in attendance and engagement. “It’s just really sad,” Lehavi said. “Generally, I think that USY has been an invaluable resource for the Conservative movement as a whole. I hope that the future of the Conservative movement is a lot brighter than the present.”
Despite serving a large Jewish community spanning across southern California, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, and more, the region did not organize many region-wide events. During the last school year, Far West offered five events, including a regional dance that was canceled due to low registration. This year, Far West is currently only offering one regional event, in partnership with the Southwestern region. The region hopes to announce another region-wide event later in the year.
“It has just made our chapter not feel like a USY chapter,” said Samuel Svonkin, a member of Far West USY from Los Angeles. “I don’t feel like we have any connection to USY itself.” Svonkin said that regional programming lacks a pull for his fellow members and the association with USY doesn’t attract teens.
Svonkin has been a member of USY since he was 13. He grew up with teens at his synagogue going to USY events and making friends and great memories. Now, he feels like his generation is being ignored. “I feel like they’re not focusing on what their youth want. And they’re instead trying to make something that works well for them. I think they’re struggling as a result of their own incompetence of looking at what teens actually want,” he said.
USY staff acknowledge that there are fewer events overall but say they are working to improve the teen experience. Glazer, associate director of synagogue support, who also oversees the southwest region of USY, suggests that Svonkin reach out to a local staff person. “If we don’t, we don’t hear from the teens —which, at the end of the day, this is who we’re here to serve — then it’s hard to know what they want,” she said.
In previous years, USY’s Marder said, there was no need to heavily advertise regional and international events; teens would just attend with their synagogues naturally. But now, “We can’t just build a regional convention and assume that people are going to come because we created it. We need to take a step back and start doing more local programming and support the chapters and help them build. Then we can build the bigger programs,” said Marder. Attracting more attendees is not an easy fix, but Marder and the rest of USY are working to build the best programs that they can create.
As they continue to regroup, USY is working towards supporting congregations in teen engagement and rebuilding the pipeline to USY. “That means redesigning and rethinking how we are running our regional and international programs to build up to the large programs that we once had,” Marder said. “We want to do it with excellence. To not just throw a program out there to throw out a program. That we are creati
This year, in place of an international convention, USY offered three different summits: a Heschel Summit at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, a Civil Rights Journey based in Alabama and Georgia, and a Teen Climate Activism Retreat set in Maryland. Stacey Glazer wants USY’s events like these summits to focus on what young Jewish teens are interested in, whether that is religion or social justice.
Teens from Pinwheel USY, the Pacific Northwest Region of the Conservative movement youth group, attend an event in July 2022. (Via Facebook)
In addition to these three retreats, USY planned on hosting a Teen Leadership Summit in Denver, but the event was canceled. Glazer did not have an answer as to why the summit was canceled.
Focusing on what teens are interested in proved to be successful for USY. Last December, the official Instagram account reported that the Civil Rights Journey only had seven spots left, four days before the registration deadline. Moreover, over 1,200 teens participated in regional or international programming, according to an Instagram post summarizing some of USY’s successes in the second half of 2022.
On top of rethinking the way USY creates programs, last year, USY also cut membership fees for its individual members, a cost that was absorbed by the synagogue. Synagogues now pay just one fee to have all of its members be associated with the national organization. “I think we had some pretty good success with [cutting fees] this year,” Marder said. USY would not provide specifics to JTA but did say the organization is not losing money because of the pay structure change.
At the end of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s fiscal year in 2022, the parent organization of USY reported that they collected a little over $6.3 million in membership dues, around a $45,000 increase from 2021. But that is still a drop from 2019, when United Synagogue collected over $7 million dollars in membership fees. Despite a recent increase in collected membership fees, the organization did see a stark decline in membership fees between 2019 and 2022, according to published figures.
Nevertheless, Glazer provided statistics that show membership growing. In March of 2018, USY recorded 5,138 members from 3rd grade to 12th grade. In June of 2020, USY recorded 4,408 members across those same demographics. From 2020 to their members now, they recorded an increase of about 3800 members as they now record having over 8,200 members.
Membership numbers are on the rise, but USY is having struggles with staff shortages, a large cause of reduced programming. Marder said that of the 12 regional staff members, only eight work full-time. With 15 active regions, supporting each region equally is a challenge. For regional overnight events this year, many nearby regions combined their events so more attention from staff and youth leaders could be put into the events.
Rather than hiring more staff, Stacey Glazer said that the organization wanted to work with the staff they have and “maybe come up with a new structure where we’re using each of our employees to the best benefit to USY as a whole,” said Glazer. She also said that the lack of staff is not because of financial pressures, but because they are working on restructuring the ways they function as a staff. And Glazer acknowledged that they will eventually need to hire more staff.
Additionally, Marder said that there are fewer full-time chapter directors at synagogues. During the pandemic, when Jewish organizations like synagogues were cutting staff, youth departments were heavily affected. Marder said that synagogues with chapter directors task them with other youth-related jobs as well.
The time USY is taking to rebuild may be causing the Far West region to struggle, but not all regions are dragging behind. Sigal Judd, a teen member of the Central Region — which encompasses parts of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia — was excited about the current status and future of her region. “We have really grown in the past few years and have had many more events to keep the people coming,” said Judd.
For Jewish teenagers who do not attend Jewish high schools, finding connections with other Jewish youth can be hard. Judd is grateful for the relationships USY gives her. “I am lucky to have these friendships from [Central Region USY] and a pen pal from the Far West region. I love being a part of the Jewish community through USY and growing my Jewish identity surrounded by kids like me,” she said.
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Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique?
AppleTV+’s new thriller Unconditional has the trappings of so much streaming content.
A young woman disappears into hostile territory. Her mother, already juggling a family health crisis, does her own sleuthing to get her daughter back. People die, twisty alliances emerge. It’s all part of the suspense boiler plate, and it sizzles just enough to keep your interest. What makes the show, airing May 8, different from every other show is the early response.
Sight almost entirely unseen, the internet was in an uproar. The show is Israeli, and the announcement trailer showed the character Gali (Ronn Talia Lynne) in her IDF uniform. Pro-Palestine accounts were quick to shout “hasbara” or “overt ziopropaganda” for a show whose premise is ostensibly a sympathetic story of an Israeli taken prisoner by the evil, Putin-era Russian state. (The trailer makes no mention of Palestinians or a war in Gaza. The show doesn’t either.)
The online response alone proves the challenging optics for anything Israeli, but the show actually has quite a bit to say about the Jewish state’s propaganda apparatus — within the country and without.
On a layover in the Moscow Airport, Gali and her mother, Orna (Liraz Chamami), are taken in for questioning. Security claims to have found drugs in Gali’s backpack — an echo of the Naama Issacher affair from 2019 — and she’s summarily sentenced to seven years in a Russian jail.
Orna returns to Israel and hires a PR handler to plead Gali’s case. Together they curate a specific image to sell to the state media.
Gali is a “happy, good-hearted girl. She served in the army, like everyone” and even extended her service, Orna says in radio and television interviews. The file photo for news segments is exactly what so many outside of Israel would object to: Gali in uniform. In Israel it tugs heart strings. Abroad, it makes the abductee a war criminal who had it coming.
It’s probably not giving much away, given that the hands behind this show are the creators of Hatufim, which became a hit in the U.S. as the antihero-forward War on Terror commentary Homeland, that Gali is not a perfect victim. This is a strange sort of hasbara, if one Israel often produces, the kind that’s peopled by problematic characters operating in the society’s gray zones. (See streaming hit Fauda, following a morally-dubious undercover unit made up of trigger-happy adulterers exploiting their Palestinian contacts.)
What’s surprising, given the premise, is how much time the show spends not in Russia or Israel, but in India, where Gali and Orna were touring before their fateful missed connection in Moscow. It’s here we’re given entree into the Ugly Israeli abroad, a stereotype that is growing increasingly common thanks to reports of poor behavior — stealing money from temples, creating chaos in hospitals and restaurants — in the global East. (On the flip side, many Israelis, like a couple at a noodle shop in Vietnam, are being harassed by other tourists for no reason other than their country of origin and some feel the need to hide their identity while traveling.)
Gali sings the praises of an Indian gastropub that will give you dysentery. “We are so lucky because for the last three months the kitchen has been condemned by the health department,” she smirks. “But yesterday some truck driver hit a wild boar, so they gave them an exemption. So it won’t be a waste.”
In a later episode, one of Gali’s companions wisecrack about the pestilential heat and jibe that prisons in India are particularly atrocious. (This must ring alarm bells for those aware of Israel’s carceral system for Palestinians.)
Russia is equally backward. Unlike in Israel, “not everyone here is happy to work with a woman,” a Russian arms dealer weighs in. If you didn’t get it, these countries are backward. Israel has its problems, but at least it has women in power!
Watching, I was reminded of social media posts by Indians complaining about racism and drug use from IDF veterans on the so-called “Hummus trail.” One post by AJ+ said the soldiers come there to “detox” from “carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”
Unconditional is under no illusions that Israelis can be a disruptive presence. If anything, it pushes the concept to new places. These Sabras ruin mindfulness workshops and start shoot-outs in hotel lobbies. It’s not great for the brand.
But then again, we live in a climate where simply acknowledging the existence of Israelis — as seen in a recent ballyhoo surrounding author R.F. Kuang — can prove controversial or politically-loaded, no matter how neutral the depiction.
Why Apple would give their imprimatur to an Israeli project today, when public opinion of the Jewish state has fallen off a demographic cliff, is a valid question likely explained by the positive reception of another Israeli import on the streamer, the show Tehran, about an IDF hacker stuck in Iran. From within the silos it’s hard to tell if audiences will cancel their subscriptions, as some have threatened.
Maybe, like Gali’s uniform, the show is a Rorschach. BDS types may boycott, yet the show seems to echo many of their talking points about Israel’s overzealous campaign in Gaza after Oct. 7 — at least by way of metaphor.
In a late episode, Orna tells her government companion Rita (Evgenia Dodina) about a time a classmate broke Gali’s arm, and the teacher excused his actions because his mother was in the hospital.
“You’re exactly like the teacher,” Rita tells Orna. “You give me a thousand excuses for Gali. ‘It’s because of me. It’s not her fault. Poor thing.’ It doesn’t matter she didn’t understand what she was getting into, and it doesn’t matter she didn’t mean to.”
Orna says it’s different with Gali — because it’s her daughter. One can overlook a lot when it’s your family, or, for that matter, your country.
The post Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City
(JTA) — An Israeli man was indicted on Thursday in connection to the violent assault of a Catholic nun in Jerusalem last month, after prosecutors said he targeted her over her Christian identity.
Yona Schreiber, 36, from the West Bank settlement of Peduel, was arrested last week and has since been indicted on charges of “assault causing actual injury motivated by hostility toward the public on the grounds of religion, as well as simple assault,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement.
According to the indictment, Schreiber, who is Jewish, attacked the nun just outside of the Old City in Jerusalem because he identified her as a Catholic nun. Schreiber allegedly pushed and then kicked the nun as she was lying on the ground and also attacked a passerby who attempted to intervene.
תקיפת הנזירה אתמול באזור קבר דוד בירושלים – שוטרי מרחב דוד איתרו את החשוד (36) ועצרו אותו בחשד לתקיפה ממניע גזעני >>> pic.twitter.com/agRpznR84X
— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) April 30, 2026
The nun, a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research, suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the state attorney’s office said.
The attack, which drew condemnation from Catholic leaders as well as faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, comes amid mounting concern over hostility toward Christian clergy and holy sites in Israel.
Cases of Jews harassing Christians have risen sharply in recent years. Last month, the IDF punished a soldier who was filmed bludgeoning a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. This week, the IDF also announced that it would discipline a different soldier who was seen placing a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary in a photo posted on social media.
Israel’s attorney general asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, where the indictment was filed, to hold Schreiber in detention for the duration of the legal proceeding.
The assault carries a maximum prison sentence of three years, which could increase to six years if prosecutors prove the attack was motivated by religious bias.
The post Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish real estate magnate Steven Roth likens Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric to ‘from the river to the sea’
(New York Jewish Week) — Jewish real estate mogul Steven Roth compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric this week to racial slurs and pro-Palestinian rhetoric on an earnings call for his company, Vornado Realty Trust.
“I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Roth said, referring to the phrase commonly used at pro-Palestinian protests that many Jewish groups consider antisemitic.
The remark by Roth, who has long been a notable philanthropist to Jewish causes, adds to mounting tensions between New York business leaders and Mamdani over his recently announced “pied-à-terre” tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million.
During the call Tuesday, Roth also expressed support for Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, whose $238 million dollar penthouse was featured in a video by Mamdani announcing plans for the tax last month.
“We are all shocked that our young mayor would pull this stunt in front of Ken’s home and single him out for ridicule,” Roth said. “The ugly, unnecessary video stunt is personal for Ken and sort of personal for me.”
Roth’s comments touched on a longstanding source of friction between Mamdani and some New York Jewish leaders, who have criticized the mayor over his views on Israel and his previous defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” another common pro-Palestinian slogan viewed by some as a call to violence against Jews.
In the wake of Mamdani’s election, some Jewish business leaders, including Dave Portnoy, the Jewish founder of Barstool Sports, said that they planned to leave the city altogether, citing the mayor’s fiscal policies and concerns about antisemitism under his leadership.
In a statement responding to Roth’s comments, Mamdani’s office said that he wanted all New Yorkers to succeed, including “business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city the economic engine of America.”
“That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink,” the statement continued. “The status quo is unsustainable and unjust. If we want this city to become a place that working people can afford, we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share.”
The post Jewish real estate magnate Steven Roth likens Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric to ‘from the river to the sea’ appeared first on The Forward.