Josh Snyder has been in the Baltimore community for 17 years working as executive director of Goucher College Hillel, where he has guided the next generation of Jewish students and served as an ambassador of Jewish life on campus.
Snyder, a Philadelphia native, moved to Baltimore after graduating rabbinical school in 2008 and has been at Goucher ever since, organizing programs and bringing Jewish and non-Jewish students together.
Snyder lives in Reisterstown with his wife and their five children.
Tell me about your background and upbringing.
I grew up in Philadelphia, went to the Solomon Schechter Day School through sixth grade and then public school after that, and was pretty involved Jewishly growing up, mostly in the Conservative movement. Judaism was a pretty significant part of my life. I was in a Jewish youth group, went to Jewish camps, and as I went to high school, I got really involved in USY.
How did your higher education journey shape your future career?
I went to the joint program between Columbia University and Jewish Theological Seminary, otherwise known as List College, which is in New York City. And it was a wonderful experience for me on a lot of levels.
One, I think I got a supercharged Jewish education, a lot of things that I really wanted to know and hadn’t had the chance to delve into while in public school, and also just an opportunity to really have a lot of Jewish living experience, living in a dorm with other Jewish people, keeping Shabbat and figuring out how we wanted to live Jewishly with one another.
Tell me about your path to becoming a rabbi.
My first career path was actually veterinary medicine. I went to vet school because I loved animals. My parents had wanted me originally to go into medicine, and I saw that as a connection and opportunity. And while I ended up at veterinary school, I found, after about a year, that that wasn’t really the career path for me. I took some time to think about what it was that I really wanted to do originally.
I thought about potentially being a rabbi earlier on. I really had only seen the opportunity for the pulpit rabbinate, and I figured out quickly that that wasn’t necessarily who I was going to be as a rabbi. When I really took stock in that year after vet school, I had an opportunity to work in a synagogue in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
What was that opportunity like?
[I had] a really wonderful mentor who reached out to me and offered me a position that gave me an opportunity to do a little bit of everything, kind of a Jewish jack of all trades. I read Torah. I led a youth group. I did adult education and taught Hebrew school. And it was wonderful because it gave me the opportunity to think about what I really wanted to do, career-wise, and what gave me joy and giving it to others. And I realized I really did want to be a Jewish professional. I [then] had the opportunity to go and learn from some colleagues and friends who were at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. And that really was where I found a cohort of people who were interested in becoming rabbis in different ways. Then an opportunity came along to work at the University of Delaware Hillel in my fourth year in rabbinical school. And so, I did that for my last two years, and I immediately felt just how much I loved working with college students.
What is it like being an executive director and rabbi?
I think what I do as a Hillel director is a little bit of rabbi and a lot of director things. Most of the time, while I might be leading services, I’m truly trying to enable students to do it. A lot of the time I’m really trying to facilitate the student experience of leadership and giving students an opportunity to express what Judaism might mean for them.
It [happens] in conversations in the dining hall or in our Hillel lounge during our open hours. It’s helping students get from an idea to a program. It’s thinking about what ways our campus community might need support in terms of Jewish leadership and what our Jewish students need on our campus. So, it’s always changing.
What does it mean for you to be a guiding force in the next generation of young Jews?
It’s really gratifying for me to see ways in which Jewish students and non-Jewish students too, who have taken part in a lot of our programs, learn and grow through our programming.
How does your Jewish identity shape your life?
As a rabbi who works in the Hillel, maybe it’s kind of obvious that it’s inescapable. The thing about my Jewish identity is that I come back to it even in moments that might not be obvious. It’s dealing with the challenge in life outside of work, in thinking about how to approach the world, how to find spirituality and support in this challenging time. How do I relate to others and create bridges of communication?
I find to a certain extent that pieces of Jewish wisdom are a part of who I am. It’s not always every single word I say, but it’s always going to be a part of who I am. And I think that being able to do that in a way that’s relatable to others — especially on a college campus, when I’m working with a population where some students, some people, are Jewish and others aren’t — is like such an important opportunity for ambassadorship for the Jewish people to help others in the world understand who we are, how we interact and how we can be a part of making a better world.
