After the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, college campuses around the world raged with protests directed at Israel and its government. Many professors on campus feared expressing any connection to the Jewish state.

Alison Black, a lecturer in the Department of Education Studies at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), heard stories of co-workers being asked by other employees for their opinions on Gaza as a litmus test for if they would socialize with them. She stopped bringing her young son to campus, worried about how she would explain the mobs screaming things she felt blurring into antisemitism. She yearned to connect with other Jews on campus, but wasn’t sure where they were. 

Black had been contemplating leaving her position, when one day at her synagogue, she spoke with the leader of a Jewish Employee Resource Group (ERG) at San Diego State University, a nearby school. His ERG brought together Jewish staff and non-Jewish allies, providing safe spaces where Jewish employees could be their full selves and holding programming that combated antisemitism and celebrated Jewish culture.

“If there is no community, I need to build it,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy, and last September, she began her journey towards starting her school’s Jewish ERG.

Once diversity, equity and inclusion became a catchphrase after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, companies turned to ERGs to cultivate a community of inclusion, including for Black, Latino and LGBTQ employees. By 2022, over 90% of Fortune 500 companies had ERGs, and since Oct. 7, an increasing number of Jews have sought to join or form their own.  

Last month, Clal—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership released its “Jews at Work” study, surveying 1,474 Jewish employees and conducting 10 focus groups. About 40% of participants were from organizations with ERGS and 60% from organizations without them. What Clal found shows an untapped demographic of Jews yearning for connection, but with many obstacles in their path.

According to the study, 46% of the Jewish ERG members surveyed joined after the Oct. 7 attacks, causing Jewish ERGs, a network of ERG leaders, to balloon from 44 members in 2023 to 312 in 2024. Forty-four percent of ERG participants surveyed weren’t involved with any other Jewish organizations, and for 24% of respondents, the ERG was their primary connection to Jewish life.

“It looks and feels and acts a lot like the havurah movement,” Rabbi Elan Babchuck, the executive vice president of Clal, told eJP, referencing the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s that saw small groups of Jews create communities outside of mainstream Jewish settings.

“Here’s a bunch of essentially lay people out there who are crafting these ERGs,” he said, “sometimes on their own dime, sometimes at a significant professional cost to them. These are people who believe in expressing and exploring and celebrating one’s Jewish identity.”

This is occurring at the same time as the mainstream community is panicking about assimilation, Babchuck said, referencing the reaction to the 2020 Pew Research Center study that showed that an increasing number of American Jews connect with their heritage ethnically or culturally, but not religiously.

Seven years ago, over coffee at Starbucks, he had a conversation with a Netflix employee who didn’t belong to a synagogue, yet met with other employees to celebrate holidays. He learned about the “Jewglers” at Google and noticed a trend.

These Jews who the mainstream community thought they’d lost were “in the workplace, proudly Jewish, celebrating that Judaism, exploring it, learning about it, sharing it with others, finding allies, being allies to others in the workplace,” he said. 

Yet this wasn’t the experience for many Jews. The Clal study shows that 31% of Jewish employees surveyed felt unsafe being “openly Jewish” at work, and over half of respondents felt unsupported by their employers with expressing their Jewish identity. Thirteen perfect of those surveyed contemplated leaving their job because of their experience as Jews at work.

Workplaces tell employees to “bring your whole self to work,” Rebecca Leeman, chief of staff at Clal, told eJP, but then they are told that they can’t put on cultural events or create ERGs because they are seen as either religious or political. Over 80% of respondents felt a personal connection to Israel, but only about a third felt comfortable discussing their feelings towards the country at work. “What’s hardest for people is just not being able to express part of their life,” Leeman said.

At a time when Jews feel so alone, ERGs give them homes, Leeman said. Setting up an ERG can take anywhere from months to a year, and is much easier at larger organizations which already have other ERGs in place to serve as templates.

While in the past, Jews didn’t want to be seen as identifiably Jewish at the workplace, the culture is changing, Babchuck said. “Jews want to show up as Jews in the workplace and in other secular settings.” But 61% of those surveyed felt their employers were unsupportive of them having a Jewish ERG.

The study was funded by the Charles H. Revson Foundation, One8 Foundation, UJA-Federation of New York, and Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

Rina Cohen, manager of community outreach and external relations for UJA-Federation, told eJP that her organization is “inspired by the grassroots nature of the ERG movement,” and Melissa Garlick, associate vice president for the Center for Combating Antisemitism at Combined Jewish Philanthropies, told eJP that this study “underscores what we’ve heard anecdotally since Oct. 7. Jews increasingly seek and desire spaces, support and initiatives to share their experiences and identities.”

Today, Black is close to launching the Jewish ERG on the UCSD campus. She reached out to other leaders in the network of  Jewish ERGs for guidance, and found a “family” ready to invite her to shabbat lunch to discuss how to build a thriving community.

“Seeing what they’ve created to help them build this sense of belonging makes me feel excited that I can have the same thing,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if there’s a future there for me [at UCSD], even though there’s a lot of meaning to the work that I do. Having this hope that I can build a space that doesn’t exist yet [helps] me feel more like I belong.”

She has attended programming from other ERGs on her campus and loved learning about other cultures. She’s excited to share hers, too.