New JCCPGH Israel Engagement Series aims for people to ‘come curious, leave wiser’

Jason Kunzman isn’t interested in creating safe spaces for conversations.

“We’re done with safe spaces. Safe spaces are ‘Come and hear what you want to hear.’ We’ve done that,” he said.

Instead, the president and CEO of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh said it’s time for something new.

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“We are now in the business of creating brave spaces where you can come with your thoughts, your beliefs, your perspective and hear things you may not agree with,” he said.

The JCC, Kunzman said, has an obligation to promote civil discourse and thoughtful reflection as a means of helping the community move forward.

Kunzman is putting those principles into action by launching the six-part JCCPGH Israel Engagement Series, positioning the organization as a forum for diverse viewpoints that may challenge community members’ perspectives on Israel.

“Society is pretty polarized right now, and a particular area of interest of ours is the polarization around Israel,” he said. “Our goal is for every single person who walks out of one of these engagements to say, ‘What just happened? I thought I knew what I need to know.’”

If the JCC can create these kinds of conversations centered on Israel, Kunzman said, then “we can do that around race, we can do that around politics, we can do that around affordable housing and trans rights and so on, down the line.”

The series will require “bravery,” he said, because it will challenge preconceived assumptions and notions, and will chip away at echo chambers.

The first conversation in the series will feature New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens and J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami. It will be moderated by Yisrael Klitsner.

Klitsner is a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and was the diaspora affairs adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He is a former Pittsburgh resident, who lived in Squirrel Hill while he attended Carnegie Mellon University studying public policy, and his wife worked with the University of Pittsburgh’s Dr. José-Alain Sahel. The Israeli native returned to the Jewish state to serve in the IDF after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

It was at dinner with Klitsner, during a March 2025 trip to Israel, that the idea of the series first came to Kunzman.

“We got to talking and exploring what it would look like to push the envelope on what folks in Pittsburgh are thinking and doing and saying around the topic of Israel,” Kunzman said.

The idea interested Klitsner. When Kunzman returned to the States he spoke to Fara Marcus, chief development and marketing officer at the JCC, who is participating in the JCC Association of North America’s Martin Pear Israel Fellowship. Fellowship cohorts are tasked with creating a project that “brings Israel to your community.”

Marcus said she had been working with Kunzman to come up with something that “really pushed us to go further into our learning.”

It was from those beginnings the Israel Engagement Series was created.

A statement from the organization said the JCC is committed to creating a brave, welcoming space for hard conversations about Israel and related issues and noted that the initiative is educational and nonpartisan.

Kunzman is clear: The JCC is a Zionist organization that firmly believes Israel has the right to exist as a free, democratic Jewish state. He’s also just as clear that no speaker or program the JCC hosts implies endorsement of any political party, candidate, policy or single viewpoint.

JCC Chair Merris Groff said the goal is for people to hear different points of view.

“When you listen, you can’t help but care,” she said. “That foundational belief is that my platform of listening and hearing and being compassionate when it’s uncomfortable makes us better people. I think the speaker series does that. We at the JCC are fulfilling that moral obligation.”

The JCC, she said, is in a unique position to bring together community in a space that allows for different points of view, “get us talking,” and to, hopefully, learn from the conversation.

Klitsner said the series presents an opportunity to “get to some granular truth” of why people should care about Israel.

The conversations, he said, will break through echo chambers and allow for nuanced conversation, conducted in a sensitive way, that will have an educational value beyond the typical sound bites and snippets with which people are typically inundated.

“It’s engagement for the sake of engagement, for the sake of breaking through these very problematic tendencies that we see happening and plaguing our communities,” he said.

That engagement, Kunzman and Marcus said, isn’t only for the general community.

Each talk in the series will be accompanied by an opportunity for Jewish professionals to hear from the speakers during a private learning session.

“That’s a really important component to the overall vision,” Kunzman said. “We’re looking to provide our Jewish communal professional network with something a lot deeper and more meaningful.”

And while each conversation will be meaningful, to help community members truly “come curious, leave wiser,” Kunzman hopes people will attend all six sessions, which will present the entire vision of the series.

In the end, he noted, the new series is in line with the JCC’s mission of enriching the community by “cultivating an inclusive, dynamic environment built upon Jewish values, heritage and culture.”

Or, to state it another way, the conversations will tie into the JCC’s vision of a stronger, more inclusive Jewish future.

“It’s the right place at the right time. We’re activating community,” Kunzman said, “But we can’t do it alone. We can only do it together.”

Tickets for the first conversation are available on the JCC’s website. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.