(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.

(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.

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.”

The post Rabbinical seminaries boast highest enrollment in years, defying downward trend appeared first on The Forward.