Role Overview
Do you love engaging others with Jewish texts, learning about Jewish history and culture, and pondering Jewish questions? Do you want to bring Judaism to life for others? Join the Hillel at Binghamton team as our Springboard Ezra Fellow.
The Springboard Fellowship is a paid, two-year fellowship that brings recent college grads with raw talent, passion, and skills needed to reimagine and redesign Jewish student life to college campuses across North America.
Armed with Jewish knowledge and high-level Jewish educational training, you will be charged with incorporating Jewish thought into daily conversations with students, whether in formal programs or over a casual coffee date. To be successful in this position you must be team-oriented, adaptable, and motivated by results. We’re looking for a Springboard who is excited by challenges, takes risks, pushes themselves and our students to think big, and is excited to collaborate with not only students but community partners within the University and Binghamton community. We’re looking for someone with Jewish living and learning experiences, such as a Jewish Studies major or minor, Jewish camp alum, day school grad, or immersive Israel experience participant.
Ezra Jewish Education fellows follow in the footsteps of the biblical Ezra, who re-engaged and reinvigorated the Jewish community by reading the Torah aloud in the town square on Shabbat and market day, and translated it so that people could understand. Ezra’s commitment to teaching, engagement, and innovation is a model for our Fellows to bring Judaism off the page and into life on campus.
What You’ll Do/A Typical Day
- Spend your morning meeting with a students leader to help plan their chocolate Seder for the next month
- Take a first year student to coffee, getting to know them, and learning more about their Jewish identity and Jewish story
- Teaching one of our sections of the Jewish Learning Fellowship to a group of 15 students
- Meet with the Engagement Interns you Supervise for their weekly group meeting and discuss the new students they met with this week and plan the follow up engagement
- Connecting with your chevruta and participating in a Jewish learning webinar to increase your stock of back-pocket Jewish knowledge to use on campus.
- Email back and forth with the Q-Center (LGBTQ+ Resource Center) about the collaborative program you are having in a few weeks
- Host a Lunch and Learn with a few students and dissect this week's Parsha
- Bake Challah with Challah for Hunger on campus in one of the Dining Hall kitchens
What You’ll Bring to the Job
- You love learning and are continually building your own stock of Jewish knowledge.
- You believe that education can be infused into experiences that captivate the imagination.
- You’re a relationship builder and can’t get off an airplane without meeting someone new and learning a lot about their interests and passions.
- You thrive when you are facilitating conversations, creating spaces for students to learn and develop their own ideas about issues that matter to them.
- You are a collaborator and love working with a team to solve problems and try new things.
- You are a recent college grad with experience as a participant and maybe even as a teacher in a Jewish educational setting.
- You’re passionate and excited about Jewish life and college students and want to help bring Judaism to life for every student on campus.
What You’ll Receive
- High-level professional development, including $3,200 in professional development funds,to help develop core skills in experiential education, including learning from some of the most innovative organizations in Jewish education today.
- Intensive Jewish summer and year-long learning experiences that will provide you with the knowledge, passion, and critical tool kit to fuel your work building our Jewish communities.
- Mentoring and career coaching to help you during and after your Fellowship.
- A network of terrific colleagues from across the Hillel movement.
- Travel opportunities, both domestically and internationally, multiple times per year
- A comprehensive benefits package, including health insurance, Tax Deferred Retirement Plan, Life, AD&D and Long Term Disability insurances, Flexible Spending Plan, generous vacation/sick time, and parental leave.
- A minimum base salary of $44,000 in year 1 and $46,500 in year 2
- Unhealthy amounts of coffee (or tea!)
- Plenty of Hillel swag
About Hillel at Binghamton
Hillel at Binghamton is located in the Student Union at Binghamton University in the Southern Tier of New York. With more than 4,000 Jewish students on a campus of 18,000 students, Hillel at Binghamton is home to passionate, driven, and hardworking students who will impress you the moment you set foot on campus. Year after year, the students, with the help of dedicated staff, work towards the Hillel mission and vision to provide a pluralistic Jewish hub to Jewish students who call Binghamton home. Hillel at Binghamton encompasses 15 student-run subgroups. From Challah for Hunger to Keshet, the LGBTQ+ group, to Bearcats for Israel, and Shoah Awareness, Hillel’s diverse offerings ensure students can live a holistic Jewish life while in college. Hillel at Binghamton has created long lasting partnerships with the Judaic studies department, Israel Studies department, the Jewish Community Center, Chabad, and local synagogues of all denominations.
About Binghamton, NY:
The Jewish community in the greater Binghamton area is dedicated and tight-knit. Binghamton hosts three different synagogues in its area including Beth David, an Orthodox synagogue, Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue, and Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue. There is a Jewish Community Center five minutes from campus and a Jewish Elementary School that functions in Temple Israel’s building.
There is fun all year round in Binghamton. Some of the most popular activities include apple, blueberry, and pumpkin picking, visiting the Binghamton Zoo, attending baseball or hockey games or eating at any of the unique restaurants all over. Additionally, transportation is a breeze with local Broome County buses running around the city as well as a ground transportation center with Greyhound, Megabus, and Coach USA going to New York City and other surrounding cities.