I was in Hebrew school from second to 12th grade, went to Camp Ramah Darom, and was a leader in USY; yeah I did it all. But by the time I started college in the fall of 2011 at University of Massachusetts Amherst, I still hadn’t gone to Israel.

My freshman year all I wanted was to go to Israel and experience the wonder and magic that seemingly the entire world, except for me, had already experienced. I now thank my lucky stars for my good friend Jackie because on one fateful October afternoon, I returned from class to an email from her with the most wonderful nine words in the English language:

“Do you want to go to Israel this winter?”

I’ve never responded so quickly to an email in my entire life! Little did I know that what I had built up in my mind as the perfect time in Israel was far from what I’d actually experience.

On my trip, organized by the JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), we volunteered in a low-economic Ethiopian Jewish community in Ramle.

After all the hype about the enchanting land of Israel, the first few days proved that it was indeed magical. Toward the end of the trip we visited Jerusalem, where our first stop was the Western Wall. I wondered what visiting the Kotel would be like: if I’d cry; what I would write on my note; what is a 10-year hyped-up reaction supposed to look like? My mind was going a million miles a minute.

I may or may not have started to get clammy as we pulled into the Kotel parking lot.

As I walked up to the wall, my heart was pounding so loud I thought it would pop right out of my chest. This is it, the end of my hype-filled road, it all ends here. Jackie started crying, and dare I say it, I felt nothing.

Okay, maybe not nothing. The Wall was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen from a historical perspective. But, no light bulb went off. I didn’t feel the need to become kosher or pray three times a day. I thought something must be wrong with me. Where was my huge religious revelation?

Disappointed, I figured I screwed up and I’d just have to move on.

The remainder of the trip was equally as magical as it had been before we went to Jerusalem, but I couldn’t help but think I did something wrong, since I was still not yet initiated into the “perfect Israel experience” society.

Upon returning back to UMass, everyone from my trip decided that we would all go to Hillel the first Friday night of second semester to see each other. At 6 p.m. services started and that’s when my light bulb finally went on.

I was back.

I felt like me again; singing all the Friday night prayers to the tunes that I know and love, surrounded by people and feeling a sense of family. Things just felt right.

The feeling of unrest and disappointment I experienced at the Kotel vanished. I realized that my connection to Israel didn’t need to be religious. Rather, my connection was through the sense of family, overwhelming pride, and  national identity that only after being in Israel, was I now able to fully grasp. I was no longer the lonely Jew that hadn’t experienced Israel the “right way.” But, I also wasn’t just “part of the club” now either. I had my own experience; my own meaningful, engaging, and magical experience unlike anyone else’s. And that was okay!

Believe me, coming to this realization after a decade of build-up was quite a liberating feeling.

This realization taught me that everyone connects with Israel on their own terms, whether that be a cultural, spiritual, political, economic, religious, or anything-in-between connection.

This summer, I am so excited to be interning at The David Project where I will be researching and writing (on this blog) about the different types of connections that people have with Israel and how each connection is equally meaningful and valuable.

So ask yourself, “How do I connect with Israel?” Leave your comments in the box below!

Because I promise that everyone, including you, can find a unique and meaningful connection with Israel.

For the institute, I’ve been working with a few people on Sunday night’s session on personal advocacy. We wanted to make the session fun and interactive, therefore, I took inspiration from my dedication to my heart health.

You see, cardio is hard work. So the way I learned to make it fun and enjoyable was by tuning into trashy reality television on the T.V. while on the elliptical at the gym.  You might wonder, what does trashy T.V., this weekend, and the Relationship Building Institute have to do with each other?

Thanks to my gym habits, I knew exactly where to turn to make Sunday night’s session fun: The Bachelor & Bachelorette series.

In the workshop, all the participants and staff will get to take a much less embarrassing turn at reality dating by participating in the newest reality sensation: The Bachelor-Advocate! This dating-game twist will allow us to LARP (yup we’ll be Live Action Role Playing) and improvise our way into the perfect advocacy relationship. Advocating for our cause and sharing our story might be serious business, but how we gain the skills to get there doesn’t have to be. While I’m excited for all of the Relationship Building Institute next week, I am most excited to meet our runner up.

I hear he/she gets to be next June’s Bachelor/Bachelorette!

Participants will then take what they learn and put it into practice. They will meet with student interns from the Greater Washington Urban League, Organization of Chinese Americans, United Macedonian Diaspora and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The goal is for all of these students to learn what motivates the other groups, and to gain experience that they can bring back to campus.

Be sure to follow the excitement as it unfolds on The David Project Facebook Page and Twitter Feed (with the hashtag #IsraelRBI).

Tweets about “#IsraelRBI”

We recently conducted a survey of first-year college students who participated in David Project programs while on their gap-year in Israel in 2011-2012. We wanted to know if they were involved in Israel-related activities on their campuses; if so, in what capacity; and if not, why not? We also wanted to know what influenced them to become involved.

What we found was very interesting but I’ll just share one significant aspect of the survey here: For the most part, students who said they were not involved in Israel advocacy on their campus said that there was not much of a need in that college students don’t want to talk about, or hear about, “the conflict.” Young people just don’t relate to the conflict. This sentiment was shared by former NYT Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bonner in an op-ed last week. Young Israelis, and their pro-Israel American counterparts, are focusing on other things besides the conflict with the Palestinians.

This same concept was again reiterated at a program we ran with The Lappin Foundation for high school seniors (alumni of the Y2I program) and their parents last week. The program was meant to prepare the students for what it is like to be pro-Israel on the college campus. Jacob Levkowicz and I talked about The David Project’s approach to advocacy, the personal advocacy model, and led a discussion around case studies that highlight what some of our students have done. While the parents were much more focused on the old approach to advocacy, highlighted by Stephanie Hoffman earlier this week, the students couldn’t relate.

They have come of age in a time where Israel is relatively safe. They don’t remember the second intifada. They have all been to Israel and have only really positive experiences to share. They don’t feel the same need to ‘defend’ Israel as their parents do.

For The David Project, this is an opportunity to teach incoming college students, gap-year students, and college students ways to relate to Israel and express connections to Israel outside the framework of ‘the conflict.’ The more students understand how they can use their personal experiences with Israel to connect with others on their campuses, the more successful we will be in our efforts to improve the discourse about Israel on college campuses in general.

There are two groups of students, each standing on opposite sides of this area. They are involved in a screaming match in which they vehemently disagree with the facts of some situation. Joe Shmo happens upon this screaming match. Most likely, Joe Shmo will walk away as quickly as he can, not wanting to involve himself in this kind of commotion and confrontation.

Now, imagine Joe Shmo hears the word “Israel” screamed by some of the participants. Joe Shmo now associates Israel with this negative encounter. He has not spent the time listening to both sides of the argument. He has not taken this as an opportunity to hear either side. Rather, he shuts them both out and wants nothing to do with Israel, good or bad.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary online, advocacy is “the act or process of advocating or supporting a cause or proposal.”

Ask many Israel advocates about advocacy, and they’ll tell you it is the act of defending Israel.

I spoke recently to someone who believes strongly in the need to educate students – before they enter college – on how to respond to allegations about Israel so they will be prepared to advocate for Israel when they enter college.

I shared the above scenario with him, and the response I received was, “That really resonates with me. I’ve been involved in many other types of activism throughout my life, and that’s the general consensus on yelling. Why have I never before connected that with Israel advocacy? Of course it shouldn’t be any different.”

We need to shift our thinking. Rather than believing we need to defend Israel, we need to take a stand to promote Israel. Let’s teach the Merriam-Webster definition of advocacy – an approach that focuses on the positive (promote) instead of the negative (defend) – and create a positive atmosphere for supporting Israel. It’s a difficult shift in mentality when the model of “defending Israel” is so entrenched in our thinking, but we’re making headway.

Next time you’re confronted with the choice of how to advocate, what will you do?

As the Director of Campus Relations and the Director of Student Outreach for NYU’s pro-Israel political club on campus, TorchPAC, we decided to end this school year with a dinner that would bring together student leaders from across the university. We led the campus relations committee and student outreach committee this past year in engaging students about Israel, both in the Jewish community and in the larger campus community. In doing so, our goal was to build lasting relationships with student leaders representing unique constituencies.

The David Project, and our amazing Campus Coordinator, Jordana Ornstein, helped our committees start and continue conversations on campus. Together, we decided that TorchPAC  should host the first ever NYU Campus Conversation dinner to further these relationships with students. The dinner brought together 25 student leaders, from student council presidents to finance and real estate club presidents to the presidents of minority group clubs on campus. During the first part of the evening, students enjoyed appetizers while networking with TorchPAC board members and other campus leaders in attendance. The students then heard from NYU Chaplain and Executive Director of the Bronfman Center, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, talk about the opportunities that arise when student leaders work together to build something. Following his speech, we invited students to introduce their organization and raise their concerns and goals as leaders on NYU’s campus. This conversation extended throughout dinner and to dessert, during which time students exchanged contact information, took down the information of other clubs and connected in small groups.

At the close of the dinner, we looked around the room and realized something amazing had happened. This was a room of our friends. In the past year, we had taken these students to coffee, followed up by email and invited them to various TorchPAC events. They asked us questions about Pillar of Defense, Iran and Israeli politics. We attended their club meetings and learned about the causes that they had a passion for. And at the end of the year, they introduced us to the next president of their club and we began building relationships with the future leaders on campus. The Campus Conversation dinner started a conversation that will extend far beyond this semester, and we could not have done it without the help of The David Project.

Obviously pay is a significant issue when it comes to a Jewish organization’s ability to maintain a staff of intelligent, dedicated, and passionate employees. However, the buzz around these issues doesn’t just focus on pay – it focuses on ideas of work and job flexibility, of acknowledging the whole of employees’ lives, and of helping them to find a balance between the two for the good of our communities. The Jewish communal sphere has a long way to go when it comes to acknowledging the contributions of our professionals, both as professionals themselves and as mothers, fathers, and individuals who hold membership in the very community they are working for. We need to have transparent and respectful dialogue among professional staff and lay leadership to address discrepancies and to ensure that our communal organizations truly reflect our Jewish values, both in terms of mission and in terms of internal processes.

The David Project has made a real effort to engage with these issues. In December 2011, we held our first organizational culture retreat. Taking a page from Zappos’ book, everyone on staff came together to discuss what we want our organization to represent, and decided on key Core Values (Creating Mishpacha, Advancing Life Long Learning, Embracing Change, Being Genuine & Open, Celebrating Zionism, Fostering Autonomy & Responsibility, Rewarding Success & Embracing Failure) that reflect who we are and what we value as a team. These Core Values have slowly infused every aspect of our organizational life, ranging from how we hire employees to how we evaluate programmatic success and failure. The values have given us a language to govern both our internal discussions, and also a way for us to grapple with the systemic issues facing Jewish communal organizations today. Our most recent venture is an evaluation of our personnel manual, with an eye to making the policies that govern our day-to-day working lives (including work-life balance issues like family leave and flexibility), reflective of the progressive, transparent, and exciting organization that we know we are. The David Project is committed to becoming a “place of choice” for Jewish communal professionals, a place where all employees are valued for the work they do and where employees are respected for the varying roles they have within the organization, within their families, and within their communities.

I have been involved with Israel programming ever since I stepped foot onto Stanford’s campus. However, it wasn’t until this past weekend that I finally understood the purpose of it all. On Friday, May 3, Stanford Israel Alliance joined Sanskriti, the undergraduate South-Asian group, for a mixer. I worked with students from Sanskriti, including Monica Dey, Aanchal Ramani and Amrita Rao to coordinate all the logistics, plan for months in advance, and anxiously await the event.

This anxiety was heightened when a student published an article in a campus publication denouncing the event and the students who would participate in it. In the post, he condemned everything from the supposed political implications of the event to the flier design. Despite this disturbance, when the day of the event rolled around at 3 p.m. sharp, Monica and I stood on the field and watched as old and new faces trickled in, sampling samosas and falafel, getting Henna, and painting Hamsas (a symbol common to both Judaism and Hinduism). When we had accumulated enough people, we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves and got to know each other.

Following the event, Amrita decided to write her own article about the mixer. In it she beautifully wrote: “The SIA-Sanskriti mixer created new friendships across the two organizations, friendships that will further the discovery of abundant similarities between the two countries, religions and cultures, giving us the chance to support each other and learn from each other’s past successes and successes to come.”

So, at the end of the event everyone left a little tanner, having made some few friends, and with a new understanding of each other’s cultures and ultimately – a strengthened relationship between the two groups.