Tessa Veksler isn’t afraid
Recently graduated student activist to speak in Teaneck
Sometimes something happens, circumstances shift, the world changes, and there’s a need for new leaders, people equipped to handle a new situation.
Some people seem to be born with leadership skills. Who knows what would have happened to those skills were they not needed by that person’s community? Maybe she’d have ended up the CEO of a huge firm, or a powerful politician.
And sometimes people’s skills are exactly what’s needed at exactly the time when they’re ready to use them.
As the Jewish community in Israel and the diaspora, very much including North America, faces levels of antisemitism that haven’t been unleashed since the Second World War, young leaders are rising to fight it.
One of those leaders, Tessa Veksler, will speak at the Jewish Center of Teaneck on July 21. (See below.)
Ms. Veksler was born in 2002, to parents who had left Odesa, in what was still the Soviet Union, in 1989. They made it to San Francisco in 1990. She has a much older brother, who was 7 when the family left home; a compelling reason for their exodus was to save him from being drafted into the Red army, as all Soviet men, including those in her family, had been.
“My family is completely secular and somewhat culturally Jewish,” she said; “I understood that I was a Russian speaker far before I knew that I was Jewish.” There’s a fairly large community of Russian-speaking Jews in the Bay Area, she said, and most of her Jewish friends were in that group.
“I had a slightly different upbringing from my brother,” she said. “Very different, really.” For one thing, she was a birthright American citizen. For another, “I had much more Jewish involvement. I went to a Chabad Hebrew school on Sundays. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, but when I was in eighth grade, my parents enrolled me in a youth group in a Reform shul.
“I didn’t feel super connected. I felt very confused, moving from a Chabad environment to a Reform environment. I didn’t really feel like I fit in. And so I wasn’t super engaged in the Jewish part of my life, and it wasn’t anything I spoke about really at all with my friends.
“I went to a public school. I don’t think that I even wore a star of David necklace until I was 17.”
During the summer between her junior and senior years in high school, she went to Israel with NCSY. That organization, National Council of Synagogue Youth, is part of the Orthodox Union, and the trip she went on, she said, was specifically for public-school kids. It’s outreach to them, and it worked.
“My parents definitely did not quite understand that it was a modern Orthodox organization,” she said. “They sent me on the trip. I really didn’t want to go.”
But it changed her life.
“It was my first time in Israel, I was there for a month, and my perspective shifted completely,” she said. “I emerged much more Zionistic. I became observant. I started keeping Shabbat. I felt like I found my place within the modern Orthodox community.”
Once she got back home, she founded her high school’s first Jewish student union. “It was very Zionistic, in a way that was extremely uncommon in my school at the time. Most Jewish students there were not super vocal about even being Jewish.”
Where did she get the leadership skills to organize and run this group? “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always had that. I’ve always been like this.
“I’ve always been a natural leader.” So the part that would be hardest for so many other people was the part she barely had to think about.
Stick a pin in that.
Ms. Veksler had planned to go to the University of California at Santa Barbara right after college, but she deferred her acceptance for a year. She wanted a gap year in Israel, so she enrolled in a coed OU program at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
It was a consequential year, which “strengthened my Zionism and my level of observance,” she said.
It was during covid, so although her acceptance to UCSB had been deferred for only one semester she was able to spend two in Israel, because when you’re on Zoom, who cares where you actually are? So she went to online Bar Elan classes from 8 in the morning until midafternoon, and then went online again for UCSB classes, from 10 in the evening until 1 or 2 the next day.
“In May 2021, there was a war between Israel and Hamas, and that war made me feel like I really understood what it’s like to be Israeli, and how misunderstood Israel and Israelis are by the rest of the world.” That was another vital part of her education.
“I started to feel that I was getting incorporated into the world of UCSB, and I kind of understood the things that were happening with students, and the conversations that were being had,” she said. “In May 2021, after that war, a BDS resolution was brought to the student government, as it was every year. So my entire program went on a trip to Haifa” — covid restrictions had been eased by then — “but I ended up staying back at Bar Ilan, at the 12-hour-long meeting.” That’s the meeting when BDS was discussed.
“In those 12 hours, I had two minutes to speak, and I talked about how I’d just been through this war, and how incorrect they” — UCSB’s student government — were, “and how they completely misunderstood Israel and they didn’t really understand what they were talking about, and how ridiculous they were, sitting there halfway across the world, in the comfort of their own homes, with so much to say.
“That was my first look at what the conversation was like on campus, and also my first real understanding of what student government was like.”
Ms. Veksler went back to California to begin her second semester in person at Santa Barbara, majoring in political science and communication.
She’d never been interested in student government, she said. “I thought that student government was for popular kids, and that really was not me in high school. I was a theater kid. I was not the student government type.”
But UCSB’s student body president was Israeli, and she hired Ms. Veksler to work in her office. “And within a few weeks of working for the student body president, I said to my friends, ‘I want to be the student body president by the time I graduate.’”
So the next year, she ran for the student senate. She won. “And then I ended up running for student body president. And I won that election as well.”
She was also the president of a student group that supported Israel at school. “I was heavily involved in Jewish leadership and in the broader student community,” she said. “I felt that I had the best of both worlds. I cared about many issues on my campus, and I never felt like I needed to focus on my Jewish identity as much when I was in student government.”
Ms. Veksler was elected student body president in May 2023, and her term started immediately. The semester ended soon after the election, and her first class the next semester, after summer break, was on October 2. “October 7 happened a week after,” she said.
What happened to the Jewish community at UCSB, and how Ms. Veksler became its face and its soul, has been chronicled in the film “October 8.” She’s one of the student leaders who was slimed by the grotesque hatred that was hurled at her, as antisemitism rose from the sewers and became almost socially acceptable, because despite the barbarism of October 7, Israel quickly came to be seen as the story’s villain.
She talked about some of her experiences after October 7.
“I think that the common feeling in the broader Jewish community — and certainly this was my feeling — was hope that maybe this would be the straw that would break the camel’s back. That it would reveal the truth about the conflict and get us empathy.
“And on the other hand, many people were saying, well, you know, historically, this isn’t going to last very long. So I wasn’t really surprised when it didn’t last long.”
She was a bit surprised at some of the reaction to her, as an out Zionist, on campus, because when she won the senate seat and then the presidential race, “I won as a Zionist. I was also the president of a group of students supporting Israel. When I became student body president, my being a Zionist was no secret. So it was a big shock to me to see that people were shocked at my commenting on the situation. The feeling was that I had this position, as student body president, so I’m not allowed to comment.
“But that isn’t an expectation that would be held of any other minority, if their community, their family, their friends were attacked. So things shifted quickly and escalated over time and took many different forms.” The menace aimed at her took “every single form you can possibly imagine,” she said. “The only thing I didn’t encounter was physical violence. But everything else that you can possibly imagine happening was happening.”
She didn’t say very much publicly from October until February, Ms. Veksler said, but in February she made a post that went viral, showing herself standing in front of a sign that says “Zionists are not allowed.”
Then the world exploded.
It was a very hard time for Ms. Veksler, but she came through it, she gained support and learned who her supporters are, and now she knows what she wants to do.
“Even when I was in school, I was already doing public speaking engagements,” she said. Some other students saw that as opportunistic, but the truth was that there was no clear way forward for her, if she were to be hobbled by criticism.
“It was again, we’re blamed for saying nothing, and we’re blamed for saying something. So I couldn’t win.” Or she couldn’t win that battle. But there were others, and she won them.
“People were excited,” she said. “There were Jewish celebrities that were supporting me, and Jewish brands that were sending me gifts or just acknowledging what I was going through and trying to be a support system.
“I didn’t really have one outside of my family and my close friends and some of my colleagues, but I think that it was just a difficult time overall.” And she also had her very visible triumphs.
“Someone who worked hard to take you down is going to be frustrated at the inability to do that.” She survived a thwarted attempt to remove her from office; her opponents must have felt bad when “I ended up at the White House instead.” As she did, twice, in 2024; once for the Jewish Heritage Month celebration, the other for the White House Chanukah party.
“I think I just kind of took it in stride, and I found my purpose,” Ms. Veksler said. “This wasn’t something that I had pictured for myself, professionally or personally, but obviously this is something I’m super passionate about.
“I can understand how some people can see what I did as extraordinary or heroic or courageous. For me, though, in the moment, it wasn’t heroism or bravery. For me, in the moment, I was in survival mode. I was in a state of mind where, especially after I went public, I thought about the message. What is the legacy that I want to leave?
“I knew that at that point, when I had already made the situation public, that there were going to be Jewish people who were looking up to me to see what I was going to do, and I wasn’t going to allow people to see someone who was threatened as a Jew be complicit in these people’s demands.
“I always say this — the truth is, by like the second day your mindset shifts and you start understanding that the people you want to respect you are the people who you should focus on. I had no interest in being respected by the people who were hating me, and so I owe them nothing. But what I did feel I owed my community was to do the right thing and to set a positive example, and to focus on a mission that was much bigger than myself.
“And that’s what guided me.
“I take a lot of pride in my work, and it was extremely challenging. It’s a situation that I’m still mentally recovering from today, but at the same time, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever been through in my life, and at the same time it’s the biggest blessing, because it revealed exactly what I should be doing, and it gave me an opportunity to turn something that I was so passionate about, something that I felt that I was good at, into a career that is benefiting the Jewish people.
“I believe that challenges are handcrafted to the individual. I believe that HaShem gives us challenges that he believes we can handle. I think that’s why there was a Jewish student body president at the time when the Jewish community on campus needed that. That’s maybe why my particular personality was equipped to handle the storm of antisemitism that was thrown my way.
“You can either rise to the challenge and let it shape you, or you can let it break you. It shaped me. I am very proud of the way I was able to handle it, and how I try to continue it now in my professional life.”
The choices available to her were entirely different than the ones her parents faced, back in the Soviet Union, Ms. Veksler said. “I live in a country where I can be as Jewish as I want to be.” Her parents took the only choice they had — to try to leave the Soviet Union, without being at all sure if they could leave or where they’d end up being allowed to stay — because their 7-year-old already was facing antisemitism, and fighting back was not an option.
Her parents would have preferred that she step away from the fight instead of continuing it, Ms. Veksler said. Their job as parents, and their life experience, pushed them in that direction.
“That’s why, when I speak to parents, I tell them that when your children go to college, you have to have faith that you raised them to the best of your ability.
“And I always say that your kids are more remarkable than you give them credit for being. I think that a lot of parents don’t think that their children are equipped to handle things, but a lot of the time it’s the parents who instill fear in their children. Otherwise, their children wouldn’t grow up having those fears.
“A lot of young people are becoming frontline Jewish warriors on their campuses and in their workplaces. There definitely are parents who prefer that their children not do that. But my parents have grown to trust my judgment. And I’ve always walked to the beat of my own drum. I never really cared that the way that I was acting was different, or that my choices were not conventional, and now that my career path is not straightforward.”
Ms. Veksler has a job now, as a public relations specialist, public speaker, and content creator, at Hiltzik Strategies. She’s also a full-time, passionate advocate for the Jewish people and the state of Israel. She’ll talk about that advocacy on Monday night in Teaneck.
Who: Tessa Veksler
What: Will be in conversation with Naomi Knopf, the chief impact officer at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and Emma Horowitz of the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee.
When: On Monday, July 21, at 8 p.m.
Where: At the Jewish Center of Teaneck
What’s it called: “Never Give In: One Young Woman’s Fight Against Antisemitism”
How much: $10; profits go to Sulamot, which supports IDF widows and orphans
To register: Go to www.jcot.org email office@jcot.org with questions.
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