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Mallory Kovit
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
Courtesy of Mallory Kovit
U ntil she left for college, Mallory Kovit never had the feeling
that Jews were unique or different.

Kovit, the assistant executive director of Hillel at Temple
University, grew up in the heavily Jewish Five Towns of Long Island,
New York. Matriculating at Stony Brook University was a culture shock
— the first time she felt like part of a minority that made up 2% of the
country’s population.

“I had never had to grapple before with people that had never met
a Jewish person before,” she said. “I had also never really understood
that there was such a thing as the BDS or anti-Israel movement until
I went to college.”
During Kovit’s junior or senior year, the Stony Brook adminis-
tration voted to get rid of schoolwide days off on Yom Kippur and
Rosh Hashanah, a policy it later changed. Kovit was frustrated that
non-Jewish students didn’t realize this was a big deal.

“A friend of a friend said something to the effect like, ‘Not everything
can be about you and what you want,’”
Kovit remembered.

That’s when Hillel changed Kovit’s
life. Hillel advocated for having the High
Holidays off and provided a central
meeting space for Jewish students.

Kovit later applied to become Stony
Brook Hillel’s engagement intern, the
first of many leadership positions she’d
hold at Hillels.

At 33, Kovit has been involved in
Hillel for almost half her life. As a leader
of Temple University’s Hillel, she wants
to make sure today’s college students
can find the same joy in being Jewish
that she found through Hillel.

“I’m someone who is confident in my
Jewish identity, and it’s not necessarily
something that comes naturally to a
lot of people,” she said. “I want people
to feel really excited and thrilled to be
Jewish and know that it’s really fun to
be Jewish.”
Since taking on the position in
August, having previously served as
the director of the Jewish Graduate
Student Network at Greater Philly
Hillel Network for two years, the
Center City resident has had her work
cut out for her.

“When it comes to the challenges
of being a student nowadays, Jewish
student or not, everything is relatively
unprecedented,” Kovit said.

The students coming to campus
are shy, having spent most of their
high school days entrenched in online
spaces during the pandemic. Many
times, Kovit said, kids encounter
antisemitism online.

It’s Kovit’s job to make those
students feel welcome and work with
Temple Hillel’s staff to bring program-
ming to fruition that is “by students, for
students.” “We really want Temple Hillel to be
a place where students know that they
can have enrichment for their lives
now, and also for after they graduate,”
she said.

Interacting with the 30-100 students
who filter in and out of Temple
University’s Rosen Center — Hillel’s
hub — Kovit bridges the gap between
the Gen Z students and millennial staff.

The key to connecting with today’s
teens, she said, is not learning TikTok
dances, but finding common ground.

Students who join Hillel are looking
for the same thing: to have fun and
connect. “They’re still figuring out who they
are as people,” Kovit said. “But people
who are between the ages of 18 to 22,
they have a lot to say; they are really
funny; they’re really kind; they really
want to share; they want to have a
good time, and so do I.”
Kovit’s path to Hillel seemed clear:
She went on Birthright before going
to college, right as the program was
starting. She went back to Israel again
as an undergrad, studying at Tel Aviv
University for a year. After graduating,
she worked at Hillels of Westchester in
New York, coordinating programming
with five area Hillels.

In 2019, Kovit relocated to
Philadelphia, taking on roles at Greater
Philly Hillel Network, and balancing her
job with earning her master’s degree
in nonprofit/public/organizational
management with a concentration in
Jewish education administration from
Gratz College. Balancing a cultural
Jewish identity with a spiritual one,
Kovit is also a yoga teacher and has
taught mindfulness and yoga to Jewish
audiences, finding that the two cultures
can blend seamlessly.

Returning to the college Hillel
scene a decade after her own
college experience, Kovit saw some
changes. The Birthright program has
burgeoned since she first took the
trip. Students today are interested in
smaller affinity groups within Temple
Hillel, such as Owls for Israel or a
Russian-language group. Instead of
a humble Hillel office that Kovit was
used to at Stony Brook, Temple has
a center for Jewish students — a
“mansion of Jewish life.”
“It’s such a thrill and a gift to have
an entire building to have Jewish life
thrive,” she said. ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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