Jewish Learning Fellowship

Text study, Education

Hillel International

North America

Hillel International and other organizations (e.g., Mosaic United, CJP, etc.)

Target Population

Operating through Hillel on college campuses throughout North America, JLF targets a multidenominational population of Jewish college students. JLF currently operates in approximately 75% of Hillels.

Jewish Knowledge/Engagement Level of Participants

Very diverse, from students with 10 years of day school and 13 years of Jewish overnight camp to students who grew up with no Jewish practice or formal learning, and everything in between.

Primary Goals

Jewish Learning Fellowship aims for students to complete the program having made friends, found a place in a Jewish community connected to Hillel, having formed a relationship with a mentor or role model, and having formed a relationship to Torah study “that feels resonant to their contemporary lives”—friends, mentorship, community, and Torah.

Brief Description

JLF is an 8- to 10-week cohort-based fellowship comprised of weekly sessions of approximately 75 minutes each. While the external emphasis of the program is Torah study, text learning is not the only goal, and the importance of forming relationships and finding ways to make Torah study relevant to the daily life experiences of students is emphasized in the planning and delivery of the program. Learning is organized around broad experiential questions like what the role of honesty in friendship should be, so that students at all levels of Jewish knowledge can both find entrée into the conversation and share pieces of their own experience that build intimacy and connection among the participants. These questions are also tied to Jewish texts, making connections between ancient texts and contemporary experience. While the outward structure of the program is similar to many extracurricular learning sessions, care is taken at every step and level to curate a deeply relational and authentic experience for students, from individual interviews with the JLF educator before the program begins to allow them to begin from the first day with an understanding of the individual participants, to carefully planning special arrangements, always including a “relational meal” as part of a session, and including a Shabbat experience at the educator’s home where students become guests.

Characteristic

Characteristic & Implementation

Implementation

Internalization

“Social by design,” JLF centers cultivating relationships between participants and the facilitator, and even more so among the participants themselves, which in turn creates what is “not just a class you go to once a week but is really a relational emotional experience for students.” This relational emphasis helps internalize the experience by embedding their Jewish exploration in friendships and a growing social network. The focus on entrée to Jewish texts through connections to contemporary life and the students’ own experiences helps build confidence and familiarity with Jewish cultural experience in a way that can “transfer Jewish learning from something that, ‘people like me don’t do that’ to something like, ‘oh, I know how to do that because I did that in JLF and it was really interesting.’”

Mentorship

While there seems to be more emphasis on cultivating relationships between participants, JLF acknowledges the importance of adult role models for college-age young adults and encourages facilitators to get to know each participant holistically, starting before the cohort begins its first meeting, in order to most effectively meet their social, intellectual, and spiritual needs.

Ownership Opportunities

JLF encourages ownership of the process of learning and exploring ideas by centering discussions of text in contemporary experience in order to allow even those with minimal or no Jewish education to learn and engage in the same questions that ancient rabbis did.

License to Experiment

While JLF certainly encourages deep exploration of Jewish texts and of important philosophical, spiritual, and moral questions, this program does not offer opportunities for true experimentation.

Internalization

Mentorship

Ownership Opportunities

License to Experiment

While JLF certainly encourages deep exploration of Jewish texts and of important philosophical, spiritual, and moral questions, this program does not offer opportunities for true experimentation.

Jewish Learning Fellowship

Target Population

Jewish Knowledge/Engagement Level of Participants

Primary Goals

Brief Description

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