There has been a long, well-documented trend of Jewish teens disengaging from the Jewish community after their b’nai mitzvahs.
However, Ethan Derman has been doing the opposite.
Derman is a senior at Gilman School. For a lot of Jewish teens like him — those who don’t attend Jewish day school — there is often a gap in their involvement with the Jewish community between finishing Hebrew school and entering college. Hence the emergence of youth movements such as BBYO, USY and NCSY.
In Baltimore, there is 4Front, a nonprofit initiative providing Jewish teens with various leadership programs, where Derman is a peer mentor.
“4Front has an undertone of teaching kids how to critically think, how to publicly speak and how to collaborate. And it’s with a like-minded group of Jewish teenagers who care about entrepreneurship and business,” the Pikesville teen said. “My peer mentor is now one of my best friends, so obviously I had a great experience meeting him through the program. I figured I’d try to offer what he gave to us to the next generation of kids.”
With 4Front, Derman has participated in the Social Innovation Fellowship, which teaches teens entrepreneurial skills. “We would meet, we would talk, we would hear from various speakers, but the end goal, besides learning skills about public speaking and critical thinking, [is] learning from Jewish entrepreneurs who came in to speak,” he said.
Derman attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed at Beth El Congregation. Today, he and his family are members of Chizuk Amuno Congregation, but he explained that
incorporating Jewish values into his life comes from the values he has been instilled with by his family.
“Jewish values have always been important for my family. I’d say almost every Friday night I do Shabbat dinners with my grandparents. We go over, they have some of our family friends over, and me and my family, and we say some prayers and we have good dinners,” he said. “I get a little bit of Judaism through that every week.”
Derman is also a leader of the Jewish Student Union and is part of the Senator Ben Cardin Jewish Scholars Program, where he meets with other Jewish teens from schools like McDonogh School and The Park School of Baltimore as part of an NCSY Atlantic Seaboard program to explore their Jewish identities and lobby in Washington, D.C., for legislation relevant to a variety of Jewish interests alongside trained lobbyists.
“Jewish values are a set that I believe in,” Derman said. “I think the teachers who are conveying the messages are good ones, and I think it teaches people how to be [an] upstanding [person] and think about life in a good frame.”
Derman added that these programs help him blend his Jewish identity with his interest in business and leadership.
In addition to being involved with Jewish programs across Baltimore, Derman is a big Ravens and Orioles fan, but his main hobby is playing bridge.
“My grandmother taught me, but she was trying to teach me when I was young, like, really young, but I wasn’t super into it because it takes a lot of attention span,” he explained. “But during COVID, when COVID began, my grandmother lives alone, and I wanted to give her a way to spend more time with her grandson, so I offered to learn bridge, and then I got hooked. I love the game — I play every day, or almost every day.”
While Derman hasn’t fully decided what he wants to do after high school, he is planning on studying business and hopes to attend University of Virginia.
