Adapting: The Future of Jewish Education

 According to Rabbi Ben Spratt , if you look around the American Jewish landscape, some organizations and institutions seem stuck, petrified of making big and needed changes. On the horizon, he views an American Jewish future that is able to break this stagnation as he places Jewish educators and Jewish education at the center of this seismic and necessary shift. What led Rabbi Spratt to this reve...

Imagine a job where you are expected to know every detail about a 5,000-year-old tradition and its sacred texts. Sounds difficult, right? Welcome to the world of Jewish educators.  These unique challenges are one of the reasons that some Jewish educators struggle with impostor syndrome. It's something that concerns  Rabba Yaffa Epstein,  who has worked as a Jewish educator around the world fo...

Is the current state of Jewish education half full or half empty? You could say that the answer is somewhere in between, that both are true, at least to some extent. Or you could say that it really does depend on who you ask.  This episode was produced by Dina Nusnbaum and Gabriel Weinstein.  The show’s executive producers are David Bryfman, Karen Cummins, and Nessa Liben. This episode was enginee...

This season of Adapting: The Future of Jewish Education will tackle some of the more challenging issues facing Jewish education today. You’ll be hearing from some of the most influential voices, discussing some of the more controversial issues – the ones that are more frequently spoken about behind closed doors than they are in public spaces. Adapting is hosted by David Bryfman, The Jewish Educati...

What happens when you reimagine an ancient ritual like immersing in the mikveh? What is it that makes the mikveh’s restorative waters a powerful spiritual and educational experience? On this episode of Our Jewish Futures , Rabbi Amalia Mark of Mayyim Hayyim discusses her deep connection with the ritual of mikveh and how Mayyim Hayyim helps people from around the country and world connect with this...

What will the history classroom of the future look like? Through what lens should educators teach about Judaism and other world religions? On this episode of Our Jewish Futures , historian and educator Rebecca Brenner Graham shares her ideas about the role of the “3 B’s”- Behavior, Belief, and Belonging- in history education and why she believes it is important to have her students question existi...

What are the core elements needed for a quality Jewish EdTech product? Russel Neiss’s answer will surprise you. Russel, a Jewish educator fluent in both Yiddish and Javascript, is a Senior Product Software Engineer at Sefaria. A longtime developer of Jewish EdTech products, Russel explains why quality educational design – and not fancy technology- is at the heart of successful technology initiativ...

For Rabbi Adina Allen , the word “creativity” is a code word for God.  Rabbi Allen believes that everyone, despite what your art teacher may have told you, has inherent creative abilities. As the co-founder and creative director of the Jewish Studio Project , Rabbi Allen helps Jewish communal professionals and lay leaders harness their creative powers and enhance their connection with the divine. ...

Why does Daniel Olson get frustrated when he hears the phrase “special needs” used to describe a child?  Why does he believe that learners with disabilities receive only a “partial invitation to citizenship” in some Jewish educational settings? Daniel, the Director of Strategic Initiatives & Research at the National Ramah Commission , is a scholar who researches the experience of people with d...

In a single moment, an educator can dramatically change a person’s life, even if they didn’t know it. It’s a lesson K.M. DiColandrea, aka DiCo, a 2021 Robert M. Sherman Young Pioneers Award recipient and director and founder of the Brooklyn Debate League , learned in the most unexpected way. DiCo shares his journey, and struggles, to follow his life’s calling – empowering under-privileged students...

What can be done to improve Hebrew language teaching and learning?  T'helah Ben-Dan , a long time teacher and student of Hebrew, has a few ideas. On the third episode of Our Jewish Futures with Dr. Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath, T’helah speaks about Hebrew and Jewish identity, second language acquisition, empowering educators, and how Hebrew can serve as a connector for the global Jewish communit...

Community. Love of Torah. Stronger social bonds. These are just a few of the benefits Rabbi Dr. Dan Smokler and Erica Frankel of the Office Of Innovation see in adults who participate in regular Torah study with peers. Dan and Erica discuss their unique backgrounds in labor organizing and dance, respectively, their small-town upbringings, OOI's new cohort based Jewish learning series, IYUN ,...

What goes into a successful relationship between a board president and a CEO? Martine Fleishman, The Jewish Education Project’s Board President, shares insights and stories from her board presidency and her communal volunteer work. She reflects on what has made her extraordinary partnership with David Brfyman, The Jewish Education Project’s CEO, so powerful and transformative, and what other board...

How do Amram Altzman, Jessica Cohen, and Megan Sass  approach the most pressing issues facing Jewish educators today? Amram , the Associate Director of Youth Programs at Keshet , discusses how he reimagined his approach to LGBTQ Jewish teen engagement because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Jessica , Associate Director of Religious Education at Congregation Rodeph Sholom , shares her approach to buildi...

What motivates and inspires Francie Goldberg and Emily Hausman , two of the recipients of The Jewish Education Project's 2022 Robert M. Sherman Young Pioneers Award? Francie, the Director of Admissions and Marketing and School Librarian at HANC Plainview , discusses her unique approach to family education and the importance of making libraries places where children feel creatively empowered. ...

What gives Liz Kleinrock hope for the future? The students in her classroom. In the second episode of Our Jewish Futures , Liz joins The Jewish Education Project’s Dr. Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath for a fascinating conversation on antiracist and antibias education in Jewish spaces and beyond. They discuss her social media activism, the importance of education about Antisemitism, and her work as an an...

Rabbi Leor Sinai , Senior Director of Israel Education at RootOne ,joins David Bryfman this week to suggest that Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut represent two of the "modern days of awe." Rabbi Sinai’s passion for Israel education and his students shines throughout this episode, and he discusses how educators can transmit the significance of these days to learners, wherever they are in...

Rabbi Yehudah Potok , Director of Jewish Education at Facing History and Ourselves joins David Bryfman for a meaningful episode focused on Holocaust education for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. Rabbi Potok shares how he understands the phrase "Never Again", why it’s important to balance the universal and the particular in Holocaust education, and how he’s responding to questions from s...

Jewish or not, teens are teens. As Jewish educators, if we want to be serious about the future of teen Jewish education, we should be actively engaging with our colleagues from other faith traditions doing this same work. For the first episode of Our Jewish Futures, Dr. Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath speaks with Kenda Creasy Dean , an ordained United Methodist pastor and the Mary D. Synnott Professor o...

Welcome to Our Jewish Futures, a new series within Adapting hosted by The Jewish Education Project's Dr. Samantha Vinokor- Meinrath ! In this series, Samantha speaks with educators and thought leaders from in and outside the world of Jewish education to envision the Jewish Future. Join us for this exciting new journey! New episodes will be released about once a month in the Adapting podcast f...

Can you imagine if your congregation had 100% participation for every Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service? According to Rabbi Matt Dreffin of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life , that's typically the case in some small Jewish communities he works with. Rabbi Dreffin speaks with David Bryfman about the vitality of Jewish life in the South and what can we all learn from...

Who owns the Torah? What does it mean for Jewish education now that we have free universal access to the Torah, Talmud, and other Jewish texts?  Rabbanit Sara Wolkenfeld , Chief Learning Officer at Sefaria , a free virtual library of Jewish texts, speaks with David Bryfman about her passion for Jewish text, how gender affected her own access to Jewish texts, and what drives her work building a new...

"As my colleague Allison Cook says, 'It feels like magic, but it doesn’t take magic to make it happen, it takes pedagogy.'"  Rabbi Avi Killip , Executive Vice President of Hadar Institute , joins David Bryfman to discuss what it takes to make Jewish learning- family engagement, adult education, and everything in between- magical and meaningful. She also reflects on how her stru...

"Would I open that?” Carine Warsawski, often asks herself when she and her team are creating email blasts and other marketing materials for Trybal Gatherings , a national nonprofit that reimagines Jewish gatherings for adults in their 20s and 30s. Carine, the founder and CEO of Trybal, delves into the social media strategies that have helped Trybal rise above “the noise” to truly engage with...

What has changed and what needs to stay the same in Jewish teen engagement? Michelle Shapiro Abraham, an award-winning Jewish educator with the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), spends her days pondering these questions. Michelle reflects on how her educational and professional journey - starting as a full-scholarship camper at Camp Swig in the 1980s - has impacted the way she strives to empower Jew...