Your Daily Phil: $150 million for Hillel’s centennial + Hebrew at summer camp | CPT PPP Coverage

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Good Monday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we interview Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman about a major fundraising campaign to mark the campus organization’s centennial, and feature an op-ed by Hunter Boyer on Hebrew language at Jewish summer camp. Also in this newsletter: UJA’s Eric Goldstein, Michael Siegal and Mayim Bialik. We’ll start with a look at the Z3 Conference, which gathered yesterday in the Bay Area.

The Z3 Conference, which brought 800 people to the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, Calif., yesterday, aimed to strengthen relationships between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry. As Zack Bodner, the JCC’s CEO, acknowledged, recent events may have made that a tall order.

“Here’s what we’re not going to do,” Bodner said in his speech at the conference’s morning plenary on Sunday. “We’re not going to spend a lot of time debating the pros and cons of the new Bibi [Netanyahu] government or the new U.S. Congress, we’re not going to be spending a lot of time debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we’re not going to be spending a lot of time talking about the [Israeli] Chief Rabbinate and how they see Reform Jews, and we’re not going to be spending a lot of time wringing our hands and shrying gevalt and kvetching about antisemitism… That’s not the centerpiece of why we brought you here today.”

Subsequent speakers and sessions touched on nearly all of those subjects — including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who acknowledged in a video address that “for many Jewish around the world, the results of the recent elections in Israel have brought up real questions.” Amanda Berman, founder of Zioness, which aims to create space for Zionists in progressive movements, suggested that the Israeli elections, in which the right won a majority, posed a challenge for American Jews, who “overwhelmingly identify both with the political left and as Zionists.”

Later, Iranian-American journalist and activist Roya Hakakian described how her relatives found a safe haven in Israel after an antisemitic mob burned down their family store.

Still, although the conference did address the debates that tend to occupy the Israel-Diaspora relationship, it also hoped to go beyond them in order to explore how “the unfolding story in which we have a strong homeland, and vibrant communities worldwide, presents us with unique opportunities and responsibilities in shaping our future generations,” in the words of Rabbi Amitai Fraiman, director of the Z3 Project.

To that end, while some conference sessions concerned hot-button issues (including one on campus antisemitism, and another on the Diaspora reaction to the Israeli elections), others departed from the usual fare. Those included a class on Israeli music featuring Shaanan Streett, the frontman of Israeli hip hop group Hadag Nahash; a talk on psychedelic use and Judaism; and a session featuring Israeli chef Einat Admony.

Overall, Bodner said in his opening speech, the hope was to create a positive basis for a relationship between Diaspora and Israeli Jews, despite differences that felt unavoidable.

“We have to stop pretending that Jewish trauma is going to build collective Jewish identity for the next generation,” he said. “We have to stop focusing on each other’s imperfections.”