Barry M. Aarons, Gamma Tau (Arizona State University) 1971, was elected to serve as International President of Zeta Beta Tau this summer.

In his role as the top leader of the Fraternity, Brother Aarons has important priorities and goals for the betterment of the world’s first Jewish fraternity.

The Digital Deltan sat down with International President Aarons recently to ask about his vision for ZBT in the next two years and more. Here is a transcript of the interview.

What advice do you have to give to other ZBTs as it relates to maximizing their fraternity experience?

(For) undergraduates, I would say to maximize the interaction they have with their chapter brothers. Learn how to manage what is essentially a million-dollar business. If they’re in a house, learn how to manage interaction, amongst themselves, how to do planning. These are all the things that we want to make sure that the undergraduates learn. It’s a brotherhood that serves as a learning experience to make you a better man in life.

For alumni, we all have chapter brothers that we still visit with, we go to football games with them, we go to dinner with them, and so on. But there’s so much more that they could be engaging in. There are many more alumni brothers that they don’t even know who live in their communities.

There isn’t a month that goes by, when I’m wearing some ZBT swag, I don’t have someone who come up and says, ‘Hey, are you a ZBT?’ I say, ‘Yeah! I am too.’

There’s a lot of us all over the country, and there’s a benefit to that. Let me give you another example: My son, who’s a lawyer in LA, called me the other day and he says, ‘Dad, do you know anybody who’s a good attorney for a specific thing?’ I said, ‘No, but I’ve got Scott Silberfein (Epsilon Delta, University of Delaware, 1999), who is an attorney brother on the Supreme Council, I’ll give him a call.’ Within 12 hours, he had two names and said, ‘Go ahead and call them and tell them that I told you to call.’

That’s the type of relationship and benefit that we can have as alumni brothers that can really benefit ourselves and enrich our lives.

When you meet today’s undergraduate brothers, what is the first topic you want to discuss with them?

If I’m meeting an undergraduate brother for the first time, I want to know who they are. I ask questions like, why did you choose to come to this college? Where did you go to high school? Tell me about your family. Do you have siblings? I want to know a little bit about them as human beings before we get into anything else.

And then I say, why did you choose ZBT? I want to know what motivated them.

How do you see a ZBT promoting Jewish heritage and combating antisemitism in the next year?

We have a very robust and competent staff of people who have been doing great heritage programming. Some of that heritage programming now is going to have to pivot a little bit. What we’re facing on some of these campuses is antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism. They are inseparable. I would suggest, therefore, that it’s important for us to educate our brothers on how to react and respond – not to confront, but to react and respond. I don’t want anybody to go picking a fight with somebody who is irrational and is going to be screaming in your face, ‘From the river to the sea,’ but I do want them to know what the issues are. I want them to be articulate on it. I want them to be competent, and I believe that’s important.

We definitely should be enhancing our opportunities to visit places like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans – which we are going to go see at Convention this year – the Holocaust Museum LA. I mean, wherever you are, you should be close enough to a place like that where you should be able to go out and learn what happened and why it happened. And that will enable you to confront it and know how to deal with those things when you run across it in your day to day life.

What do you want to see from a campus that shows it would be a good future home for Zeta Beta Tau?

We should be looking at non-denominational Christian schools and Catholic schools to build chapters. Why? Because I keep hearing from parents of Jewish kids: ‘I’m afraid to send my kid to Harvard. I’m afraid to send my kid to UCLA, because I don’t think they’re going to be safe as Jews on campus.’

I believe students who attend a denominational school may feel more comfortable that they’re going to be able to study, to engage. And if they’ve got ZBT there, they know they’re going to be able to have some type of a Jewish experience, and they’re going to be comfortable with a set of students around them who aren’t going to challenge them because of their religion.

What types of colleges and universities should ZBT look to grow at?

The generic answer is any and all. There are some campuses that have a robust Greek opportunity and we should be on those campuses. There are some campuses that have small Greek opportunities and we might want to be at those campuses, but we also want to make sure that the campuses we go to are going to create a return on investment.

So, what types of campuses? Well, as I mentioned earlier, new nontraditional places where there are an increase or influx of Jewish students going there for reasons of safety or other reasons. There are some smaller liberal arts colleges around the country where I don’t think we’ve ever been. Of course, all of the really big schools have potential.

How can brothers of all ages help support the fraternity’s growth?

The first answer to that as a former President of the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation is to make contributions. Look, there are three things of value in this world: time, treasure and talent.

Treasure can be developed, talent can be developed, but time cannot be — once you lose it, it’s gone. I think that being willing to give a little bit of time to help your chapter is something brothers of all ages can do.

I know there are a lot of alumni brothers that left their alma maters and went to their original home cities or moved to a new place. I suggest they adopt a nearby chapter and give their time to them. Volunteer, help them, agree to become an advisor, go to alumni meetings. You’re going to have fun. I guarantee you’re going to have fun. If you are going to a campus — like for a football game — I suggest you go to the chapter before and go to their mixer or go to their aftergame activity.

The point of the matter is that yes, it is very essential that everybody commits some treasure and gives some money to the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation, whether it’s a little or a lot. Secondly, make sure that you make your talent available. I have had undergraduate brothers serve as interns in my company, and I’m giving them my talent because I’m educating them. It’s a matter of time, and of the three, time is the only one that you can’t get back.

What does ZBT need to do to survive in the long term?

Barry D. Seigel, Beta Eta (Bowling Green State University) 1952, who was our executive director back when I was an undergraduate (so you’re talking over 50 years ago) used to say, “Numbers, numbers, numbers.”

If we’re going to survive in the future under any circumstances, whether the antisemitism tide continues or whether it doesn’t, we’re going to have to open new chapters and we’re going to have to continue to see the growth of our existing chapters.

If the chapter is a 50-person house today, pat yourself on the back for a minute, and then commit to become a 60-person house, and then a 70-person house.

My point is, that that’s what it’s going to take to survive — “Numbers, numbers, numbers” — we’ve got to be looking at chapters that might be underperforming right now and how we can bolster them.  We’ve got to be looking for new places to start chapters.

Why did you choose ZBT? Gamma Tau was a Prospective Chapter at the time.

It kind of chose me. A couple of ZBTs who had transferred from other schools, one of which was Lawrence (Larry) Lavine — he came from Bowling Green, Beta Eta Chapter — and then he snapped his fingers [showing a chapter tradition].  Larry and another gentleman came to my room in the dormitory at the end of the first semester my freshman year and said, ‘We want to start a Prospective Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau. Would you be interested?’ And I said, ‘Well, I might be.’

People have asked me, ‘Why did you why didn’t you go through rush and join Alpha Epsilon Pi or another group?’ I said because it gave me the opportunity to start something new. That was a draw for me. You got to start a new chapter, you’re going to be there on the ground floor. You’re going to be a Founding Father. It may be cliché, but that was really a motivation.

I’ll never forget the time, when I was an undergrad, we drove over from Phoenix to Tempe to Palm Springs because we had a brother whose parents were remodeling their house and had some old furniture. They said if we came to pick it up, we could have it, so we drove over and halfway across the desert until it turned dark. We put a Hanukkah menorah on the dashboard and we put candles on it and we lit the candles, and we sang the prayer. Probably it was illegal in both states, but the point is that it gave me a connection to the Jewish community and ZBT’s heritage.

No question that starting a Fraternity also introduced me to social experiences with women that I could date, we could have an intramural team, and so on. There were a lot of different reasons, but it all stemmed from the fact that they approached me and I thought it was an opportunity for me to participate in something new. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.

How can we promote trust between brothers of different ages and between undergrads and national leadership?

There has always been a problem of undergraduates decrying, ‘Oh, Nationals. Nationals making us do this. Nationals making us do that.’

And you know what? That’s not much different than the cry in the 1960s: ‘Never trust anyone over 30.’ I don’t think that’s a ZBT problem. I think that’s an endemic problem where young people of a certain age who are just really becoming mature adults resent being told what to do.

To promote trust, I have asked the international committee chairs who are members of the Supreme Council to make sure that they have a good number of undergraduates on their committees. I want the undergraduates to not just participate but to know that they are valued in their opinions. The truth of the matter is there are things they can tell us about what’s going on a college campus today that I have no clue about. I think that that is the first way to build trust. Building trust takes time.

What does Brotherhood for a Lifetime mean to you?

When I joined the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation board in 2005, I walked into that room at my first meeting and there were two brothers in there who I had known when I was an undergraduate. One was Steve Ehrlich (Iota, University of Denver, 1970), and one was Phil Waxberg (Alpha, City College of New York, 1966), and they had both been staff members who met at the two conventions I went to as an undergraduate at the Grand Bahama Island.

Over time, I began to bond with those Foundation board members in a way that made it start to feel like a new ZBT chapter for me. Some of those men have become friends for a lifetime. Some of them are on the Supreme Council, some of them are not. But I keep in touch with them as best I can because they became kind of a new chapter for me.

Brotherhood for a Lifetime is the continuation of building chapters in your heart and your mind with the brothers that you come across as you age.

Any closing thoughts?

I have the benefit of having served as a lobbyist working with legislators in the United States Congress in my career over more than 50 years. Because of that I’ve learned a lot about  — believe it or not  — how to work together to achieve a common goal.

Most people think that our state legislatures and our Congress are absolutely broken, irreparably broken, and I would tell you that they’re not. There are a handful of issues where you’ve got a partisan divide as deep as the Grand Canyon. Some of those issues are never going to be bridged, but I will tell you that most legislation that appears before the legislature in any state or the U.S. Congress comes from a particular interest group who needs to have a law changed in order to facilitate more effective management of their businesses or trade associations.

The people who are opposed to that change get into the same room with the proponents. They haggle and they talk, and they achieve consensus. I’ve told my clients, I don’t care for the word ‘compromise.’ The reason is because compromise implies somebody’s giving something up to get a result. That’s not what you’re looking for. What you’re looking for is consensus. You’re looking to find those issues that can drive a consensus for everyone. Everybody needs to walk out of the room and say, look, we resolved this issue.

Now, the reason I say that as it relates to me being President of ZBT is we’re all not united on everything that we’re dealing with.

We just had a terrific Supreme Council Executive Group lunch, and we were kind of all over the map with ideas of how we want to proceed. We had the meeting, we had the conversation, everybody participated, and because of that, we can now move to the next level of conversation and be able to achieve a lot of great things, because most issues on which there is conflict are not irreparable. Most issues can be resolved if everybody goes at them with the concept of, ‘I want to resolve this to the benefit of everybody involved.’ And I think that’s how we can become successful in the Supreme Council during my term as president. That’s what I’m striving for.

About Brother Aarons

Barry M. Aarons is a former president of the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation and current International President of the Fraternity. He has served ZBT internationally on either the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation Board of Directors or the Supreme Council since 2005.

As owner of The Aarons Company LLC, Brother Aarons has 50 years of experience in association management, policy development, public affairs implementation and lobbying in and around the Arizona Legislature, other state legislatures and the United States Congress. He spent decades as Public Affairs Director for the old Mountain Bell and USWest companies (now Century Link) and in the regulatory and executive branches of Arizona State government. He served as Special Assistant, Policy Advisor and Legislative Director for former Arizona Governor Fife Symington.

Brother Aarons was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arizona Capitol Times. He is a past winner of ZBT’s Sommer Award and Ehrlich Award, both honoring his volunteer service and selfless dedication to the Fraternity. He and wife, Jody, live in Phoenix, Arizona, and have several children and grandchildren.

• Share this article