News

eJP: What happens when students lead Jewish learning: An experiment in Jewish male engagement

Author

Rabbi Rob Gleisser and Mollie Feldman

Date

June 30, 2026

Originally published on June 19, 2026 in eJewish Philanthropy,Ìý“,â€�Ìýby Penn State Hillel Senior Jewish Educator Rabbi Rob Gleisser and ÌÇÐÄvlogl Senior Director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Experience Mollie Feldman, explores a new model for engaging Jewish male students in Jewish learning.ÌýHere are excerpts from the piece:

“On a Tuesday night at Penn State, groups of fraternity brothers gather in their living rooms to talk about masculinity, responsibility and what it means to be a Jewish man. There is no rabbi or teacher at the front of the room. The conversation is led by a peer, for their peers…

For decades, Hillel has built learning programs designed to help students explore Jewish ideas in meaningful, relationship-centered ways. This model has proven remarkably effective at cultivating Jewish identity and a sense of belonging on campus. 

And yet, a set of converging trends is impacting the landscape in which this work unfolds: First, as noted, male student engagement continues to lag behind that of their female peers. Second, students increasingly trust their peers much more than they trust institutions or traditional authorities. Third, we’ve found fewer students are stepping into leadership roles in the post-COVID-19 era, absent compelling frameworks for doing so. These trends are both root causes and outcomes of one another, affecting Jewish life on campus as well as Jewish communities beyond the college years. 

The Men to Mensches (M2M) program, developed at Penn State Hillel and supported by the Maimonides Fund, offers a response to these converging realities, as well as the larger problem outlined in Wainer, Kurtz and Kenter’s piece. M2M is a four-session, peer-led, Jewish values and identity conversation that takes place within an existing male-networked community, such as a fraternity or an athletic team…ÌýÌý

This spring, ÌÇÐÄvlogl piloted M2M on 17 campuses to test whether the model that succeeded at Penn State Hillel can scale. 

This R&D approach aims to address this sector-wide male engagement challenge: seek out inspiring and impactful campus initiatives, understand the conditions that make them successful and invest in testing them across the movement. By scaling local innovations through national pilots, we can generate new knowledge, identify promising practices and actively explore strategies to strengthen male engagement and contribution across Jewish life. 

Our hope is not only to replicate the success seen at Penn State Hillel, but to learn and to challenge our own assumptions in ways that might strengthen the broader Jewish ecosystem.”Ìý

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