When Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh began serving as vice president for Jewish engagement at Los Angeles’s American Jewish University (AJU) in mid-August, she had no idea where the rest of the year would take her, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher.

Gut feeling: ??She never expected to emerge as a national figure for speaking out against the Iranian crackdown on protesters, and never expected to be recognized at the People’s Choice Awards as a leading advocate in support of the uprisings. She was an Iranian American rabbi trying to act on a gut feeling: that she couldn’t sit silent as her people suffered. One month after she started the job, she found out about Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old who was detained by Iran’s morality police on Sept. 13 for improperly wearing a hijab, and who died under suspicious circumstances soon afterward.

Organizing: Since then, Rabizadeh has been active in organizing people in L.A.’s large Iranian Jewish community and beyond to support the protests. On Dec. 4, AJU hosted the Baraye Iran (Farsi for “For Iran”) forum featuring leading Jewish and non-Jewish Iranian advocates, organized by Rabizadeh and 14 other Iranian leaders in L.A. Later in the month, the university hosted a conversation with Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, titled “The Woman Whose Hair Frightens Iran.”

Backstory: Rabizadeh was born in Los Angeles in 1985 to Iranian immigrant parents who had been studying in the United States during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Rabizadeh’s surname means “descendant of rabbis,” and since she was a teenager, Rabizadeh knew she wanted to become one. “I’m trying to go back to a kind of Judaism that I was raised with that no longer exists,” she said. “A lot of that has to do with the Persian kind of Judaism that I was raised with — this kind of feeling of opening your heart and talking to God and having it be messy, sitting with your grandmother [in] the synagogue and learning from her what it means to ask God for whatever you want in life.”

Elsewhere: West Coast activists are aiding the protesters on the streets of Iran in a variety of ways. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that around 200 Starlink satellite dishes, from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, have been smuggled into the country. The devices provide locals with internet access, which has been restricted by the government. The Journal reported that one of the teams working on the effort is “a group of Iranian-American activists and tech entrepreneurs in California, who began making plans to buy and ship the devices only days after the protests broke out.”

Read the full story here.

“During my 50-year career framed around Jewish communal practice and teaching, I have developed lifelong friendships and met and engaged with an assortment of impressively dedicated leaders, while mastering new skills and accruing a lifetime of memories. I have also learned a lot about the nature of leadership,” the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Steven Windmueller writes in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Anticipate, act, discern: “Leaders need to maintain a sense of self, examining how they perform in various settings, just as they need to measure outcomes, and even anticipate how they might operate moving forward. “Leading” is a dance, engaging with lay partners and professional colleagues to find a productive, balanced outcome in which people feel connected, successful and appreciated. “Leading” operates as a verb, representing a set of changing behaviors, with different leadership patterns coming into play as situations warrant.”

New behaviors for a new generation: “No doubt, the art and act of leading has changed over time. Today’s leaders have access to extraordinary leadership and management tools, training centers and research institutes, as well as new technologies, providing critical resources and allowing unprecedented access to information about legacy institutions, as well as exposure to newer boutique organizations, social platforms and educational resources. New generations — with their distinctive behavior patterns, priorities and interests, and their abundance of questions and insights and passions — are infusing the field with new perspectives and methods. Emerging questions [about topics] such as climate change, race and gender identity, and cultural conflicts join the ranks of long-standing concerns such as antisemitism, civil and human rights, and the embedded economic and political challenges facing our society. Today’s leaders also have access to an expanded base of financial resources, with new fundraising methods like crowdfunding and social media campaigns joining  more traditional funding streams and traditional donor support.”

A half-century: “From each of my jobs, from my time at American Jewish Committee in 1969 until 2022, when I am serving as the interim director of the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles and an assortment of additional positions along the way, I learned how to effectively operate in the Jewish communal world.”

Read the full piece here.

“What is the limit of human capacity? Who determines what we can or can’t do? On Hanukkah, we commemorate an event during the second century BCE, when a priestly family of the tribe of Levi, the Maccabees, led a successful rebellion against the Seleucid Greek empire, as a response to Antiochus IV forbidding the Jews to practice their religion. How could an army of approximately 7,000 barely trained Jews beat an army of more than 60,000 highly trained Greek soldiers? Throughout Jewish history, we have repeatedly seen how individuals have surpassed all expectations of what is achievable. The ancient teachings of Judaism and the modern field of psychology teach us that faith in God and in our own capacities can be the perfect combination to drive us through what others call impossible,” writes Moises Arbitman, a graduate student at Brandeis University, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Faith and feelings: “In recent decades, faith has become an important area of study among scientists, leading to important discoveries. One finding, for example, revealed that people who believe in God tend to be happier and healthier than non-believers. Other studies have found that believers tend to feel less depressed and have a more defined sense of the meaning of life. In other words, researchers have found that faith affects — usually positively — how an individual engages the world.”

Read more here.