NCSY leader: Jewish teens combat antisemitism through identity building

People ask me all the time how we prepare Jewish teenagers to deal with antisemitism, especially after targeted incidents like the one that just occurred in Michigan. They expect me to talk about debate tactics or how to respond to anti-Zionist talking points online.

That is not what we do.

I lead NCSY and the Jewish Student Union, which together reach more than 40,000 Jewish teenagers across North America, the vast majority of them in public high schools, living and learning alongside peers who may have never met a Jewish person before. They face real hostility. Antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools have surged. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the environment for many Jewish students has become markedly more difficult.

Our response to all of it is not a workshop on how to argue back. It is an investment in who these young people are.

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Law enforcement vehicles are parked outside Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, March 13, 2026, after a person identified as Ayman Ghazali drove a vehicle into the building. A 41-year-old man was killed March 12 after ramming his pickup truck into a synagogue on the outskirts of Detroit, causing a blaze and triggering a huge police response.  (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

We take teenagers on Jewish retreats and Shabbat experiences where, many of them, for the first time, they feel the full weight and warmth of what it means to belong to this people. We connect them to Jewish history — not as a lesson in victimhood but as an inheritance of survival, creativity and purpose. We introduce them to the richness of Jewish learning, the depth of Jewish values, and the joy — genuine, unhurried joy — of Jewish community.

And something happens to a teenager when that connection takes hold. They stand differently. Not defensively — confidently. They do not need to win an argument with someone who hates them because they are not defined by the hatred. They are defined by something far older and far stronger.

I think about what “Never Again” really means for this generation. After the Holocaust, it was a warning to the world, a demand that civilization not allow such horror to be repeated. That demand still stands. But for Jewish teenagers living in 2025, “Never Again” has to mean something they can act on every single day. And the most powerful act available to them is not confrontation. It is continuation.

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People hold an Israeli and U.S. flag in front of a large group of anti-Israel protesters marching outside The Grove shopping center on Black Friday in Los Angeles Nov. 24, 2023. (David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images)

To live as a proud Jew — openly, joyfully, unapologetically — is its own answer to every attempt to make Jewish people shrink. The teenager who lights Shabbat candles on Friday night, who knows the blessings by heart, who has danced with friends at a Jewish teen event until midnight, who feels the thread connecting her to every Jewish generation before her — she does not need to be taught how to respond to antisemitism. 

She already knows who she is. And that knowledge is not something a hateful tweet or a hostile classroom can take from her.

Social media has amplified hatred in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. A piece of anti-Israel propaganda can reach a Jewish kid in suburban Ohio within minutes of being posted. The volume is relentless. 

But here is what I have observed. The teenagers who are most grounded in their Jewish identity are also the most resilient in that environment. They scroll past the hatred differently. Not because they do not see it, but because it does not destabilize them. Their sense of self is not up for debate.

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Anti-Israel demonstrators march through the city center during a protest against the recent Israeli strike on Lebanon and continued offensives in Gaza Aug. 3, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pa. (Matthew Hatcher/AFP via Getty Images)

After Oct 7, I watched Jewish teens across our network do something that moved me deeply. They did not retreat into silence. They showed up — for each other, for their communities, for their people. They organized. They mourned together. They held onto their Jewish identity not despite the darkness of that moment but because of it. 

Because they understood, at a level that went beyond argument or strategy, that being Jewish was not something to set aside when it became costly. It was something to hold more tightly.

That is what we are building at NCSY and JSU. Not a generation of teenage debaters. A generation of Jewish youth who are so certain of their worth, so rooted in their heritage and so connected to their community, that antisemitism — as vicious and as loud as it has become — simply cannot reach the core of who they are.

The news will keep covering the hatred. Someone has to cover the response.

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Forty thousand Jewish teenagers are living it. Their answer to antisemitism is not a counterargument. It is a Shabbat table. It is a Jewish summer trip. It is the look on a 16-year-old’s face when they realize, maybe for the first time, that being Jewish is not a burden to carry — it is a gift they get to keep.

That is what “Never Again” looks like now. Not a warning. A way of life.