“Jewish history is a history of having the law weaponized against you, of being told you do not belong. That history did not make us fearful of this work. It made us certain of it.”
When Samantha Pourciau, Esq.—an Avodah Jewish Service Corps alum, new board member, and Senior Attorney at the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI)—stood before the Louisiana State House, she brought the weight of Jewish history and values with her. She was there to testify as a representative of Avodah and PJI in support of SB 407 and in fierce opposition to a slate of restrictive voting rights bills. Her words drew a direct line from Jewish activists on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement to the fight happening right now in Louisiana.
But the battle at the State House didn’t end with Sam’s powerful remarks. Just a week later, Sam emailed us with an urgent update: Hannah, a current Jewish Service Corps Member, was scheduled to testify the next morning against SB 121–a bill aimed at confusing and restricting voting access through deeply partisan redistricting maps.
The reality of local legislative hearings is brutal. Hannah waited patiently, but the hearing dragged on for a grueling nine hours. Because she ultimately couldn’t stay for the entire duration, Sam stepped back up to the microphone to carry the torch.
After Sam spoke, Representative Ed Larvadain III asked what a young person like her thought about SB 121, and whether people of her generation would choose to make Louisiana their home if they were mapped out of the democratic process this way.
Sam’s response was emphatic: “No, people will leave. Or not even come.”
There is a profound, terrifying honesty in that answer. It is the sound of a generation refusing to play along with a system designed to legislate them out of their own futures.
When we talk about Gen Z, which includes the cohort of young people currently filling our Service Corps batim (communal houses), waiting out grueling nine-hour hearings, and standing on the front lines of a changing political landscape, the world loves to analyze them like a demographic puzzle to be solved. They look at a generation whose key developmental years were marked by compounding crises (completing school during a global pandemic, climate catastrophes, ever-present state violence, a brutally fractured democracy, and more), and they call them weak, fragile, cynical, or disinterested.
But at Avodah, we see something entirely different. We don’t see a generation that is checking out; we see a generation that is stepping up with an entirely new set of expectations around leadership, belonging, and systemic impact.
And frankly, they are demanding that our Jewish community keep up with them.
For twenty-eight years, Avodah has been in the business of developing lifelong social justice leaders. But the work we are doing right now in our Community Engagement & Learning strategies isn’t about teaching Gen Z how to care; it’s about building containers strong enough to hold the ferocity of their commitment.
Young folks understand, intimately, that mental health and systemic oppression are inextricably linked. They know that you cannot tend to the soul without also fighting against unjust laws. And because they refuse to look away from the brokenness of our world, our job at Avodah is to offer them the structural, spiritual, and communal scaffolding to do this brutal work sustainably, without fracturing.
When Representative Larvadain III asked Sam if people of her generation would make Louisiana a home under these conditions, the subtext of the question seemed to be: Will you settle down and accept this proposed injustice as the new status quo?
Sam said, emphatically, no. Hannah, by showing up to testify, said no.
This is the generation rewriting the rules of engagement. They are modeling a Judaism that is gritty, brave, and deeply rooted in the soil of real-world struggle. They aren’t leaving the Jewish community because they don’t care; when they walk out of rooms, it’s because the rooms aren’t ready to hold the breadth of their vision.
At Avodah, we are proud to build expansive rooms. We are proud to green-light the testimonies that make institutions sweat. And we are proud to stand behind the young leaders who look at a broken system and choose, with every ounce of their holy rage, to stay, to fight, and sometimes build something new.
