Supporting Jewish students in a time of campus turmoil

Adam Lehman had big plans for Hillel International when he became its president in 2020, but one pandemic and a Mideast war later, a new path had to be forged.

The head of the largest Jewish advocacy group on college campuses joined Hillel in a change of career trajectory after spending years in tech and business companies. Lehman was trying to focus his professional efforts more on community service, but after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war, he's has to get more political.

“The past year, Oct. 7 and the war [that] ensued between Israel and Hamas ripped the cover off of what were already really challenging dynamics on campus,” Lehman said. 

The shift to politics, he says, takes him back to his student days.

“I was involved in so-called politics as a student leader, serving as class president for several years. I actually started to grow a bit disenchanted with the idea of being involved in the professional political context,” he told The Hill.

“This was the '80s, heading into the early '90s, when I perceived an increasing dysfunction within the political process and landscape. By the time I had finished law school in 1992, my interest had diverged, and I actually focused much of my early career in the commercial and business space,” he added. 

But his interest in the political process always lingered in the background. 

Growing up, Lehman got to see his father serve in the Ohio state legislature and his mother work as an elected county judge. In college, he won the Truman Scholarship, a prestigious political graduate fellowship that left him feeling like he had "unfinished business."

Even while in the business world, Lehman was heavily involved in the Jewish community.  

He volunteered at a Jewish day school and Camp Ramah of New England, served as a board member of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and is an author of a series of plays inspired by Jewish holidays.  

“My personal life became very full with engagements in the Jewish space, those reflected both the growth of my family and our family involvement in synagogue, in Jewish camp, in Jewish faith schools and in getting an appreciation for the role of Israel within Jewish identity,” Lehman said.   

All that work led to joining Hillel in 2015 as chief operating officer, supporting an organization that serves 200,000 students on 850 college campus in the U.S. and around the world.  

“When I began my career at Hillel, because of the major change in context from my prior career, I honestly didn't know if it would be a productive environment for me or an environment where I could carry forward the same type of success and impact,” Lehman said. “While that was a source of self-trepidation, when I first began my work at Hillel, almost immediately, I felt completely at home in the work and in the ecosystem I was now working in.” 

He was selected to be the group's president in 2020 with big plans focused on innovation and partnerships. 

“I, of course, started with grand plans and ambitions in terms of how I was going to remake our organization, and then was faced with a life-changing pandemic that everyone faced a few months later. It turned out to be a source of great pride that we as an organization through the pandemic provided even more critical support and care for students and campus communities during the trauma of the pandemic,” Lehman said. 

“But it, of course, also really shifted our focus for the first few years of my tenure as president,” he added.  

As the concerns with the pandemic waned, however, the group did not get much time to breathe. Lehman says that Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Hillel has had to make major changes quickly, including first to invest “much more fully in physical security” since the war began.  

"Second, we have meaningfully scaled our involvement in legal work to ensure that universities are complying with Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jewish students, like other minority students, deserve basic protection under the law, and that means that universities have to take more forceful steps in preventing the kind of harassing and discriminatory environments that we've seen emerge in so many campuses over the past year,” he said. 

“In that regard, we've become much more active in the political environment, not as a lobbying or political organization, but specifically in trying to partner with and advocate with the federal, state and local agencies that govern education,” he added.  

Hillel announced earlier this month that its free legal protection hotline for students, in collaboration with other civil rights organizations, has received more than 650 calls regarding antisemitism on campuses since launching last November amid the rise of protests critical of Israel's handling of the war.

The group also tracks antisemitism incidents, finding that the summer of 2024 had 190 such incidents on campus, compared to just eight from the year before.

The spike in antisemitism on campuses has led to multiple lawsuits against schools, with one against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology getting dismissed by a judge and another against Harvard University moving forward.

Both sides of the U.S. political spectrum have tried to position themselves as the one truly fit to fight antisemitism, and Lehman stressed Hillel is not focused on Democratic or Republican when helping students. 

“We are not in the business of picking sides or of trying to direct the political process when it comes to addressing issues of antisemitism. We're fortunate to bring that unique expertise in terms of understanding how antisemitic discrimination plays out of campus, and with that, we've been able to serve as relevant, nonpartisan resource to all branches of the government when it comes to their efforts to address antisemitism,” he said.  

Moving forward, Lehman said one of the big focuses will be partnering with different government agencies to fight the growth in antisemitism.

"We know that, unfortunately, issues of bias and discrimination targeting Jewish students on campus are not going to disappear overnight, regardless of how the situation evolves in Israel, Gaza and the broader Middle East," Lehman said.