“I think at Hillel, we've hosted more Palestinian speakers than any organization on any campus, including [from] Palestinian rights organizations, because we do want to create opportunities for Jewish students and other students to understand Israel, including all the communities within and around Israel,” says Adam Lehman, CEO of Hillel International, on this week's episode of The Syllabus podcast. “However,” he continues, “we wouldn't host, a Palestinian speaker coming from an organization that was bent on the destruction of Israel.” 

Hillel’s reach has doubled in the last year and will engage a record number of 200,000 students in the year 2023, but does Hillel’s new motto “All Kinds of Jewish” include messianic Jews and Jewish Voices for Peace? Lehman speaks with Mark Oppenheimer on the positives and the negatives of this drastic uptick in student engagement; the tricky matter of donor retention; how to handle students on the political left and right;, the future of Hillel with interfaith marriages on the rise; and Hillel’s role in Ukraine.

Bio: Adam Lehman is the president and CEO of Hillel International, the largest Jewish student organization in the world, serving more than 850 college and university campuses in the U.S. and 16 other countries. Adam worked as a lawyer and executive, including at AOL. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, Lehman joined Hillel several years ago. 

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