Matan Sacham spent his first two years at Stanford advocating for Israel. But the 20-year-old Israeli American didn’t know he was missing a major part of the Middle Eastern story, until he started telling it himself.
One of 33 Kohn interns serving Bay Area Jewish agencies this summer, Sacham was placed with JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), a new group that wants its story of expulsion from Arab lands included in the modern Jewish narrative.
“Wow! Nearly a million refugees from Arab countries. That’s a huge number,” Sacham said, noting that those demographics are vital to the Mideast equation.
The Kohn interns are doing more than just making their Jewish grandmothers proud. Taking on challenging tasks in new working environments with little to no experience and becoming actively involved in the Jewish community, the college students say they have learned more than they expected.
One intern from the former Soviet Union, placed with the progressive New Israel Fund, re-examined the right-leaning perspective of her family.
“My conservative shell was broken,” said Beata Shneyer.
An American-born intern at the Anti-Defamation League, Jessica Weddle, deepened her ties to Judaism. And Adam Staley, who taught English to immigrants at Jewish Vocational Service, discovered he wants to be a teacher.
Now in its chai, or 18th year, the Kohn internship program, run by Jewish Vocational Service, has a running total of almost 350 interns since its inception. This year more than 70 students applied for 33 positions, according to Rebecca Bassin, the program director.
This year’s group seems to be particularly diverse, said Bassin. Six are from emigre families, seven are first generation, some are Israeli and six are from interfaith families. Their religious and political backgrounds have an equally broad range, making for lively discussions when the interns meet on Friday, after four days of work in their respective agencies.
Bassin says the program’s success is due in part to its ability to attract those interested in “the next step in a progression of Jewish leadership, as well as those really interested in nonprofit and Jewish communal work.”
The desire to expand their education is also part of the equation. An Ashkenazi, Sacham admits that a month ago he knew little about the Mizrachim dispossessed around the time of Israel’s founding.
One reason why the Ashkenazi historical perspective gets more attention, said Sacham, is that, “the established American Jewish community is dominated by Ashkenazi Jews.”
But at JIMENA, Sacham had the opportunity to work with, listen to and read about the experiences of group founders and refugees like Regina Malaka Waldman from Libya and Joseph Wahed from Egypt.
Sacham soon realized that, “there isn’t just one refugee population,” referring to the Palestinians who once lived in what is now Israel. “And justice needs to be achieved for both.”
The eight-week Kohn internship program supplies the interns with a $2,000 stipend. Which means that Sacham happens to be the only official full-time paid employee of the less than 2-year-old, S.F.-based volunteer organization.
Until his internship ends Aug. 6, Sacham is in charge of producing new media and educational materials for JIMENA. He also attends meetings with the small group of founders. When he returns to Stanford, he wants to bring the JIMENA cause to the forefront Middle East debate.
“It’s like playing a video game; you get to the end and there’s the ultimate boss — this is that issue,” Sacham said.
The Russian-born Shneyer doesn’t discuss Middle Eastern history on campus, but since interning at NIF, the debate has come up increasingly around the dinner table at home.
The 19-year-old sophomore at the College of San Mateo usually agrees with her right-leaning family on Israel issues. But since learning about how NIF works to maintain civil rights and democratic principles in Israel, she broadened her perspective.
“This organization brings up issues that you don’t see on CNN,” she said. “This was an incredible education, and it’s not mainstream, because many Jews don’t want to admit that Israel has democratic flaws.”
Shneyer said she fell into that same category until her co-workers told her about Bedouins “skipped over” by the Israeli government, inadequate representation of Israeli minorities such as Arabs and Ethiopians, and other related issues. “If I didn’t hear it from them, I would have never believed it,” she said.
Shneyer is quick to explain that she has not made extreme leaps in her political beliefs, and if anything, her “love for Israel has increased” with her new, more progressive opinions.
For Weddle, a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley, the program has exceeded her expectations. When she applied, she was more interested in getting work experience at the ADL in San Francisco than in strengthening her connections to the Jewish community — but she didn’t put that on her application.
“I wrote that I hoped the ties I made with students in the program, might strengthen my connection to Judaism — but I didn’t think it would actually come true,” she said.
Used to being one of five Jews at her high school in Sonoma, Weddle says that being around a diverse group of Jewish leaders her age makes her feel like a part of a community for the first time.
Adam Staley, 19, said he hoped to form stronger relationships within the Jewish community, but he made perhaps more significant bonds with the VESL (Vocational English as a Second Language) students he helps teach at JVS in San Francisco.
“They come here, they don’t speak the language, they don’t know other people. It takes a lot of courage. I wouldn’t have that same courage,” Staley said.
Because of this summer’s experience, he would like to go into teaching.
“I care about the students much more than I thought,” he said. “At first I was anxious about getting up in front of the class, but then I realized that this was going to help them. I feel that I’m in a very privileged situation in my life, but now I can give back.”