Recently, a post appeared in a parents’ group called “Mothers Against College Antisemitism.” Every Jewish parent should read it.
A mother wrote that her 17-year-old daughter is starting college this fall. One of her assigned roommates dropped out at the last minute, and the housing office filled the empty bed with a student whose social media is an open archive of antisemitism—not a stray comment, but a collection.
The parents asked the administration to reconsider. Via email, they were given three options:
- The daughter could break her own housing contract and find off-campus housing, which is more expensive and, for an incoming freshman, barely realistic.
- She could apply for a room swap and hope that a stranger would agree to trade, surrendering the friendships she had already begun to build.
- She could file a formal complaint, which the school would then forward to the roommate herself.
Three bad answers. And every one of them puts the full weight of the problem on a 17-year-old girl who had not yet attended a single class.
The easy response to this is outrage, followed by a demand that the university do better: Protect students, screen roommates and enforce the school’s own policies.
I understand the instinct. Still, I grew up in the Soviet Union and recognize this kind of institution. It is very good at saying the correct thing and very skilled at quietly moving the risk onto the individual. The university’s response was not a failure of the system. It was the system working exactly as designed: the appearance of concern, the reality of abdication.
So let me say plainly what most of us already sense: The universities are not going to protect our children. Not because every administrator is hostile, but because individuals cannot and increasingly choose not to protect our children. If our entire strategy for raising Jewish teenagers rests on institutions behaving honorably at the moment of truth, we have already lost. We are asking the wrong question.
Identity comes first because everything else—every argument, every rebuttal, every stand—draws its strength from it.
It’s not about how we can protect our children on campus. The honest answer is that we largely cannot. The real question is: What tools did this 17-year-old girl arrive on campus with?
Two teens can open that same email and have entirely different experiences of it. For one, it is a private catastrophe. It is proof that she is unwanted, unsafe and alone, with no language for what is happening and no ground to stand on.
For the other, it is ugly and wrong, but it does not touch who she is. She knows what she is part of. She has a people, a history and a reason. She has friends who understand exactly what she is facing. She meets that antisemitic roommate as an insult from the outside, not a verdict from within.
That difference is not luck or temperament. It points to something our community has always known and somehow keeps forgetting: Jewish identity is not something a child simply has because she was born to us.
It is transmitted—deliberately and patiently, from generation to generation. It is the oldest work parents, grandparents, teachers and Jewish communities do. We do not leave the transmission of Torah, peoplehood or belonging to the goodwill of strangers. And we certainly cannot leave it to a university that has told us, in writing, that a student’s safety is her problem to solve.
Solving this problem is the work of Club Z. We build Jewish identity in teenagers before they ever reach a college campus. Not identity as a slogan or a set of talking points, but as a grounded, durable sense of who they are: their history, their peoplehood and their unbroken connection to Israel and to one another. We do it in the years that count—the years when a young person decides what she is willing to stand for and whether she is willing to stand alone.
None of this means that advocacy doesn’t matter. Our teens need it. They need the sharper arguments, the facts, the confidence to answer a hostile classroom rather than sink into their seats. If identity is the shield, then advocacy is the sword. A Jewish teenager on campus needs both.
But the order of priorities is not arbitrary. A sword in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what to defend is worthless and dangerous to the one grasping it.
Identity comes first because everything else—every argument, every rebuttal, every stand—draws its strength from it. Give a teenager the arguments before you have given her a sense of who she is, and you have armed her for a fight she has no reason to join.
We cannot childproof the campus. We were never going to. What we can do is prepare the child. That is the whole of it, and it is everything.
