When Jewish Community Is Invisible
L'DOR V'DOR
FOCUS ON...
gatherings to meet students where they are. Regularity is key: a monthly Shabbat dinner where you come as you can, along with frequent informal outings to build connections. From there, we ramped up engagement in broader Jewish life with invited speakers and collaborations with other Jewish institutions in the area. Ongoing support from The Jewish Grad Organization (JGO) helps us hold more events than we would be able to on our own with kosher food and Jewish ritual items. As a national organization, JGO works to support student leaders (at over 150 campuses around the country) behind the scenes as they create peer-led communities, offering funding, logistical support, mentorship, and leadership development. They also work with students to think intentionally about transitions, helping graduating students find their place in the broader Jewish community. Our members are now put back into the pipeline. Jewish graduate students at UD are visible and proudly represented during every Graduate Student Orientation: we have a home. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that, while ours is a story of success, Jewish graduate students at other universities are still invisible. Our organization formed due to a chance meeting; had any of us not been there, we would be in the same situation: disengaged, with looser-to-nonexistent ties to the wider Jewish community. With greater visibility, intentional outreach, and support from organizations like JGO and Jewish Federation, what feels like a Jewish desert can become the foundation for emerging Jewish life.
Those small research spaces and social circles carry no guarantee of Jewish peers, which is accompanied by a notable absence of the Jewish infrastructure that carried forward many of these students when they were younger. When the communal scaffolding that existed in earlier stages of life disappears at the same moment isolation intensifies, connection becomes harder to sustain and easier to lose. This is not to say that Jewish graduate students do not want Jewish connection, quite the opposite is true. They want to mark holidays, build friendships with other Jews, and feel rooted in community during a demanding stage of life. Yet the barriers are significant. At campuses like the University of Delaware, the Jewish graduate population is relatively small and widely dispersed. Gathering points for the general graduate student population are few and far between, there is no easy way to know who else is Jewish, and few programs are specifically designed for graduate students’ schedules and needs. Students don’t disengage intentionally. They simply never find one another. At UD, there was no Jewish institution that offered support specifically for graduate students. Hillel, Chabad, and their associated student organizations are focused almost solely on the undergraduate experience. During New Graduate Student Orientation, Jewish representation was notably absent among clubs catering to cultural and religious groups. Jewish graduate students were left without a home. Some went outside of the university to local synagogues to find community, while others became disengaged with Jewish life altogether. All of this changed in February 2025, when a handful of Jewish graduate students met at a random university event. We realized we shared that desire for community on campus and formed the Jewish Graduate Organization at UD. The aforementioned isolation made recruitment difficult but, through months of effort, we established a coalition across campus to form a small community. We emphasize low-pressure, relationship-centered
Why We Must Invest in Jewish Graduate Students
But that pipeline has a quiet break. It happens after college, when students enter graduate school. Law school. Medical school. PhD programs. Business school. Programs that are academically intense, geographically mobile, and often socially isolating. Unlike earlier stages of life, graduate school rarely comes with built-in Jewish infrastructure. There is no default place to show up. Graduate students are not just another subset of “young adults.” Their needs, rhythms, and realities are fundamentally different and, when those differences go unrecognized, the pipeline of Jewish engagement quietly fractures. Graduate students are not disengaging by choice. They are navigating a stage of life where the responsibility to find or build Jewish community suddenly shifts almost entirely onto the individual, often for the first time. And without support, many are left isolated at precisely the moment when identity, values, and long-term patterns of engagement are being reshaped.
Graduate school is isolating by design. Students often move to a new city or state, leaving behind established friendships and support systems developed during earlier stages of life. Many live off campus, sometimes for the first time, without the built-in social ecosystem that undergraduate housing or campus life provides. Academic schedules are intense and irregular, shaped by classes, labs, research deadlines, teaching responsibilities, and long stretches of solitary work. Day-to-day life can be especially siloed. Many graduate students spend long hours in labs, libraries, or independent research spaces, interacting with only a small circle—or no one at all. Even highly motivated and socially inclined students can find it difficult to build new communities under these conditions. This level of isolation is especially hard on Jewish graduate students. When Jewish Community Is Invisible
THE INVISIBLE YEARS: MENDING A BREAK IN THE JEWISH PIPELINE
Graduate students are not simply passing through a phase. They are becoming the next generation of Jewish leaders. Today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s professors, doctors, lawyers, researchers, and policymakers. They are the future educators, clinicians, and communal decision-makers who will shape Jewish life in ways both visible and unseen. Whether Jewish identity remains integrated into their adult lives is often determined during these years. Everyone deserves to find their place in the broader Jewish community and to feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people. When Jewish life disappears during graduate school, it does not always come back later. But when students experience belonging, leadership, and continuity during this transition, Jewish life becomes something they carry forward, not something they leave behind. Mending this quiet break in the Jewish community pipeline is essential to capture young Jews who are entering one of the most formative and demanding periods of their lives. This is L’dor Vador in practice. Not just the transmission of tradition, but the intentional care we take to ensure that no generation gets lost in the in- between years. .
W
BY MEIR S. ZIMMERMAN, JACOB BURGER
hen we talk about L’dor Vador , we often focus on how Jewish life is passed down through institutions. Jewish preschools and
day schools introduce identity at an early age. Hebrew schools and youth groups reinforce ritual and belonging. College campuses offer robust Jewish infrastructure, with Hillels, Chabads, student organizations, and visible points of entry for Jewish life. Synagogues and Federations support new families and professional adults, starting the cycle anew. In many ways, the Jewish community has invested thoughtfully and success- fully in building a roadmap which carries young Jews from childhood through early adulthood.
About the Authors: JACOB BURGER is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics and the lab manager of the Experimental Psycholinguistics Lab at the University of Delaware. He is also the president of the Jewish Graduate Organization, a student club at UD which he co- founded with fellow graduate students in February 2025. MEIR S. ZIMMERMAN serves as the Mid-Atlantic regional director for the Jewish Grad Organization, where he works to strengthen Jewish identity, leadership, and community among graduate students across the region.
Meir’s (far left) most recent visit to UD on December 10th, during which the JGO group held an early Hanukkah celebration; Jacob is on the far right Photo Credit: Meir Zimmerman
26
27
MARCH 2026 | JEWISH LIVING DELAWARE | ShalomDelaware.org
ShalomDelaware.org | JEWISH LIVING DELAWARE | MARCH 2026
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online