Last week, Harvard finally settled two Title VI lawsuits accusing it of tolerating antisemitism on campus. The elite academic institution agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to clarify that its nondiscrimination policies protect Israeli and Jewish students and to adopt the somewhat controversial definition of antisemitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which was adopted as federal policy under 2019 and 2025 Trump executive orders.
This settlement follows a dramatic rise in antisemitic speech and action at campuses across the nation, and increasing alienation, discomfort and real fear on the part of some Jewish students. For many of them, Hillel International, the world’s largest and most inclusive Jewish campus organization, serves as a safe haven. A Hillel is a nonprofit with an affiliation structure. Hillel International raises money for the campus organizations, which also raise money and offer all of their services for free to students.
Some 200,000 students at more than 850 colleges and universities in the U.S. and around the world hang out at a campus Hillel house at some point each school year, sharing meals and conversation, volunteering, studying, maybe learning Torah or going to Friday night services. Established in 1923 by Rabbi Benjamin Frankel at the University of Illinois, Hillel’s home-away-from-home role has taken on a new importance for many students this past year. Funders have taken note: The organization reported its largest-ever annual conference in December. It also rallied major donors for its centennial campaign, as we wrote last year.
Hillel International President and CEO Adam Lehman has been at the helm during this difficult and important period. Lehman graduated from Harvard Law School and then spent a few decades as an executive and entrepreneur, including as a senior vice president at AOL. He served as Hillel’s COO and interim CEO, before taking on the role of CEO in 2019. He was there for the centennial campaign, called Promise of a New Generation, which launched in 2022, and led the charge to raise $150 million by the end of 2024. IP checked in with him to see how that went, and how the campus organization is faring during this complicated, challenging time for global Jewry (and also the globe writ large).
So Hillel launched its centennial campaign with the aim of raising $150 million by the end of 2024. Now, it’s 2025. Did you reach your goal?
Yes. We have raised more than $200 million and we extended the campaign by virtue of continuing interest on many campuses to participate and leverage the reality — both positive and challenging — that Jewish students face in terms of pursuing Jewish life on campus.
Wow! You beat your fundraising goal; I wish I could say the same about my personal goals. How did the October 7 attack by Hamas impact fundraising?
We raised more than $70 million since 10/7. Clearly, there was added motivation by virtue of the events of 10/7. During the last year, we have seen an 89% increase in grassroots giving at the Hillel International level — donors giving under $10,000 in a given gift — and a 23% increase in our overall unrestricted giving. We raised another $15 million in an emergency campaign to address the specific needs that arose following 10/7.
What steps have you taken to help students facing antisemitism, discrimination, harassment, discomfort and fear on campus?
That [post-Oct. 7] emergency fund positioned us to invest $2 million in supplemental security at campus Hillels, $2 million in legal and university relation programs like the campus climate initiative, $1 million in new educational and bridge-building programs, nearly $3 million in core Jewish community programs and experiences, and several million dedicated to crisis response, talent support and talent retention. It has been particularly important to address student needs now and make investments in the Hillel buildings, talent and long-term capacity that will enable Jewish life on campus to thrive for decades to come.
I’m confused about how campuses participate in fundraising. I went to Hillel in Houston when I was an undergrad and I never gave a thought to who was buying the bagels. Are students involved in fundraising?
We are a distributed movement that was designed from day one to tap into and enable local campus participation. The fundraising efforts and contributions are roughly split by Hillel International and locally. At campus Hillels, local professionals [handle fundraising]. [That means] the executive director, and with better-staffed Hillels, a development professional embedded in the campus staff. Hillel International provides a comprehensive campaign structure, everything from research, branding, event support, donor engagement, gift negotiation and event management to movement-wide campaign events. We approach this as a centrally driven, locally engaged set of campaigns. Our approaches have evolved over time.
How is Hillel specifically addressing antisemitism on campus, the experience students are having with it, and disagreement within the Jewish community about Israel’s response to the attack by Hamas and its actions in Gaza?
During this period, as Jewish students have faced increased challenges when it comes to being able to fully express their Jewish identities in the dorms, in classrooms, on the quad and in student groups, Hillel has stepped up to play new and significant roles. For example, ensuring a positive campus climate for Jewish life. We have launched and rapidly grown our Campus Climate Initiative to train college and university presidents and administrators in the nature of current antisemitism and to partner with them to strengthen the policies that can address and ideally prevent campus antisemitism. We now have more than 100 universities participating. It requires extensive commitment and engagement from them.
As a second example, we have created an antisemitism action program that provides direct support to Jewish students and Hillel staff in rapidly addressing any instance of threat, harassment or marginalization directed at a Jewish student. A third example is our work in the legal arena, where we’ve ensured that Jewish students have legal recourse when they face unlawful discrimination. We have a partnership with ADL and the Brandeis Center and put up the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line (CALL) that has already supported more than 1,000 Jewish students and staff. We recruited hundreds of lawyers who are doing pro-bono work to support the CALL initiative.
Finally, we created an online resource called Campus for All that provides Jewish students with education about antisemitism and a wealth of resources that can empower them to protect themselves and respond. It’s got everything from how to understand and respond to tropes that are antisemitic to a resource guide of who you can call for practical help. It also includes opportunities for student leadership if you want to step into the challenge and grow your own leadership skills. We’ve already had more than 100,000 unique visitors to the website.
During this time of global uncertainty, I’m seeing both a continued secularization among young people and adults and a quest for more meaning, purpose and connection, which sometimes means embracing religiosity or spirituality. How are those trends playing out on campus Hillels?
If you take a multi-year view, Jewish students on campus mirror young people overall in a move away from traditional religion. That said, we’ve seen two strong countervailing factors. Number one, we have seen among a sizable minority of Jewish students, a longing for greater meaning and purpose that they see as potentially available to them through traditional Jewish religious attendance and observance. A second countervailing factor has been a new set of sensibilities following 10/7. During just the past 15 months, we’ve seen a significant surge in Jewish student interest overall when it comes to engaging in Jewish life, experiences and communities. It really put the first dynamic on steroids.
There are a wide variety of reasons that young people have sought out wisdom from ancient traditions and practices. When you combine that with a deep sense of threat, fear and alienation that followed from the events of the last 15 months on many campuses, it has led many students to want to better understand what it means to be Jewish and to seek out the comfort and support of our Hillel communities. To concretize that a little bit, last year was by far our highest year of overall student engagement at Hillel, nearly 200,000 Jewish students and young adults. This fall, we have continued to see many campuses continuing that pace of growth.
In what regions has Hillel been growing in general?
Some of the largest in terms of staff and resources are Columbia Barnard Hillel, UCLA Hillel, Berkeley Hillel and Michigan Hillel. They tend to correlate with Jewish student population and student engagement. As far as resource development, we tend to see the most significant-sized Hillels correlate with longevity of that Hillel, the tradition of Jewish student life on that campus, and the overarching variable of alumni capacity. Those that overall have very engaged and philanthropic donor bases tend to correlate with Hillels that are able to similarly benefit from that — so in Hillels in the Northeast that have been around for many decades, and the Midwest.
We’re seeing rapid growth in the Southeast and Southwest, where Jewish student populations are rapidly growing. For example, Hillels in North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona State University and across the state of Florida. We’ve also seen rapid growth in Jewish populations at commuter colleges and community colleges. It has been a bigger challenge to raise resources because many do not have a tradition or infrastructure of alumni and donor engagement. To that end, we’ve been growing our resources development at the Hillel International level to support those nascent Jewish communities.
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Oh, it’s interesting that Hillel is investing at community colleges and commuter schools, given that so many students are turning to these options in the face of skyrocketing tuition at traditional colleges and universities. At my local community college, Santa Monica Community College, a lot of students say it’s hard to make friends in general, and that there isn’t much student life, which can be lonely and alienating for any student.
SMC is a good example of where we’ve seen growth and have not yet cracked the code of how to serve a community-based cohort. We have a presence, but it pales in comparison to at UCLA, USC and Cal State Northridge.
How, specifically, are you engaging students at nontraditional colleges and commuter colleges?
We’ve led the way to support Jewish students in nontraditional environments. At Hunter College in New York, we offer Thursday Not Shabbat Shabbat, so there is an opportunity for students when they are on campus to convene, knowing they won’t be there on Friday. We’ve also offered an extended array of services; for example, mental health and wellness and career development services, that are attuned to a student population that doesn’t have the alumni networks often associated with elite schools.
We are now up to 36 social workers and other student wellness specialists, with a plan to grow to 44 for the next academic year, embedded at Hillel. Many are at commuter and community colleges, so we can meet the holistic needs of those student populations. There is a rapid growth at these less-traditional campuses, and it parallels the evolution of our model at Hillel to serve the needs of students wherever they are.
How else is Hillel changing to serve and attract students today?
We have turned our programmatic framework from one that focuses solely on traditional Jewish life programs to a human-centered-design approach that works with students to design experiences that they have identified as meaningful to them. But the foundation of work continues to be the power and beauty of Jewish wisdom, tradition, ritual and community.
Also, we invested several million dollars to make sure that Jewish students would find robust, visible Jewish programs and communities when they arrived on campus this fall. In those campuses where we invested “Welcome Week” resources, we saw a nearly 30% increase in Jewish engagement on those campuses.
So investing in Welcome Week can keep kids engaged for their entire college career?
It also tells a bigger story. We found ourselves last year in a reactive posture. No one anticipated the atrocities of 10/7, the extent of the Israel/Hamas war or the corresponding demonization of Israel and Jewish people that rippled across campuses. We applied ourselves in any way we could last year to support Jewish students and ensure safety and to provide robust options for Jewish students who were feeling frozen out of other parts of campus.
We entered this fall committed to being on our front feet, investing in positive and visible opportunities for Jewish student experience, as well as ongoing ways through the academic year to engage in education about events in the Middle East. To pursue the kind of bridge-building and relationship development that will be key to reversing the isolation of Jewish students on campus and to grow their leadership for their years on campus and beyond.
How real were the reports of antisemitism on campus after October 7, 2023?
During the last academic year, we tracked and responded to more than 2,000 discrete instances of Jewish students facing harassment and discrimination, and logged nearly 1,000 during the first semester this year. To be clear, these incidents are primarily issues of conduct — for example, vandalism targeting Jewish student dorm rooms, harassment and hate speech targeted at specific Jewish and Israeli students, discriminatory practices in classroom settings, and students even encountering physical assaults and intimidation. Rather than being debatable questions of free expression, these conduct-based incidents are textbook cases of harassment and discrimination.
While we have continued to see and address an ongoing stream of issues impacting Jewish students this academic year, many university administrations have proven far more effective at mitigating and addressing the issues, in part due to our continuing advocacy and work with them. These improvements have translated into fewer incidents growing out of large-scale disruptions and protests, and more rapid and consistent application of campus codes of conduct.
While issues continue to emerge across the higher education ecosystem, on a regional basis, we see the highest concentration in the Northeast and up and down the West Coast. We’re investing additional staff and resources at the schools facing the highest volume of issues to ensure that Jewish students have access to educational opportunities free from harassment and discrimination, as called for under Title VI, and that we would want for all students.
Are there any books you’re reading or movies you’re watching that would help people involved in these issues get more informed, or that are just interesting in general?
That’s a great question. There have been a host of films about the post-10/7 experience in Israel that I think are helpful for young people and all people seeking to better understand the experience of Israelis. One difficult but important film is “Screams Before Silence,” with Sheryl Sandberg, and demonstrated the very real and difficult impacts of sexual violence that began on 10/7.
Apart from this, I just read Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity Is Nearer,” about the pending convergence of human and machine intelligence. It’s freaky, but it feels like his prognostications are likely to be more right than wrong, so we have to get our heads wrapped around how AI and other technologies will shape our lives.
I find merging with AI a scary reality itself! Thank you for your time.
