Avi Helft: No Script Required

The first time I had a proper conversation with Avi Helft ’26 was about a year and half ago, on a freezing cold February morning. I had just been hired as a campus tour guide, and it was during a training session on how to answer difficult questions that I met him. While the rest of us were trying to commit answers to memory, and praying that we never had to meet the oddball father of a prospective student that asks unanswerable questions, Avi seemed genuinely excited by everything that couldn’t be scripted.

As head tour guide, Avi walked me through how to handle difficult questions from prospective students and families, but what I remember most clearly wasn’t the answers he gave. Rather, it was the way he approached each question; not as an obstacle to get through, but as an invitation to listen closely, to take people seriously, and to understand what they truly wanted to hear about Amherst College, rather than defaulting to a picture-perfect polished version of it.

As the semesters have passed and I’ve grown to call Avi a friend, that instinct has started to feel less like a quirk and more a principle he moves through the world with. Avi doesn’t just tolerate hard questions. He looks for them. And more often than not, he starts by listening.

That tendency to listen has shown up throughout his Amherst career in unexpected places. In his senior thesis, which traces the life of his grandmother, listening becomes not just a method, but a responsibility in an attempt to preserve an incredibly powerful story. His thesis advisor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Spanish Sara Brenneis, said “the power of listening is what he’s really transmitted to me. He’s changed me over the course [of] his thesis.” 

It also explains the way that Avi seems to exist everywhere at once on campus. While creating his time at Amherst, he has truly been anything but restrained. Alongside being a Spanish and political science double major, he’s also picked up roles all over campus. Yet, he didn’t just take on roles — Hillel president, head tour guide, ski team captain, Route 9 director — he sought to understand each community, to hear its needs, and to respond thoughtfully. 

He’s not just existing in each part of campus, but stopping and being willing to ask and to hear what’s difficult. “He has this effortless ability to make everyone around him feel seen and respected,” said Assistant Director of Admission Elia Hanish, Avi’s boss as head tour guide. 

The Early Days

Avi grew up in a small neighborhood of Oakland, Calif. called Rockridge, which he described as “the perfect mix of the suburbs and the city.” His world was both small and yet expansive, with close friends from his neighborhood and school on one hand, and the pull and energy of San Francisco on the other.

His family, as well as his Jewish and Argentinian backgrounds, played a major role in the development of his personality and character. Avi grew up very close to both his parents and younger brother, but also to a broader sense of a Jewish community that was shaped in part by summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp. It was there, at this small sleepaway camp outside of Yosemite, that the seeds were planted for him to seek out the closeness of a liberal arts school, and to be a strong presence in the Jewish community.

“I always really appreciated the amount of vulnerability that there was room for at summer camp,” Avi said. “No technology, [you’re] off in the woods, and you’re there with your bunkmates with basically nothing else to do other than hang out and talk to each other.” 

This vulnerability he found at camp was pivotal in determining who he truly was, especially in his last year as a camper, when he was also a senior in high school.

“We spent the whole night talking about what it meant to be approaching the end of high school, going into college, and even just family stuff. We were just open with each other,” he said. “The corny way of saying it is ‘finding myself’ or whatever, but it mattered. I actually ended up writing my [college] personal statement about that experience.”

Going into the college process, Avi did his research and knew that he wanted the community that a small liberal arts college could provide. But there was no perfect “aha” moment where Amherst clicked for him. “When I was researching schools, it was really weird sometimes to figure out what makes them stand apart. And I think Amherst, honestly, more than anything, was a vibes thing,” he said. “I think the reality is that when I was choosing Amherst, of course, I knew I wanted that small community, but it was just that I got great vibes.”

Upon arriving at Amherst, Avi took his time with deciding his majors in true liberal arts fashion. He originally considered the pre-med track, and cycled through a multitude of courses including chemistry, math, political science, philosophy, and lots more. “Obviously I didn’t have my whole four years hung out, but [political science] has a lot of whole classes that I’m into,” he said.

And then he took “Literature and Culture,” which surveys literature of the Spanish-speaking world, with Assistant Professor of Spanish Ludmila Ferrari. Coming from an Argentine background on his father’s side and having grown up speaking some Spanish, he wanted to take at least one Spanish class in college. But Ferrari inspired him to take another class: “[Ferrari] was just so warm and amazing ... that I was like, ‘okay, I’ll sign up for another class.’” And the ball just kept rolling — that’s how he ended up as a political science and Spanish double major. 

The Language of Stories

Studying abroad in Buenos Aires during his junior year only deepened his connection to both the Spanish language and his family. “Buenos Aires is just such an amazing city, and there was so much going for it,” Avi said. “One of the big reasons wasn’t just that my family is there, but also that I had this really deep desire to not only speak Spanish, but to speak Spanish in the same way that my family spoke Spanish, with the same accent [and] the same vocabulary.” 

And I completely get it. That kind of connection to one’s family is something that goes beyond words. It connects to you a story that started long before you, something very fitting with Avi’s character as a storyteller. At Amherst, Avi’s accent and manner of speaking draws playful teasing from friends. But for him, it’s a source of pride, if the sheepish grin on his face was anything to go by.

When it came time to decide on thesis topics, Avi knew he wanted to explore topics surrounding Latin America’s Jewish population. But the inspiration had been at home all along: “I realized what I really wanted to do was tell the story of my grandmother,” he said. His thesis is a 120-page biography on his paternal grandmother, Marion Eppinger, detailing an incredibly powerful life story that almost reads like a journey through history.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Eppinger survived the Holocaust as a child, before briefly living under communist Hungary. She eventually moved to Argentina, not knowing an ounce of Spanish but quickly learned the language. Eppinger went on to become a doctor and founded a revolutionary hematology-oncology clinic, the first of its kind in Argentina. And if that wasn’t amazing on its own, she went on to curate an incredible collection of Argentinian art with her husband. 

Through 19 interviews over Zoom, Avi wove together the remarkable life of his grandmother, capturing not just history, but the personal stories that connect generations. “It’s really not just about these two historical moments,” Brenneis said. “It’s also about his whole family history, and how it dovetails with our collective history, and it’s deeply resonated with me, in so many ways.”

The Responsibility of Community

For Avi, his Spanish-speaking heritage wasn’t the only thing that guided him throughout his time at Amherst. Growing up close to his Jewish identity through family, community, and summer camp, he knew that maintaining that connection was something he wanted to continue at Amherst.

Having joined Hillel on the very first day of orientation, Avi has become an integral part of the organization. “They did a ‘get to know you’ Shabbat dinner that Friday,” he said. “And then I got to meet some older people, and I was like ‘okay, this is awesome. I want to get involved in leadership.’” 

Though he’s spent all four of his college years with Hillel, Avi has never lost the excitement and connection that drew him to that first Shabbat dinner, but has proceeded to become a leader guided by a genuine desire to listen. 

“​​It’s been something to watch as a leader over these last few years,” President Michael Elliott said of Avi’s growth at Amherst. “[I’ve] watch[ed] him develop a kind of gravitas, and it’s clear that his peers respect him, and I think that comes from the fact that he also clearly listens to and respects his peers. It’s a valuable form of leadership on campus.”

That manner of listening and inclusivity has persisted in Avi’s role as a leader of Jewish life on campus. In his leadership, Avi has sought to make Hillel a place of community, inclusivity, and belonging, especially in the wake of October 7. “Hillel is the one main street Jewish organization on campus, and therefore it’s our responsibility to serve all of the Jews on campus,” he said.

True to form, Avi seeks out the hard questions. On his tours, he lets prospective students and families know that he is heavily involved in Jewish life, in hopes of receiving difficult questions to answer. He participated in a panel where alumni challenged him for being too critical of Israel, and he clashed with the Hillel e-board in his sophomore year to prevent the organization from issuing a blanket statement condemning events abroad. Avi’s priority was clear: He didn’t want to exclude any Jew on campus.

“It was really impressive to me to watch somebody who cares so much about their fellow students think hard about what leadership requires at such a moment,” Elliott said. “It would have been very easy for him simply to say, ‘this is too fraught [or] too difficult. I’ll let somebody else step forward.’ [But] that’s not the way Avi works. He thinks about the needs of the people around him and tries to respond to that.”

Everywhere Else All at Once

It’s rare to find somebody who has truly touched every part of campus in the way that Avi has. Beyond his academic and personal pursuits, Avi has found a way to embed himself in so many other communities, from a capella and jazz to skiing. But he’s never just a fleeting presence, or somebody who’s there for a quick minute. Avi’s somebody who manages to make an impression wherever he goes.

“It’s his presence that really sticks with you. He has this ‘community-first’ mindset and a way of leading that isn’t about title, but about the people he works with. He’s extremely principled and thoughtful, but he balances that with a great sense of humor that makes even the longest days in our office feel lighter,” Hanish said.

I can’t help but agree. He has a strange way of caring about everyone he meets, and making them all feel heard and seen. It’s a bit of a joke between the tour guides that Avi is such a mom figure, if the “mom of the year” paper plate award he won in our final tour guide meeting is a good indicator of his personality.

It’s no surprise, then, that Avi’s applied his “community-first” mindset to Amherst’s a capella and jazz groups — music forms that require intense teamwork. He noticed that a lot of his friends on the ski team were also a part of Route 9, who talked him into auditioning in the second semester of his freshman year.

“It’s [all about] having a really tight knit group of guys that subscribes to this similar kind of vulnerability, goofiness, and openness and, frankly, awkwardness and corniness,” he said. “It’s a great friend group, and it’s fun because it brings people together from across campus, and we get to meet people through each other.”

The Next Chapter

After graduation, Avi is headed to New York to work at Redstone Strategy Group, a consulting firm working with nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. True to form, he’s already planning out adventures beyond work, like hiking the Inca Trail, and searching for new stories to tell and hard questions to solve.

Having had the pleasure of knowing Avi, I know that wherever the future takes him, he will approach it with the same curiosity, empathy, and courage that have defined his time at Amherst. I truly cannot wait to read the biography that somebody will inevitably write about him someday, about all of the new ways he’s continued to seek out the hard questions, listen carefully, and share the stories that matter most. And when that time comes, I hope I have the honor of this profile serving as a first chapter in what I know is an amazing journey that is about to unfold.