Three Jewish student leaders are vying to become the next president of the Union of Jewish Students, representing 9,000 members across 75 Jewish societies in the UK and Ireland.
The candidates—Louis Danker (Edinburgh), Naomi Bernstein (Cambridge), and Daniel Grossman (Bristol)—launched their campaigns on November 26, with voting now open after live hustings.
Their slogans set bold tones: “A Bolder, Braver UJS” (Grossman), “Bringing Back Jewish Joy” (Bernstein), and “Pride, Diverse, United” (Danker). Each also released polished one-minute YouTube videos outlining their visions.
Pic: UJS
It’s been a profoundly challenging year for Jewish students on campus, with a significant rise in antisemitism following the 7 October Hamas atrocities.
The three candidates know they have a tough job in convincing their peers that they’re best positioned to tackle anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, pro-Palestinian protestors and campus encampments and ensure they can engage with their Jewish identity freely during their student years.
First up is final year Edinburgh University geography student, Louis Danker, who grew up in Barnet with a London mum and Belfast Dad. He tells Jewish News that visiting his grandparents in northern Ireland twice every year meant that an “understanding of small Jewish communities was a core part” of his upbringing.
Louis Danker, Edinburgh JSoc
He describes becoming Edinburgh JSoc president in 2022 in his second year as “maybe the best thing I’ve ever done”. He “”totally loved it”.
Together with his JSoc team, he built “a vibrant community with 250 people coming to Friday night dinners, hosted 600 people to hear a Holocaust survivor speak and did collaborations with the Islamic, feminist and history societies.”
Under his leadership, Edinburgh was awarded ‘JSoc of the Year’.
“That,” he says, “really gave me a taste for Jewish leadership. It started to make me think that maybe I should be putting these skills and experience to work as UJS president. In the last few months, I’ve been speaking to loads of different people from all across the country about what it is they like and what it is they want to see more of. It’s a theme I’ve been thinking about since October 7th and it’s ‘where has Jewish pride gone?’”
Shocking scenes on campus. Screenshot: YouTube UJS
Danker’s whole campaign is about “putting that Jewish pride back on the agenda. If there’s 10,000 Jewish students, there are 10,000 different ways of relating to their Judaism, but everyone should feel proud. The last year I’ve been frustrated because we’ve been talking about feeling safely Jewish on campus, which is important, but what a low bar that is. I want Jewish pride at the core of everything that UJS does.”
He wants to run a Jewish culture and history week on campuses around the country focusing on Jewish identity and talking about the diversity of different Jewish backgrounds “because we’re not all the same. I’ve been frustrated about how politicised Jewish identity has become on campus. Showing that pride in who we are is really important. No matter your beliefs on conflict, and no matter your views on Israel there is no safe space for dialogue for Jewish people on campus. There is only spaces of hatred.”
Naomi Bernstein, Cambridge University
And that has made “a lot of Jewish students feel frightened or inward looking.” His focus is on “celebrating Jewish diversity but acknowledging we have further to go and creating inclusive spaces for JSocs and places within UJS for everyone.”
Central to that idea is a JSoc ‘cultural review’ to get “to the heart of why Jewish students feel excluded from UJS.”
One student told Danker that going to JSoc was like going to a high school reunion of a school they never went to.” Danker wants to benchmark the ones “that are brilliant at inclusion” to look at “what can we learn from that and turn it around.”
Team Danker is also proposing “a proactive plan for a year of zero tolerance on anti- Semitism” because “it’s not just how we deal with the crisis of this week, it’s ‘what are we doing for the next two or three years?”
Danker notes that UJS has “incredible convening power of people in law, journalism and politics. Why aren’t we getting them all in a room and calling it the ‘antisemitism on campus taskforce’ and giving them the job of putting UJS’s work at the forefront of attacking this, not just now, but in the next couple of years? It’s a no-brainer that we need to be leading that fight and creating allies within universities, within student unions, in order to work with them to do that. Institutional problems need institutional solutions.”
Pro-Palestinians camp outside the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford
As to whether he’s enjoying the campaigning experience, he says: “Absolutely! I’ve adapted pretty quickly to a diet of bagels breakfast, lunch and dinner. No complaints here! I’ve been so energised by talking to Jewish students and working with my brilliant campaign team. It’s been a great preview of what the job would be like, and I’m more excited than ever!”
Hailing from Edgware in north west London, Naomi Bernstein is studying English Literature at Cambridge University. She tells Jewish News that she’s “always been very involved with the Jewish community. I was president of my school JSoc and coming to campus was very keen to get involved.”
Edinburgh University
Within her first year at Cambridge, she was president of its JSoc, an experience she describes as “fantastic and really fulfilling”. Her second year was very much taken up with the aftermath of 7th October on campus. Her JSoc needed a new campaigns officer and she “stepped up to the plate because I had the experience to handle the role”.
For the past year, she’s been doing all of the media, communications and working to help keep Jewish students safe at Cambridge.” Whilst she had never thought about running for UJS before, “having done all of that, I realised that I found it incredibly meaningful to work so closely with our community. It brought me a lot of joy to see everybody else getting joy from the work I was putting in. So I’d really like to be able to extend that work across the country to not only keep everyone safe, but keep everyone happy.”
Her manifesto is as personal one; that she’s got the experience and can get the job done. The first task is “building our community and making it stronger; I think if you ask any Jewish person, they will say their community is the most important thing to them.”
For starters she wants to “empower women leaders to ensure that women take on the same amount of leadership roles as men.”
As a former Bnei Akiva youth movement leader, she wants to “work with religious students a lot more, to rebuilt trust with them and to have concrete measures in place for them to go to their JSoc and UJS events, be included and know that it will work for them and their religious needs.”
Bernstein wants to work with the Movement for Progressive Judaism and Masorti UK to “build up more progressive chaplaincy on campus.” Also on her community platform is a pledge to work with communal partners such as the Jewish Neurodiverse Association, Keshet and Jewish Women’s Aid to “make sure those groups are also included and safe.”
Protest and break in at Edinburgh University, Day 2, 28th February 2024
She notes that UJS’s current president Sami Berkoff is “still in the minority of Jewish leaders who are women and especially on campus, a lot of JSoc presidents are men. It’s really about throwing the ladder down to empower people and I want to do that for women’s empowerment as well.”
Bernstein suggests a mentoring scheme for Jewish women leaders in the community, involving previous female JSoc presidents, “to ensure that people have the confidence and ability to really stand up for themselves and work for what they want.”
As to how she’d hit the ground running on day one if elected President, Bernstein says: “A lot of the issues facing Jewish students aren’t issues just facing Jewish students; they’re facing the whole community. Working out how to navigate issues like anti-semitism on campus is a massively overwhelming task and it’s not one I would be able to solve on the first day. I think we deal with that challenge through very small action steps, bringing practical tasks that would make a small difference and building up from them. The job is, quite rightly, a massive one at the moment. I think it’s incredibly hard for any organisation to fill it, but I would really like to try to.”
As for her own experiences of anti-semitism on campus at Cambridge, Bernstein has “been the person dealing with every single incident that we’ve had. I personally have had a few incidents but I’ve also seen all of my friends struggle. It’s time we tackle it head on.” Key to her manifesto is dealing with the “culture of normalised antisemitism on campus”.
Leeds JSoc, 2023. Pic: UJS
What makes her “really excited” about the presidential campaign is the “potential to grow our community built on the strength that we found last year, but turn that into more of a positive energy again; to have more and better events.”
Why should students vote for her? She says “because I know what needs to be done in a very practical way and I have the experience to do it. I know Jewish students are tired and drained from the last year. I know that we need strong leadership that uplifts their voices and also ensure that Jewish students have safe spaces that they can go to to relax and get away from the strain of often quite tense campuses. I’ve been doing that here and know I have the ability to do it on a national level.”
Daniel Grossman (Bristol JSoc)
Daniel Grossman from Pinner is in his final year at Bristol University studying history. A former vice president of its JSoc committee, he wants to empower Jewish students to be able to have “difficult conversations”.
Grossman has been representing Jewish students on the Board of Deputies for around two years, was recently elected to its international division and co-chairs its two-state solution working group.
He tells Jewish News that campaigning for president “feels like a culmination” of the work he’s been doing. “I feel like I’ve constantly wanted to get stuck in and help Jewish students and improve Jewish life on campus. This feels like the best way to do so. There’s no better job to try and do that.”
The Grossman manifesto is based on “my experience over the past year and the experience of Jewish students that I’ve spoken to up and down the country.”
Bristol University’s experiences with antisemitism on campus are well documented. Whilst he says “the man who must not be named” (Professor David Miller) was “slightly before my time”, he adds that “we’re still dealing with the effects.”
Encampment at Cambridge University, May 2024. Pic: Gabrielle Apfel
With regards to the pro-Palestinian student encampments, he believes “not everyone means to have bad intentions. However, some of the rhetoric we were seeing at the encampments was extremely problematic.”
Grossman says he “took the initiative to actually go and speak to them and explain to them why it was wrong. I found I was able to have difficult conversations about why, for example, you can’t say ‘Zionism funds media and politicians’. But yes, things did worsen. There are extremists who will never be reached and never engage in reasonable conversation; but I also think there are lots of people on campus who have antisemitic beliefs but don’t want to consider themselves antisemitic. So we can run things like a mass public information campaign to try and educate them to spot it.”
Grossman’s manifesto is “quite focused”, “fundamentally about adding and not removing” and he’s identified three areas he can make a difference on and improve: antisemitism with a strong focus on interfaith relations, pro-active Israel engagement, and supporting JSocs across the country.
Whilst “UJS does a lot well and does a great job in supporting Jewish students”, he wants to “enhance and improve that by identifying gaps in the work areas.” He’s proposing “mass information campaigns targeted at ordinary Jewish students in combination with continuing the student union officer antisemitism awareness training which is “incredibly valuable.”
Grossman says “interfaith work has also taken a huge hit over the past year”. Describing it as a huge area, he says he’s been “at the forefront of conversations with people of all sorts of faith societies, including the Islamic Society” and that they’ve had “some very good conversations and there is definitely room to do more. When you get in the room and you have discussions with these people and you put faces to names, you can actually treat each other with a lot of respect.”
He wants to support Jewish students in “getting in the room with groups that might be hostile to us. I don’t want it to be a top-down thing from me. I want to empower Jewish students to have difficult conversations with people we profoundly disagree with. But we can have constructive dialogue and it’s important to do so. I really do think it can have an impact based on my experience and work that I’ve done.”
Overall, Daniel Grossman’s vision is for a “bolder, braver UJS made up of combating anti-semitism at its roots, fostering comprehensive Israel engagement and to tailor support for every JSoc. These are the three issues that I have identified over the past year that I have solutions to and I can improve.”
As to what makes him different, Daniel Grossman says: “I have new ideas. There are lots of issues that I care about. I’ve identified the solutions and I’ve got experience to back that up. I firmly believe that what I want to do will be transformative for Jewish life on campus.”
His experience with the Board of Deputies has equipped him with a “great understanding of how our Jewish community works and how to operate within in. I really understand the diversity of opinion that I want to represent through fostering comprehensive Israel engagement. Being on the Board has equipped me with experiences in leadership and how to effect change within our community.”
- The deadline for student voter registration closes at 12pm on Tuesday 10th December. (Jewish students can register to vote at www.ujs.org.uk/join and must include their graduation year and JSoc).
- The official campaign closes on Thursday 12th December with the result being announced on Sunday 15th at UJS Conference.
- The campaign videos for Louis, Daniel and Naomi are all available on Youtube.
