An Inspiring Journey: Hillel’s Approach to Engagement and Education
As the Foundation marks our 20th anniversary in 2025, we are pleased to elevate some of the individuals, organizations, and research that have left an indelible mark on the field over the last two decades.
In this feature, we share insights from Rabbi Benjamin Berger, Senior Vice President of Jewish Education, Community and Culture at Hillel International. Ben previously served as a Senior Jewish Educator, was a Wexner Field Fellow, served as director of the Wexner Heritage program, and then returned to Hillel in 2019 to begin his current role. How has Hillel’s approach to student engagement changed over the years? How has evaluation been especially influential in this work? What does the future of student engagement look like on campus? We’re grateful Ben took the time to share his experiences and insights.
Personal and Professional Journey
Certainly I’ve been deeply impacted by the investment the Foundation made in me at different career stages. 
But what’s even more impactful is the investment in the work, which allows me to support other people coming up along a similar journey. That continuum is a critical leverage point that allows Hillel to pursue our mission in a profound way. - Rabbi Ben Berger
After graduating from Yeshivat Chovevi Torah in 2009, Ben was part of the first class of Senior Jewish Educators (SJE)—Jewish personalities who act as mentors, teachers, pastors, and community organizers in a variety of campus contexts—at The Ohio State University Hillel. He notes:
Individuals at Hillel International like Rabbi Dan Smokler and Jennifer Zwilling really had a vision for thinking differently about what the rabbinic journey in Hillel could look like, and what, more importantly, education and engagement could look like in Hillel. The launch of the Senior Jewish Educators program, along with the Campus Entrepreneurial Initiative (CEI), was such an important moment. Hillel showed an understanding, along with key funders, that we all needed to think differently about the engagement and education binary and how we could invest in them as a continuum.
Early Evaluation Informs New Thinking
When Hillel released its Drive to Excellence strategic plan in 2015, it reflected a new way of thinking about and working toward goals in student engagement and education. Two strategies that are now prevalent in the field today rose to the surface through that plan and the preceding evaluation work:
A need to lever the capacity range for an individual professional to effectively engage more people. Hillel wanted to go beyond the 180 students that its professionals would generally engage in a fairly deep way on campus. It needed to build in a force multiplier effect and the CEI program pioneered this approach.
By having ‘spheres of influence’ within our engagement—with some students closer to the center than others—we could more effectively engage and ultimately educate a much larger number of students. This was such a critical learning at that time.
Think of the work in a highly relational way, not just in a programmatic way. Hillel had previously understood success through a “butts in seats” methodology. The evaluation of SJE/CEI led to a sea change in thinking: Hillel’s efforts should not only be measured by the number of people showing up, but also by the depth and profundity of the relationship with them.
We had to stop thinking about just promoting programs through traditional means. We began to understand our success as coming through the depth of relationships, how we sat down with students and invited them into spaces, and we were invited into their spaces. This led to a blossoming of a new type of creativity that wasn’t confined to programming.
It seems obvious now, but evaluation efforts of SJE/CEI led Hillel to understand that it could not wait for students to come into buildings. Hillel had to be where the students were, to engage them where they're at in compelling ways. Then Hillel could bring them into programs in meaningful ways.
The Drive to Excellence captured this new way of thinking along two axes of work: the breadth, the number of students reached, and depth, the meaningfulness and impact of the relationship. Ben notes that today Hillel differentiates between the total number of students they could reach and the depth of the ways they could reach them. Hillel understands there is a data-focused and measuring culture that is equal to the relationship culture.
We have to know deeply about our students and how our offerings affect them. What do they need and want from us? We respond to these questions effectively by gathering information both from data and through relationships. We understand how highly integrated these two areas are.
Education and Engagement Together
As Hillel learned more and more from rigorous evaluation, it recognized that it needed to stop separating the values of engagement and education.
We always thought of “engagement” as the way we bring students in and “education” as what the rabbis and educators do. We came to realize this was a false binary. As great as rabbis and SJEs are for Hillel we have to recognize that they only comprise 130 professionals at most. We needed every Hillel professional to see themselves as educators. For that to happen, we had to provide tools that supported that growth for all professionals no matter their career level or type.
This led to professional development investments like Hillel U that support both content knowledge acquisition and pedagogical knowledge acquisition. Whether a program supports Springboard Fellows as 22 and 23 year-olds or Hillel’s Senior Jewish Educators and executive directors—and everyone in between—Hillel understood that they were all, by virtue of their proximity to students, core educators.
I’m especially proud of the total commitment that Hillel has to ongoing professional development for its professionals, which comes with a commitment to educating our students. We’re all learners.
The Future of Jewish Belonging
The Drive to Excellence helped lead to Measuring Excellence, which helped lead to Hillel’s latest strategic plan, The Future of Jewish Belonging. The many steps along this learning journey, including each strategic plan and way of measuring success, were informed by the time period in which they were developed. The new plan outlines three pillars that capture the current moment. We have an opportunity to provide students with tangible skills and a network to harness their interests and their abilities and to send them into the pipeline of future Jewish leadership, whether that's professional or lay.
Read the planHillel’s Work Today and Ahead
We know that education in the context of Hillel is in a category on its own; it's neither classroom nor camp. It's something very different. In the words of Rabbi Dr. Tali Zelkowicz of The Wexner Foundation, our education has to be both transmissional and translational. Transmissional because it supports students from across backgrounds to understand core elements of the Jewish story and Jewish literacy, and translational because it should support student growth from Jewish adolescence to Jewish adulthood. Our work today is guided by the idea that we help students move through a trajectory of becoming, belonging, and building, from Jewish adolescence to Jewish adulthood. Our curricula are unique and recognize the power of creating spaces of Jewish learning that can have three clearly delineated outcomes: connections to fellow students and the creation of friends through Jewish learning; connection to a mentor educator; and building relevance of Jewish text to the daily lives of students. We also see our unique role in empowering generations of students to take on the mantle of leadership in our communities. To do that we need to provide the skills of Jewish living and Jewish community making.
We are committed to this work in the context of pluralism, a core part of our DNA since 1923, even in such a highly polarized environment today. Post October 7th, we are building strategies that are not just about preventing future acts of antisemitism, but about continuing to invest in our students as subjects of the stories of the Jewish people, not as objects of other people's hate, to paraphrase Deborah Lipstadt. We will help students understand who they are even in the most tumultuous of times. - Rabbi Ben Berger