When Hillel's newly minted executive, Kinney Zalesne, was in college, the Hillel on her campus at Yale held little appeal for her. For four years, she maintained a skeptical distance from the whole institution.

"To me, Hillel was for people who were only socially comfortable with other Jews and whose cultural interests were mainly Jewish," said Zalesne, who began her job as executive vice president last Monday. "That seemed narrow to me — less than the universal embracing of the world that I was interested in."

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