A couple of months ago, I happened to be in New York over a Shabbat, and along with my brother and his family, got invited to a Friday evening dinner which was being hosted in honor of some participants in a program called GESHER, which means “Bridge” in Hebrew.
As you’ll hear in our conversation with JJ Sussman today—which I invited him to have after he and I had both returned to Israel—GESHER was originally created by a now legendary Israeli educator to build bridges between religious and secular Jews. But in recent years, GESHER has expanded its work in several ways, including building relationships between Israel and the Diaspora.
Here’s part of how GESHER explains the trips:
The “Gesher to the Diaspora” course offers Israeli leaders and influencers a rare opportunity to deepen their understanding of Jewish life outside of Israel and to strengthen the bonds that unite the Jewish people. Through learning, listening, and direct encounter, participants develop a deeper sense of shared responsibility and mutual belonging between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.
The course brings together Israeli decision-makers and public influencers from across society, including local government, security and defense, media, education, and culture. Participants represent the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish life, including secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox communities, men and women, and people from both the center and the periphery of the country.
The program culminates in a six-day visit to a Jewish community abroad, where participants meet with both professional leadership and everyday community members, visit central institutions, and engage in open and honest dialogue. The experience is supported by academic research and evaluation to ensure lasting impact.
The true measure of success is what happens after the course. Upon completion, participants become Gesher Syms Fellows, empowered to lead with empathy, courage, and vision. They return to their communities with a renewed commitment to civic engagement, bridging divides within Israeli society and strengthening Israel’s relationship with the Jewish world. To date over 500 leaders have participated in the course.
The Israelis at the dinner were fairly senior people in business, military, government and more. They were the kinds of people, I assumed, who, sure, might well have learned a lot from a trip like that, but who certainly had a fairly decent sense of American Jewry even prior to the trip.
But I was wrong. Virtually every person spoke about how little they’d known—or even thought—about Diaspora Jewry prior to the trip, how their visit to American Jewry had been a genuine wakeup-call, and how moved they were by the shared values and work of these two halves of the Jewish people. It was an evening moving and memorable far beyond what I’d anticipated, and it struck me that in this time of worry and division across the Jewish world, hearing about GESHER’s work is cause for genuine optimism and thus well worth sharing.
You can visit GESHER’s website here. We hope you enjoy our conversation with JJ Sussman.
JJ Sussman is the International Director of Gesher. JJ has worked in Israel’s High-Tech sector for the last 18 years at firms including SanDisk, Jerusalem Global and Israel Seed Partners. JJ has always been involved in projects to help the Jewish people and was the International Director for Unity Day in its first year. He made Aliyah from New York 20 years ago and now lives in Modi’in together with his wife and six children.
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The conversations with people that I bring on to the podcast have their genesis in all sorts of ways. I read something that they wrote, somebody I know tells me, This is a fascinating person you should get to know. We meet each other at a conference or wherever. It happens in all different kinds of ways. I think this is the first one, though, that emerges from a Friday night dinner on the Upper West Side of New York. I happened to be on the Upper West Side, I guess, a couple of months ago already. I don't know when it was exactly, but a while ago, and I was invited to dinner at the home of friends of my brothers. My brother said, Oh, they're having a bunch of Israeli people over. It's some sort of Delegation. They've come to learn about American Judaism, that's all I knew, but you're welcome to come. My brother was going to go there anyway, or my sister-in-law, at least, my brother was post-surgery. I went and met these really fascinating Israelis on the delegation. And I met the person who was running the delegation for an organization which we're going to learn more about in just a minute, an organization I'm called Gesher, which means Bridge.
The person who I had the privilege of re-meeting that night and sitting with today is JJ Susman, JJ is the International Director of Gesher. He made Aliyah to Israel about 30 years ago. He worked in various high tech companies, the names of many of which you would recognize for a couple of decades. He's been at Gecher for about a decade. He lives with his wife and kids in Modi'in. I wanted to talk to you, JJ, because you bring these people to America, mostly either to New York or LA, but whatever, and they're very important people. They have positions in ministries. They have very pivotal positions in very important high tech companies. They're players. They're definitely players in the Israeli system. I've always heard people say, Israelis don't really know a lot about diaspora Jews, but I always assume that you get to a certain point in Israeli society, a certain height on the ladder. Well, obviously you do because you meet people, you learn. I sat with these people. I think there were three of them that night at our dinner, each one of whom was impressive beyond words. I mean, these were really smart, smart people. And they all said to a person, I didn't know anything about American Judaism.
And that's when I decided, I got to talk to you about this, because I want to hear from your vast experience of doing this now, what do you want Israelis to know about American Judaism? But perhaps even before that, what do they not know? And going through the experience that you put together for them, and you'll describe the experience, what do they leave knowing, and how does that change their attitude to diaspora Jews, to the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, perhaps a sense of responsibility to diaspora, given what's going on now? I guess later in the conversation, we should talk about whether they're picking up how much the sands are shifting under the feet of American Jews. I'm not sure American Jews know that, but we'll talk about that as a separate issue. So let's just start out. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about Gesher, and then we'll dive in.
So first of all, Daniel, thank you for having me on the show. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here. As you said, I made Aliyah to Israel in the late '90s. I've been here about 30 years now, or in the mid '90s, I guess I made Aliyah. I worked in high tech, and now I've been at Gesher for about a decade. Gesher is an organization that's been around for over 50 years, trying to bring together the secular and the religious and even the Haredi communities, trying to build a cohesive society here in Israel.
Was founded by a really special person.
Was founded by rabbi Dr. Daniel Tropper, who he in his own right is a special person, but today may be more recognized by his son, who is a former Minister in the government, Hili Tropper, and today is still a member of the Knesset. And about a decade ago, Gesher made a strategic decision to evolve from a strictly educational organization to one focused also on social impact. And to that end, established something we call today the Gesher Leadership Institute. And the goal of that program is to work with influential leaders in Israeli society, people who have influence, like you mentioned, director, generals of ministries or mayors or senior journalists, people who have really outsized influence on the public discourse in Israel and more than public discourse, educational leaders in Israeli society, and to work with them so that when they go back to their positions of influence, they can take the values that we've tried to impart to them and really spread them forward. So you have them act as social change agents in their positions of influence.
What are those values that you're trying to impart to them?
So the values of cohesive society. And then a decade ago, when we started this program where we bring them together for a course, which includes beyond the trip you mentioned, the delegation you mentioned, which is about a week long trip to a Jewish community outside of Israel. It includes also about 30 hours worth of time together here in Israel, where we learn about diaspora Jewry, where we learn about the different fault lines and issues tearing Israelis apart here as well. And getting back to the issue we want to talk about, diaspora Jewry. Like you said, they really know nothing. And I was also flabbergasted and blown away in the beginning when we started doing this. How little they know. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Israelis, when they learn about Jews outside of Israel in the school system here, in the educational system, it's about the Holocaust.
Diaspora Jewish history ends in 1948 in most Israeli textbooks.
Exactly. From Tanakh to the Shoah, I think. But even more than that, when they travel in their positions of influence, they're traveling either for business reasons or for governmental reasons or for Hasbara reasons. And They're usually the ones giving the talk. They're the highlight at a talk or at a lecture, and people are coming to hear them talk. What's incredibly unique about our program, I believe, is that we teach them to listen, to not talk, to pay attention, to learn. They're going to learn about the Jewish communities to which they're going, the American Jewish community, like you said, whether in New York or Washington or Los Angeles or even Boston and Detroit we've been to. And for them, as most of your listeners have probably met with Israeli, too, in their lifetime, That is not a simple task to sit and listen and to talk about it. And what we do is after they hear the speaker, whether the speaker is from the ADL or from APAC or a leader in a community or rabbi, after each day, We sit together with the group, and the groups are cohorts of about 15 to 20 at a time, and they, too, come from various disciplines and various backgrounds. So some of them are religious or secular. And that's where the excitement happens. That's where the discussions about what they just heard. That's where they start really figuring out what they heard and argue with one another about what the implications of what they heard really are.
Okay. So give us a sense. I mean, you said you were flabbergasted. I wasn't flabbergasted. I was just surprised, but I didn't get into the weeds with them the way that you do. But give me a sense of what do they not know that you would have thought they would have known when you started the job, that they are no longer surprises that you don't know, that they don't know. What do they not know? And then how do you go about having them learn whatever that thing is?
They don't know a lot. They don't know the different denominations. They don't know what reformed Jews are here. Reform Jews are considered a curse word, basically, or a derogatory term here.
By non-reformed people we should be saying. There's a flourishing reform from Judaism. I just want to make sure that everybody understands. But reforming in the government circles means people that aren't serious about Judaism, which is totally absurd.
Right. But that's exactly the point. It's not just by the religious, by the secular, too. The secular sometimes travel to America and expect to meet their colleagues and their counterparts who they think are these reform Jews who we're meeting with. And they don't realize that the reform Jews are really religious Jews. They go to synagogue. And for a secular Jew here, they have many, I'm Actually generalizing it, where many have built up such an anti to anything religious that they have a hard time or takes them a while to find that common ground, even with those non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism in America. And beyond that, just the pace of change that we lived through over this last decade around the world, but let's focus on the Israel-American relationship, is incredible and really just incredibly fast. When we started doing this thing, it was just a year or two before the Kotel compromise, if you remember.
You know, blessed memory.
Which I would say many of the professional Jews dealt with, but didn't really have to do with the general Jewish community there. Then we went to COVID, which for everybody was a time of, a time. Then we had the judicial reform issue, which people on both sides of the ocean were very, very engaged in. Then we went straight into October 7th. October 7th had extremely significant ramifications for us here in Israel, but also for the Jews in America. Sometimes Sometimes similar, sometimes very different. But we were so engrossed, and we continue to be so engrossed in everything that happens to us in the here and now, that we don't spend time thinking about what's going on to our brothers and sisters on the other side of the ocean. I think just going there back and forth is so critical to let one another know that we really are part of one big family.
Okay, so I want to come back to October 7th and post October 7th in a minute. But let's just say before October 7th. They didn't know anything about denominations. They didn't understand that reform is actually sophisticated take on what Judaism is, and it has a whole set of beliefs and practices and synagogues and people who are devoted to it. Okay, so denominational stuff they didn't know before October 7th. Again, what other kinds of things about American Jewish life did they not know? I'm sure they didn't know very much about American Jewish history. I mean, did they know when the Jews came to America? Did they know how many Jews there were in America? Did they know that there was a Western European immigration, then an Eastern European immigration, and then a a Russian immigration, then an Iranian? Do they know that stuff?
The answer in one is no. But that's why we spend the time before we travel to really learn a lot of that context and a lot of that history. And the time when we're actually on the ground, we try to meet those people and meet what's going on in the today and now. But it goes to politics. They don't know that 70-ish percent of the American Jewish community vote Democrat and not Republican. Certainly when you have a Prime Minister here who's been in power for 15 years, more aligned with the Republican Party, that to them is a surprise. But I would say that if I put into a sentence what they really learn, all of them, is that to be Jewish in America, you have to invest in your Jewishness. To be Jewish in Israel, it's in the air. The busses say Shana Tova. Their kids are off on the Jewish holidays automatically. They don't recognize, certainly don't appreciate how much someone in America to be Jewish needs to invest in their Judaism, whether it's being a member of a JCC, whether it's sending their kids to a Jewish school or a Jewish camp. Every day they wake up and they have to decide actively to be Jewish and to pursue their Jewishness, which is incredibly different than living here in Israel.
Now, here's a question that maybe is an unfair question. When they come back from having seen that, you can't just go to public school and assume that there's going to be Tanakh and Uditzitz, whatever. Does it make them more bullish or less bullish about the communities that they visit? Do they say, Wow, these people are amazing. They have done all this stuff and look what they've managed to do. Or do they say, Wow, these people are amazing. Look at all the investment. But how long can this be sustained? Because it's not in the air. How long can you as a 3%, 2.5% of the population? So does it leave them feeling that the diaspora is strong or does it leave them feeling that there's something relative to Israel that's very, I don't know, fragile about diaspora Jewish existence.
So like I said, we take 15 to 20 people on each of these cohorts, and they'll come back with answers along the spectrum, which range from, I would say, oh, my God, this pluralism of expression of Judaism in America is so beautiful. If I only had that in my community here in Israel, I'd be so much more connected to my own Jewish identity. So that's one end of the spectrum. The other end is the numbers are proving that, look at the conservative movement is dwindling and the reformed Jews are, I, as a religious Jew, let's say, know that by performing my mitzvah, my rituals, I'm going to sustain the Jewish people. Here in another generation or two, there'll be fewer and fewer of people committed to their Judaism, and not just the Judaism, to the Jewish people because of the rate of assimilation and intermarriage and the like. But I'll give you one story. I remember the day we landed in Los Angeles on one of our delegations, and we met with a senior member of the Jewish community in Los Angeles. And again, the group was made up of religious and secular members. And the first sentence he said is that, I used to view intermarriage as a threat, and today I view it as an opportunity.
That was his sentence of the American community leader. If you're a religious Jew and you hear that sentence, you're saying, Where did I just show up? What's going on here? His point was that I think the way the American Jewish community relates to the children of mixed marriages today is significantly different than they related to them even 10 years ago, and certainly 20 or 30 years ago, where they wrote them off. And today, there's much more of an engagement with them. But just that sentence alone, I think, throws an Israeli who's grown up in this world of, even the shul I don't daven in as an Orthodox shul for the most part, hearing a sentence like that is really mind-blowing. And okay, let me learn more about what's really going on.
And is their instinct to say, My God, you're off your rocker, or is there instinct to say, I've never thought about things that way. Let me hear more.
Here's where we call it the attention muscle, the listening muscle. We tell them, you're going to hear some things which are very, very difficult to hear. Our goal, is to listen. It's not to challenge the people we're listening to. That we do, again, amongst our own group, from everything. Certainly, you can ask questions to clarify or to get a better understanding. But that within the group became a big question and fault line, again, between the different worldviews that existed within our group. And again, as the week went by, we met with reformed Jews, we met with conservative Jews, we met with Orthodox Jews, we met with Haredi Jews. We were in Hollywood on that particular on that particular delegation. And we even spend time in people's homes for Friday night dinner. There was a story we had in New York. I remember we were on the Upper West Side again, where I met you. So it was a different dinner in a different family's home. And we had a secular journalist who was a guest at the family on the Upper West Side, a modern Orthodox family towards the liberal side. And we were already at the stage where we had been hosted the night before at a very wealthy family his home, and they were starting to make cynical jokes about how wealthy the American Jewish community is and how different it is from us in Israel. Here he went out Friday dinner, and he came back and shared with the rest of the group his experience. He said that, We've been making fun of these upper West Side, 'faltzanim' was the word he used in Hebrew.
Braggards, yeah, like showy.
Then he said, They washed their hands, and before they washed their hands, they started singing Shalom Aleichem. In their heavy American accents, they were singing these words before Kiddush, and he had no idea what they were singing. He didn't know the words. He felt that he had been robbed of some his Jewish identity in Israel, where people all the way on the other side of the world were singing this thing, and he just had no idea from a cultural standpoint, not even a religious standpoint, had no idea what was going on. And that to him, I think, really inspired him to learn more about his own Jewish identity and write his own Jewish story, if you will.
Okay, so that's fascinating, right? I mean, an Israeli who doesn't know what Shalom Aleichem is and hasn't heard it or whatever. You have one person who goes out and says to them, I see intermarriage as an opportunity, which, of course, is the precise opposite. Even I think among reformed Jews in Israel would not say that they see intermarriage as an opportunity. That's a very non-Israeli perspective. And that's a perspective of somebody who is 3% of the population, not 80% of the population. You have people that say, Okay, I went to a family's house and whatever. I thought of them, I thought of them. But I have no idea what that was. And that reminds me that I grew up in Israel for X number of decades. Learned nothing. I mean, really, basically learned nothing. Other moments that come to mind when you just were shocked by either how different what they heard about American Jewish life was or how little they knew. I want to move on to a post October 7th in a minute, but just a couple more general?
You mentioned the whole immigration story and how American jury came about and to its current state of of, I guess, prominence, if you will. The whole federation set up of federations, what they are, why they exist, who they exist for, is just a tremendous amount of ignorance, I would say. I think that's really the key point. There is a tremendous amount of ignorance. Like I said earlier, they don't learn about it in schools. When they travel, they're traveling for very specific purposes and not to learn about it. When we started this, our goal, like I said earlier with Gesher, was to evolve into a social impact organization, to work with leaders in Israeli society. This wasn't our goal, initially. Our goal was to take Israelis out of Israel so that we can have all the labels drop and work around internal Israeli society. What we quickly realized is that nobody else was dealing with this. I would say this is now 10 or 12 years ago. Early on, there are now a few other organizations taking these types of delegations to do it. But we were certainly early on, and there was a vacuum. There was a vacuum, both in organizations doing this, but more so in the knowledge base of these prominent Israelis, like you said. You see it with politicians who go and try to speak in English and say grandmiser. It just shows you they can be the smartest people in the world, but their horizons are only as far as the Hebrew language goes. That particular minister, I know for a fact, traveled for his first time there only once he was in government to America, walked into, again, a liberal American synagogue and I've never been, never seen one. It wasn't through one of our programs. But it's that same experience that happens again and again and again and again with leaders who you shared the Friday night table with just a few weeks ago.
So now let's turn October 7th. Obviously, everything changes here. The world is turned upside down. All of our assumptions about security, about everything. I mean, this country completely changes on October 7th, but life changes very dramatically and not for the better. For American Jews also. The Israeli Jews now that you've taken to America over the course of the last two years and a few months since October 7th. Now, there's a lot of Israelis who go and tell their stories, right? And there's a lot of Israelis who, I mean, thank God, the ones who came out alive, the hostages, many hostages, are going back and forth and telling their stories. And they're very much in demand as well, they should be, because there's just nothing like hearing it from the actual person who went through it, especially if you don't have access to the Israeli press, which covers it in much greater depth than the English press can. So again, those are really critically important presentations and meetings between American Jewish audiences and hostages and hostages' families and so on and so forth. But I want to put that aside. What have they learned about what's happened to American Jews post October 7th? And what surprised them about it? How did it leave them feeling differently about American Jews than they had before they went on these trips?
So it's I'll tell you, one of the leaders who we had participated in one of our programs before October 7th was a chief education officer in the IDF. He was one of those guys who came back and said, I can't believe how much the American Jewish community invests in their Jewishness. This is such an incredible learning experience for me, and I want to be able to impart that experience to a much greater pool of people whom I can influence. In Israel. In the IDF. And that's exactly what you said. You didn't ask, but I'll answering the question is what happens to these people once they get back to Israel, our leaders who participate in this program. And we have a whole team working with them to try to implement these projects in their spheres of influence. And this particular individual, I'll fast forward a few steps of how we got there, but basically, we've now partnered with the IDF and some other partners to run similar delegations for IDF officers at the rank of a major to go to experience a Jewish community outside of Israel. It's a program which because of the war, took a little bit longer than we had hoped to get off the ground.
But what's happened since the war, we've taken, I think, about six or so, and then there are 60 officers at a time. So these are big delegations, is that we're meeting an American Jewish community who is incredibly embracing these soldiers, these officers, who are thirsting for this connection to these heroes who were on the front lines. And that's on the American side. On the Israeli side, These heroes are literally coming from one day in Gaza, the next day they're with us in Ben Gurion Airport, and they're participating in a Kabbalat Shabbat on the steps in an elementary school in New York, and see 500 kids singing songs for them, singing Akhinu, making them feel like heroes. And they had no idea. They had no idea that the world is so engaged in every, the Jewish world, obviously, the engaged, pro-Israel Jewish world, is so engaged are saying prayers for them and are singing for them. And they come back and they say, this is an exact quote from one of the officers who participated in this program, I went thinking I was a soldier for the state of Israel, and I came back recognizing that I'm a soldier for the Jewish people worldwide.
Now, what that does for an IDF major who's roughly 30 years old, I mean, anywhere between 20 and 35, roughly, is tremendous. He realizes, and I give that example because it just happened recently, but also because it's representative of all these people. The goal You ask what the goal is. The goal is to when we say we, we don't just mean we, the state of Israel. I mean, we, the Jewish people. We, the Jewish people is half of the Jewish people are here in Israel, half the Jewish people are outside of Israel, the majority of them in the American Jewish communities. And that is something which since October 7th, I would say two things have happened. Either you have Jews who have been incredibly more showing up to their Jewish things, whether it be a Friday night dinner or, again, a federation. This we've seen, by the way, since we've taken the trips, we were at Federation. New York Federation showed that they had an incredible amount of new donors to Federation, first-time donors, subsequent to October 7th, to the number of 30,000 or so new donors, first-time donors, or an organization called One Table, which does Friday night dinners. The number of seats around the Friday night dinner tables for them spiked and has continued to spike since October 7th. You definitely have that surge of people searching for their Jewish identity and searching for their Jewish Jewishness. And then another part, I think, who are, because of the rise in anti-Semitism, because of the costs of outwardly being Jewish, are shying away and are probably not showing up. But those aren't the people we meet because they're shying away and not showing up.
But some people are probably showing up not only because of what happened in Israel, but because they may be showing up because of the anti-Semitism. I mean, the Israelis have a part. Look, what happened on October 7th. We always believe that progroms were a European thing. We're going to have soldiers get killed, obviously, and we're going to lose Jews in terrorist, it's not going to be perfect here. There's going to be very high costs. But the idea that non-Jews can come in and slaughter Jews by the hundreds at will and do unspeakable things that we're not even going to mention. We said, That's progroms. That's why Zionism came into the picture. We left that behind, and it turns out we didn't leave that behind. It can happen here, and it did happen here. And pray to God, it never, ever again happens. But whatever. So there's a in which we lost a bit of a sense of optimism or security about ourselves. American Jews have also lost a certain sense of certainty and security. And I think it's actually become even greater. And I want to come back to the Mamdani thing in a minute.
But we're seeing, I We're seeing people saying things. A Candice Owens, who has been normalized in part of the Republican Party. A Nick Fuentes, who's been normalized in part of the Republican Party. A Tucker Carlson, who is normalizing him doesn't get you thrown out of the Heritage Foundation. And on the same time, on the left, people also saying just, I mean, horrible, horrible, horrible things about Jews. To the Israelis who are now coming, are they hearing about this also? Are they sensing that this is a community in crisis? Or are the people that they're meeting with from the American side don't believe that it's a crisis, and so therefore, they're not saying it's a crisis?
Definitely sensing it's a crisis. I mean, we meet with the ADL, for example, who've shown us, the thing is, I participate in all these trips, but each Israeli is coming for the first time. To say that the participants hear this and see the evolution of it from trip to trip would be incorrect. Certainly, as myself, someone who goes in for each trip every few months, I've seen the numbers go up. And again, the numbers of anti-Semitism were pre-October 7th, but the spike since October 7th is incredibly scary to see. So the Israelis who come in absolutely see an American Jewish community who is taking these things very seriously and who are in a different state than they were pre-October 7th. Absolutely.
Is that a sociological insight or do they come back feeling, we as a Jewish state, these people are in trouble over there, and we have an obligation to help them.
The first trip we took after the war, the first allegation we took after the war, there were two participants who never met with one another. One was the head of the Unit 8200, the famous intelligence unit in Israel, the Alumni Association of that unit. And another one is the head of an organization called Generative AI for Good, a social good organization. And they met there for the first time. They met with the ADL, they met with family It was, again, it was a year, I think it was at some point after the war, not the first few months, but sometime after that. They came back and said, We have to do something, and we have to use our combined talents to do something. What they did was they tried, they set up a conference called Hack the Hate, where they were going to try to leverage Israel's high tech community here in Israel to come together and think of ways to help curb the anti-Semitism that was rising drastically. They were able to secure the government's arm of combating anti-Semitism, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, and combating anti-Semitism to also come in as a partner.
Their conference, they thought, what did get about 50 people was hosted in Microsoft's offices. They had 250 people, and there were people still waiting online to come in. And they subsequently have had now a second conference in New York as well. And that all stemmed from the fact that they didn't know how bad it was. And they went on this delegation, and that to them was really the issue that they wanted to work on when they came back. So absolutely. And that's, again, just one anecdote. Another one is Miriam Peretz, who, the Israel Prize winner, was on our delegation a bunch of years ago already. And we've worked with her through our alumni, through our fellows network for years now. Just a month ago, after a lot of hard work together with senior educational leaders who were also gone through our courses in our delegation, we put together a global Zionist Youth Conference, bringing together youth from outside of Israel together with youth within Israel, about 350 youth gathered together in Budapest, where Herzl was born.
High school kids age?
High school kids age, exactly. 11th and 12th graders, mostly, in Budapest, where Herzel was born, to reenact the youth conference and to come together and work together. It's so I think these days, because we're both going through significant challenges, both here in Israel and in the American Jewish community, to pull our efforts and to work together and recognize that we're not such a big family, and we really need to stay together and pull our efforts to work with one another from across each side of the ocean, both adults and also the youth.
Last question in terms of this progression of time we talked about before October 7th, the general stuff that we talked after October 7th. I was just remembering as you were talking, you and I had that dinner. I attended your dinner I guess, is a better way of saying it.
We both attended a gracious house dinner.
Okay, fair enough. Very well said. The Friday night after Mamdani was elected. Mamdani was elected three days earlier. Now I still remember because I was only there for a week, so I know what happened during that week. Now, we're a couple of months, I guess, a month-ish, post all of that, a little bit more. Do you have an agenda for the people who come to try to learn something about the political travail that Americans are facing in the hopes that Israelis will do something about it? Do you have an agenda that will learn about it in hopes that Israelis will at least just be more knowledgeable and sensitive? Or is your sense that they should know about it because your intelligent people should know things, but fundamentally, there's not a hell of a lot that we can really expect Israelis to be able to do to help American Jews who are navigating really uncharted waters in American political and cultural life here. What's the institutional Geshar hope for what these Israelis are going to come back with in a post-Mamdani era?
So it's a very fine line, first of all. I think it's not just in the post-Mamdani era, but also in the post-Mamdani era. I think for Israelis to come in, certainly if they're only coming in for a week, to come back and say, We know better or we can do better. And even if you're the Israeli government to say that we can do better. We've met with plenty of Jewish communal leaders across the spectrum who say, Thank you for caring. Thank you for listening. We've built up this community for the last hundreds of years. Certainly love some help, but stay shy of telling us what we need to do. And it only hurts in some cases. On university campuses, for example, if you have a club that starts getting funding from the Israelis or from the Israeli government, that could hurt the situation. And we can't assume to know better than they know many, many things. Certainly from so far away, we have a view that when you're in it, you don't have. And I think we can share our thoughts, but it's very, very fine line and patronizing if we come in and say that we know better and we can do better.
When it comes to, again, stopping anti-Semitism is the hottest issue right now, I would say on the table, we can certainly lend our know-how and our online expertise or the high tech expertise or security know-how and offer that help, but really be cognizant to the fact that they're incredibly smart, engaged Jewish professionals who are dealing with these issues and have themselves a very sensitive time ahead of them. But knowing that we care and showing up for them and being there for them is incredibly important. To answer your question in a very secure at this route, the first step is just learning about it and trying to understand it. From there, we do hope that our participants take some responsibility. How that responsibility expresses itself, I think, is different in every case.
Well, because they're different people and they have different kinds of jobs. So last question. You obviously work with the Israelis. I mean, you're one the leaders of Gesher, and Gesher is bringing Israelis to America. Israelis who don't know a lot about American Judaism to come across the ocean to learn more. I wouldn't say necessarily a lot in a week, but learn a hell of a lot more than they knew.
They learn a lot.
Yeah. I mean, a week is a long time if you're a smart person and you're inundated, for sure. So I know that you don't officially work with the American leaders that you meet with or the families that you meet with or whatever, because they're just basically making themselves available to your delegation. But you're an American guy. You grew up in New York. Your English is mellifluous, and you talk to them a lot. What do you think, when they say goodbye to these delegations, they're hoping? Do they say, Okay, I mean, JJ Sussman asked me to meet with them. I met with them. I didn't show up late. I didn't have a stain on my tie. I did my job. Or is it more than that? When they wave goodbye and say, thank you for coming. We really appreciate your being here. When they're driving home, what do you think they would like to see Israeli leaders like the ones that you're bringing do?
So I think these are very senior people who we're meeting with also, the people with whom we're meeting. And they also have agendas, and they also want to get their messages back into Israel. So I'll just give you an example from the group that earlier in the week when I met you, we were in Washington, and one of the leaders, a very prominent liberal Jewish American. She said that it's very hard to love a country that doesn't love you back. And for her, it was very important to get that message across. That as a liberal Jew in America, when she comes to Israel and is made not to feel comfortable in various ways, she, as a professional Jewish communal leader, is working day and night on Jewish causes. Yet when it comes to feeling loved by the Israeli establishment, she doesn't feel that love. I'll go to a Federation leader with whom we meet sometimes who said what I mentioned earlier, Tell your government, thank you for offering that help. But in many cases, we don't want their help because it only makes our job harder. So they have agendas also. I will say, though, and this I can tell you now because we're in December when we're recording this, I've sent end of the year thank you to many of the people that we meet, because like you said, they make their time available.
And these are very, very important people on the other side of the ocean. And most of them do it without asking for anything in return. And for many of them, it's a highlight. It's a highlight of their year to meet with such a high a global group of Israelis and to really have an open and honest conversation. Almost all of the discussions are off the record. So they feel very, very comfortable sharing what they really believe and being able to share what their organization does or what they do and to share their thoughts. For many of them, it's a real, real highlight of their everyday job, which is oftentimes fighting in the trenches, to meet with such a great group of Israelis.
That's super helpful. I'll just share with you now that at this recent Republican Party, conference that there just was, there's a whole blue blood there, the issue of the USS Liberty came up, which is really completely irrelevant to anything that happened in 1967. People brought it up really as a, it was more like a trolling than anything else. What did Charlie Kirk say about the USS Liberty? Whatever. The only point that I made is that a dear friend of mine from the States sent me that conversation. He didn't write this, but this is what he was trying to say. He was trying to say, It's even 60 years ago, and the crap that you guys do, it comes back to haunt us, even more than a half a century later. He didn't say that, but I know him well enough to know why he sent me the email. He's a smart, smart guy and a deeply committed Jew and a deeply committed to Israel, but he has this attitude that you guys are always just messing things up for us. I wrote him back, whatever I wrote him back to say about the liberty, and I told him to read Michael Lauren's book about the liberty and so on and so forth.
But I think that in this era in which we sense that the agendas of the two communities, each of which is hurting in its own ways, the agenda is somehow being pulled apart. The work that you and your colleagues at Gesher are doing is an exception to what we think the prevailing rule is. I would have to imagine that most of the people listening to this didn't know about the work that Gesher is doing, didn't know that these very senior Israelis are coming to America on a regular basis. They're saying a little, but listening a lot. This, I think, gives tremendous hope that some of what they're hearing from rank and file people at Friday night dinners, but also from very well positioned senior leaders of all different sorts, will hopefully come and begin to influence the way that we hear in Israel talk about diaspora Jews. I think if anything's clear, we need each other now. We need each other very, very badly. I used the image of the family before. Families do have issues. Every family has issues. I mean, not mine, not yours, of course, right? But most Other families have issues.
That's why we were both at a Friday night dinner table somewhere else.
But families of all different sorts have issues. The question is, how does one look them right in the eye and try to address them? I think the work that you and your colleagues are doing is just really critical to that. I bet a lot of people listening today did not even know that that work is being done and feel very appreciative for what you do.
So thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel, for those words and for having me here today. Let me maybe just conclude with one of my colleagues or board members even has a great line, I think, which really states clearly what we're trying to do, that these delegations and these courses expand the prism of Jewish history for these Israeli participants from 77 years to 3,000 years. And once you do that, you have to feel part of something much greater than just the borders of the state of Israel. And you start saying we, you really do start meaning we, the Jewish people, and not just we here in the state of Israel.
And at this point in our history, nothing could probably be more important than that. So for what you all do, deepest thanks. And thanks again, JJ Sussman, for taking the time to have this conversation.
Thank you.
