News & Blogs Category: From the Foundation Team

Like many, I am deeply troubled by much of the rhetoric coming out of the AI labs, and the very real impact that AI is having (and will have) on our future. I am neither a “Doomer” nor a “Boomer” – more of an apocaloptimist (thanks, AI Doc) who feels strongly that there needs to be a new approach to AI, including much more safety testing, increased transparency and accountability, and some amount of government oversight. When over 1,300 employees from leading AI labs sign a letter suggesting a slowdown in AI research and more focus on safety, we should pay attention. Undoubtedly, cognitive offloading is real and will impact generations of learners. The explosion of data center construction is also deeply troubling, and I’m happy to see that many communities are pushing back, even when they need the revenue.

Recently in the New York Times, a former Lululemon CIO cautioned readers to be very skeptical about the impact of AI.  While it was a compelling piece, her perspective was exclusively around for-profit companies, which have one goal: increase shareholder value. So, yes, if that’s the goal, AI can be a finicky partner. While it might seem to bring much-needed efficiencies, the difficulty in properly leveraging AI, combined with the impact on jobs, makes it a net negative in her view.

However, including nonprofits in the conversation changes the equation significantly. Nonprofits are very adept at finding ways to do more with less. It’s in their DNA. So, if AI makes them 5% more efficient, they’ll take it, and they’ll “reinvest” in the mission. And since nonprofits are human-centered, the risk of AI taking over is much smaller. Moreover, while there could be some impact on jobs, mass layoffs don’t happen very often. The nonprofit sector needs more people, not fewer. But what about the tension between the positive impact on efficiency and the risk of replacing human connection in work that’s built on relationships? This is often referred to as dialectical thinking; as Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Holding seemingly conflicting truths together is a well-understood place for nonprofit professionals; our field leverages the results of capitalism for the greater good. We’re very good at holding two opposing truths, which makes the AI conversation a familiar place for us.

It’s impossible and irresponsible to look past the impact this tool can have on this critical sector. As funding for nonprofits gets harder to secure, anything that can be done to strengthen the sector is worth considering. At the Jim Joseph Foundation, we take a measured but committed approach: use AI when appropriate, be transparent about its use, ensure that humans are driving, regularly evaluate the output, engage stakeholders, and continue to understand and review the impacts of this technology on your work. In that vein, we support our grantees to leverage AI by educating them on the possibilities and supporting them in its use. Our most recent initiative is piloting the concept of an AI Lead role inside a select group of organizations we support – someone responsible for determining where AI makes sense and ensuring it is used responsibly. While our learnings are just beginning, here are two examples where AI is making a difference today:

At BBYO, AI is embedded in how the IT team now serves the organization. Claude has deep context about BBYO’s systems, processes, documentation and even the way the organization is structured. That means technology staff can describe a problem in the language they use every day and ask AI to help diagnose it, propose solutions and, in some cases, build the code needed to fix it. When families were having trouble logging into BBYO’s online portal, for example, Claude helped the team identify what was going wrong, suggested changes to the login process and customer-service guidance, and wrote code that BBYO could test and refine. BBYO has since used the same approach to make it dramatically easier to add teens and families who attend events into its database and to address the enormously complicated task of assigning teens to the correct regions based on constantly changing ZIP codes.

But perhaps the most important impact is on people. A more junior Salesforce administrator at BBYO is now able to take on work that previously would have required considerably more experience. Rather than replacing her expertise, Claude is helping her develop it—functioning almost like a “digital mentor.” BBYO is seeing something similar with a web design specialist who had little Salesforce experience but is now using AI to bridge that knowledge gap and build within the platform. AI is helping the BBYO IT team become more capable, confident and ambitious in the work they can take on.

At UpStart, AI is rooted in a familiar Jewish idea: na’aseh v’nishma— “first we will do, and then we will understand.” Rather than waiting for the technology to mature or developing a perfect AI strategy, UpStart encouraged its staff to start experimenting and learn through use. Importantly, the organization framed AI as professional development, not human replacement. Some initial skeptics became among UpStart’s heaviest AI users, and staff in programs, finance, HR and operations were given additional resources to experiment within their functions. The key wasn’t forcing AI on people; it was letting colleagues see how useful it could be in someone else’s work and then wanting to try it themselves.

The results are already changing how work gets done. One employee had been spending roughly six hours each week gathering news from across UpStart’s network of 250 organizations to share with board members. UpStart built an AI-supported process that now gathers much of that information and prepares a draft for her to review and refine. More important than saving six hours was the fact that now she had more time to talk with board members, build relationships, and make connections.

AI also allows UpStart to think differently about scale and its goal to deliver five times the impact without increasing its budget fivefold. UpStart is now developing an AI version of its Jewish social innovation and entrepreneurship methodology that could eventually make its expertise available to thousands rather than hundreds of people each year. It is also testing AI “sidecars” that program participants can use between sessions to revisit content, ask questions and work through challenges. The goal isn’t to replace coaches, facilitators or relationships, but to make UpStart’s knowledge and support available more often and to more people.

These are just two examples of our grantee-partners embracing concerns about the potential negative impacts of AI while also pursuing its usage to achieve greater impact. This dialectical thinking reflects a long-standing Jewish teaching. In Eruvin 13b of the Babylonian Talmud, the schools of Hillel and Shammai argued for three years, each insisting the law should follow its view. Then a heavenly voice declared: “Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim”, meaning “These and these are the words of the living God.” But the voice kept going: “v’halacha k’Beit Hillel”, meaning “and the law follows Beit Hillel.”

So the teaching has two parts. Both positions carry truth, and a decision still gets made.

The Talmud then asks the obvious question: if both are the words of God, why does Hillel’s school win? It isn’t because they were more correct. It’s because they were kind and humble. The Rabbis studied Shammai’s arguments alongside their own, and they even stated Shammai’s position before their own when teaching.

Importantly, the tradition also preserved the minority’s view. Shammai’s arguments stay on the page, and the Mishnah explains that they’re kept so a later court could draw on them if circumstances change.

If we apply this to the topic of leveraging AI in our work in Jewish nonprofits, it guides us to consider both truths, even if they’re in conflict. It teaches us to be humble and open to all arguments, but then decide how best to move forward, while remembering to document our decisions and revisit them as needed.

This is by no means the end of the conversation. AI is happening at lightning speed, so we have to continue to be deeply informed and engaged. Ensuring we maintain a deep connection to our humanity is becoming more critical and getting harder. Perhaps there will be events that change our approach to AI, or perhaps we’ll continue to operate in the space between. It is hard to predict. But, if you’re interested in this discussion, we’re here to engage.

David Goodman is Program Director, Technology Strategy at the Jim Joseph Foundation. 

For two decades, the Jim Joseph Foundation’s core grantmaking — what we call our Deliberate Strategy — has invested in an ecosystem of organizations that foster vibrant Jewish life. While these efforts yield remarkably positive outcomes, the underlying ecosystem was built by and for the minority of Jews who already feel at least somewhat comfortable and connected. It simply was not designed to reach the majority who do not.

Although most young Jewish adults aged 22-40 in North America are not affiliated with Jewish institutions, they don’t realize how common this is. They assume they are the exception, but these young adults are the majority. At the same time, many of them do engage in Jewish life that is meaningful to them — at home, with friends and family.

To bridge this divide, a few years ago the foundation launched an R&D initiative called Common Era.

Common Era operates separately from our traditional grantmaking, with its own team and a clear mandate to find the people, ideas and unmet needs that our Deliberate Strategy does not focus on. Our aim is to generate new initiatives and, importantly, to strengthen an ongoing discipline to generate knowledge and ideas — in short, to drive our Emergent Strategy. We want to learn about the Jewish people broadly — our culture, behaviors, and the kinds of Jewish experiences that will be relevant and resonant in a quickly shifting landscape.

Pairing established operations with discovery is standard practice across industries. Universities balance teaching with original research. Businesses pair core products with R&D. Venture capital firms maintain established portfolios while funding unproven startups. Science advances because institutions create space to ask questions before knowing the answers.

In practice, Common Era invests in and conducts research outside usual channels, funds small experiments before knowing if they will succeed, identifies new talent and partnerships, and gives innovators the runway to test and iterate under uncertain conditions. Most experiments fail to scale. When an initiative ends, it either captures lessons for the next attempt, stays small and localized, gets handed off to an established partner or scales into a standalone entity.

Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

I joined the Jim Joseph Foundation as Program Director, Technology Strategy because I believe our sector is at a pivotal moment. It has always been challenging for nonprofits to harness the right tech tools. They’re expensive, complicated, and are often not geared towards nonprofit use. And now AI and the rapid pace of change is making it even more challenging. A decision made in the morning about which software to use, and how to implement it, may feel wrong by the afternoon.

In this complex climate, our grantee-partners (and all nonprofits) deserve a technology infrastructure that matches the ambition of their missions: engaging young people, strengthening communities, training educators, providing meaningful learning, and preserving and reimagining tradition. My role, and the reason I joined the Foundation a year and a half ago, is to help make that happen—to work alongside our grantee-partners, understand their unique needs, and support them in building their technology capacity to do their best work and achieve their outcomes.

I have spent my career helping nonprofits better leverage technology for increased impact, and I have a fundamental belief in two things:

1. Technology is a critical part of any business, especially for nonprofits
2. Nonprofits aren’t fully supported to leverage #1

Unfortunately, technology is not always viewed as a critical asset and, when it is used, often does not run well or is not properly deployed to support impact. As a result, many nonprofit professionals simply haven’t experienced “good tech” in the workplace. In my various professional roles, and at the Foundation today, I’ve helped organizations understand what “good” looks like and then worked with them to develop a strategy and plan to get there.

The critical starting point for this support is understanding the current state of technology for each organization. I’ve deployed this approach wherever and for whomever I’ve worked. More than just learning about specific systems an organization uses, I want to understand who’s responsible for technology, how often it is discussed at leadership meetings, what the governance process look like, and more.

To understand this at a high level, the Foundation has developed a Technology Maturity Assessment that asks a series of questions of multiple stakeholders, including the CEO/Executive Director, the “tech lead,” and two or more professional team members. The results are then analyzed to develop a maturity score, accounting for the quantitative answers as well as the free-form qualitative responses (see sample below).

I then review the report with the grantee to establish a baseline of understanding, and a plan to move forward. Sometimes the engagement is to provide a basic sounding board around how the organization can advance its technology strategy. Other times, it involves a targeted intervention like supporting a systems implementation or a cybersecurity review. In a few cases, we work with outside experts to develop plans for comprehensive technology upgrades across the organization. In all these scenarios, the Foundation is committed to supporting both assessment and technology project implementation.

This approach reflects the Foundation’s commitment to relational grantmaking, through which we aspire to serve as true thought partners with our grantees. The tech space is rapidly evolving and many of us are trying to learn and keep pace. The more we can help foster a culture of knowledge-sharing, asking questions, and problem-solving together, the better off our entire field will be.

So far we have worked with 20 of our grantee-partners on the Technology Maturity Assessment and are currently supporting ten projects, with more on the horizon. We also just completed our first AI Learning Cohort – over 140 people across 24 grantee-partners participated. Our goal is not to push the use of AI, but rather to help our grantee-partners understand what AI is and the different ways it can be leveraged. Then they can decide if and when it’s right for them.

These efforts are only the beginning of our technology support strategy taking shape. We look forward to providing continued support, and to learning alongside our grantee-partners engaged in this work. As we do so, we will continue to share new learnings and insights to help advance the broader field.

David Goodman is Program Director, Technology Strategy at the Jim Joseph Foundation. Read his second blog on how AI can be a gamechanger for nonprofits here.

For years, conversations about Jewish young adults have often been framed through a familiar lens. Within the Jim Joseph Foundation, we’ve referenced “the 30%” who are actively served by Jewish organizations and institutions (the audiences for our Deliberate Strategy) and “the 70%” who are underserved or not served at all by Jewish communal institutions (the audiences for our Emergent Strategy).

That framework is an important strategic lens through which we view our work. Yet we also know that to more effectively serve and design for all our desired audiences, we need to better understand the nuance that often gets lost in larger strategic outlooks. People today exhibit a range of complexities, contradictions and subtleties in their life. For Jewish young adults, we see these qualities in the many different modalities and ways they engage or don’t engage in Jewish practice and with communal organizations. Measuring their level of institutional participation is only one data point among many that show how they relate to Jewish life, identity, purpose and community. On its own, this data point does not provide a full picture of Jewish young adults today. We know that any serious strategy for the future of Jewish life will require us to deeply understand both the young adults who are most engaged and the majority who are not.

This positioning led us to commission Project Prism, a multi-method study of Jewish young adults in the United States conducted in partnership with Sense Worldwide, with NORC at the University of Chicago serving as the quantitative survey partner.

Why we wanted a multi-method approach

Sense Worldwide, which led this project through multiple complementary research approaches, specializes in uncovering the cultural, emotional and behavioral dynamics that shape people’s decisions. This research often reveals insights that individuals themselves may struggle to articulate directly, thus helping organizations turn understanding into action.

Project Prism combines online qualitative research, a nationally representative survey, consumer culture analysis, semiotics and machine learning. These methods together create a more complete picture than any one method could on its own. Moreover, NORC’s expertise in rigorous probability-based survey research helped ensure that the findings would reflect the diversity and complexity of Jewish young adults across the United States, producing findings that reduce sampling bias and that can be generalized with confidence. The result is a dataset representing more than 2,000 Jewish young adults between the ages of 22 and 40 (including many whose lives rarely, if at all, intersect with Jewish organizations or communal institutions), spanning a remarkably broad spectrum of backgrounds, family structures, religious identities, levels of participation, geography and life experiences.

Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

Stacie Cherner is the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

The past few years have increased the disconnect between Diaspora Jews and Israelis in profound ways. Here are 4 ways to come together

I just spent a week in Jerusalem at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Community Leadership Program, sitting with ancient and modern texts, wrestling with identity alongside extraordinary scholars. It was spectacular. Any learning worth taking seriously has the good manners not to insult you with easy answers, and Hartman offered none. Instead, it provided depth, argument, and the humbling reminder that Jewish tradition still has an astonishing amount to teach us about living in an increasingly complicated world.

Throughout the week, I listened to rabbis, educators, and lay leaders from a broad spectrum of political and religious thought. Yet every conversation was held with real respect—the kind that allows disagreement to surface without requiring people to perform outrage and permits discomfort without treating it as a failure.

That alone felt like a gift. But standing at Ben Gurion Airport waiting for my flight home, I found something more urgent: a sharper focus on one of the few crises we actually have the power to influence.

Like anyone invested in Jewish life, I have spent the past few years exhausted by a cascading list of worries: surging antisemitism, the wars facing Israel, the trauma of October 7, the hostages, and the fragility of democracy both in Israel and the United States. Much of this feels entirely outside our control. We cannot single-handedly dictate the decisions of the Israeli government or reverse online hate.

But I believe we can shape the relationship between the two largest Jewish communities in the world — Israel and North America.

Read the full piece in the Times of Israel. 

Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation

Professional development is often described in practical terms like “new skills,” “new frameworks,” “new tools,” and “new ideas.” Yet the most powerful professional development experiences offer more than just these tangibles. They create space for reflection, relationships, confidence-building, and sustained learning that changes how we work and how we understand ourselves as leaders.

This practice of Elu v’Elu, Hebrew for both/and, was woven throughout Jewish LearningWorks‘ Voices for Good Fellowship, in which we both had the honor of participating (Rachel from 2021-2023 and Jenna from 2024-2026). The Jewish concept honors the possibility that more than one truth can exist at the same time. In the context of leadership, it invites us to resist false binaries and to stay open to complexity. Rather than choosing between concepts like reflection or action, confidence or humility, and individual growth or communal responsibility, Elu v’Elu empowers us to think about our potential when we hold these values together.

At the recent siyum (Hebrew for “completion,” often referencing the culminating celebration of Jewish study) for Cohort 3 that Jenna was part of, we further explored both/and thinking with Rabbi Dr. Tali Zelkowicz of The Wexner Foundation. This learning reinforced that holding together seemingly competing values helped make Voices for Good so powerful. That approach created space to amplify women’s voices, strengthen the Jewish community’s talent pipeline, and foster meaningful relationships among participants.

In short, the Voices for Good Fellowship modeled the kind of professional development the Jim Joseph Foundation believes is worth investing in.

In separate cohorts, we each experienced the fellowship as an intensive two-year professional learning journey. Now we are connected to the same growing network of women leaders across Jewish communal life. The siyum illuminated that network, bringing together current and past cohorts to celebrate the 35 graduates of the program and the broader community of fellows who shape Jewish communal life. The ceremony itself reflected intentionality: diplomas, pins, photos, public recognition, and the chance to celebrate one another’s growth. These details matter and served to validate the time, commitment, and learning that participants invested.

When most effective, professional development is not a break from the “real work.” It is part of the work, and it strengthens the people who strengthen organizations, communities, and the field. Voices for Good offers a model and learnings that other professional development programs can draw from:

Learning Can Be Both Relational and Practical
The Fellowship carefully cultivated an environment where relational and practical learning could thrive together. Relational learning meant that growth happened through trust, shared experience, and sustained connection with peers. Practical learning meant that we left with tools, leadership frameworks, and skills we could apply in real time. While the relationships made the tools more usable, the tools also gave the relationships a shared purpose. We learned alongside other women leaders over time, building trust with each other. We were invited to bring curiosity, contribute our gifts, listen actively, speak from “I” statements, assume good will, embrace pauses, and celebrate together. These norms created the conditions for meaningful learning.

Coaching Helps Learning Go Deeper
One-on-one coaching through the Fellowship enabled us to move beyond general concepts and apply learning to our own professional contexts. Through coaching, we examined our work at this moment, including the values that inform actions in the field and choices we can make to take action too.

For example, we leveraged coaching to help design parental leave return-to-work plans and navigate increased professional responsibilities with young children. Time for individualized reflection with our coach helped learning stick and created accountability. It enabled each of us to test new communications practices and define and stretch our own boundaries.

Strengthening Adaptive Leadership Helps to Hold Tensions
Adaptive leadership helps leaders distinguish between “technical challenges,” which can be solved with existing expertise, and “adaptive challenges,” which require learning, experimentation, and shifts in behavior, relationships, or assumptions. Adaptive leadership is especially relevant in Jewish communal and educational settings where professionals often navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, and rapidly changing needs. Sometimes in our work we try to resolve tensions too quickly, such as choosing between content or connection and rigor or accessibility. Voices for Good helped us experience that strong professional learning develops leaders who have the capacity to balance these tensions.

The Importance of Women’s Leadership and Community
The sisterhood aspect of the fellowship was central to its power. Fellowship faculty, who are incredible leaders, educators, and facilitators, modeled different ways women can lead with wisdom, creativity, courage, and authenticity. Amy Tobin, for example, guided us through personal branding and storytelling work, helping fellows think about how we communicate who we are, what we stand for, and how we want to show up as leaders. Tara Mohr, whose book Playing Big was a core part of the curriculum, similarly encouraged us to examine inner barriers to leadership, identify the voice of the inner critic and distinguish it from realistic thinking, and practice responding to self-doubt with curiosity, grounding, and values-based action.

It was deeply inspiring and supportive to learn in a community of women committed to growth, leadership, Jewish wisdom, and one another. The Fellowship lifted up talented educators and leaders as role models. Being in conversation with women across roles, organizations, and career stages expanded our sense of what leadership can look like.

Carrying the Learning Forward

The Foundation’s support of our involvement in the fellowship reflects its approach to professional development for grantee-partners and the field. Professional development is both an investment in individuals and an investment in organizational capacity, field-wide learning, leadership pipelines, and communal resilience. The field becomes stronger as more people gain new knowledge, practice new skills, and join networks of peers committed to learning and leadership.

The many professional development programs, fellowships, conferences, and learning communities in our sector each have unique qualities and all offer opportunities to reflect, gain new skills, build relationships, and learn leadership frameworks to lead with greater purpose.

That is what we experienced in Voices for Good, and why we remain committed to professional development as a vital part of building a vibrant, effective, and enduring Jewish communal field.

Jenna Hanauer and Rachel Shamash Schneider are Senior Program Officers at the Jim Joseph Foundation. Learn more about the Voices for Good Fellowship. 

 

 

There is a lot on my mind right now.

First and foremost, of course, is the war in the Middle East where millions of our sisters and brother’s daily lives in Israel are disrupted as they seek shelter from rockets so they can stay alive. They do this while trying to navigate through their day, raising kids, taking care of the elderly and myriad other necessary tasks. They are built differently than me, with such unimaginable resilience. No article about Jewish life should be written during this war without acknowledging them. I hope they can soon return to their normal routines in safety.

What I write below may appear trivial in this moment, but something is pushing me to share these thoughts now. I have been thinking about them for some time.

I have written before about VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity — and about the pace of change reshaping our world and Jewish communal life. In this environment, professionals have had to adapt. Many have. They have become more agile, more responsive and more comfortable making decisions in real time.

If the world around our institutions has changed so dramatically and so quickly, compelling our professionals to change, it begs a question: have the systems through which we govern our Jewish institutions changed as well? The answer, in many cases, is not nearly enough.

Jewish organizations spend enormous energy talking about innovation in programs, strategy and engagement. We spend far less time asking whether our governance architecture enables those ambitions or quietly impedes them.

Together, professionals and lay leaders need to build a culture in which governance is designed, not merely inherited, so we can navigate these VUCA times.

Practically speaking, this design process will probably include redefining committee charters, clarifying which decisions belong where, reducing unnecessary approvals, reshaping meetings around strategy rather than reporting, creating clearer lanes between oversight and execution and minimizing the distance between emerging reality and institutional response. In other words, it means treating governance as a living operating system, not a permanent artifact. Leading Edge is doing important work in this area via its Board Leadership Accelerator program and other workshops and resources it produces.

Read the full op-ed at eJewish Philanthropy. Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

In moments of uncertainty, communities often turn to ideas for meaning, clarity, language and frameworks to make sense of what they are experiencing and what might come next. Over the past several years, we have seen how deeply people in the Jewish community are searching for voices that can help them hold complexity, wrestle with moral questions and imagine possible futures without flattening difference or rushing to certainty.

And yet, even as we talk frequently about the importance of Jewish thought leadership, we rarely ask some basic questions. What do we actually mean when we say “thought leadership” in a Jewish context? Who is a Jewish thought leader today, and how did they become one? What enables thoughtful, courageous voices to emerge and endure and what gets in their way? What might it look like to be more intentional about cultivating Jewish thought leadership to strengthen our capacity for learning, meaning-making, connection and dialogue?

Over the past year plus, the Jim Joseph Foundation and Maimonides Fund commissioned Valerie Ehrlich of Mission Bloom Consulting to conduct a research study to explore those questions. The result is “Ideas that Influence: Understanding and Supporting the Ecosystem of Jewish Thought Leadership,” a set of four connected “deep dive” reports that look at Jewish communal thought leadership from different angles: what it is, who is doing it, the ecosystem that shapes it and the choices facing the field if we want this work to thrive. The study sample is not meant to represent all thought leaders across the diverse communal landscape by any means, and the findings are not meant to offer a single definition or a prescriptive agenda. They are meant to surface patterns, tensions and possibilities. We hope to spark conversation among funders, practitioners, institutional leaders and thought leaders themselves.

Below is a brief introduction to each report and a few of the insights that stood out to us. We hope it encourages you to dive more deeply into the full reports and to talk with others about what resonates, what challenges you and what remaining questions feel relevant.

Stacie Cherner is the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Read the entire piece at eJewish Philanthropy. Access the study here.

With a shared story and trauma accumulated across millennia, someone who lives – and suffers – on the other side of the world can feel like family

When a Jewish person is killed thousands of miles away, Jews around the world often feel it as a personal loss. Not symbolically. Not intellectually. Personally.

After the recent mass killing in Bondi, Jewish communities across continents gathered, mourned, and checked in on one another. Most of them have never been to Australia. Most of us did not know the victims. And yet the pain traveled fast and deep, as if the loss had occurred in our own neighborhood.

This reaction often puzzles people outside the Jewish community. Why would the death of a stranger feel so immediate? Why does it produce not just sadness, but anguish and despair? Or as my son put it simply, why do our hearts hurt?

The answer matters, because it reveals something fundamental about how Jews understand belonging, memory, and responsibility. It also challenges a modern instinct to treat grief as private, contained, and proportional only to proximity. For Jews, grief does not work that way.

Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Read the full piece in the Times of Israel.

The human mind craves certainty. We like clean lines and simple choices: right lane or left, dessert or restraint, I agree with you or I don’t. Jewish life has never been that tidy. We are a people who study arguments for sport, who treasure texts filled with contradictions and who inherited a tradition that insists we can hold competing truths without losing our heads or our hearts.

The Torah makes this clear from the start. Take, for instance, the verse “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). Why does the word “justice” appear twice, the rabbis ask? Because real justice demands more than one path and never erases the dignity of those who disagree. Truth in Judaism rarely arrives in a single package.

Rambam (Maimonides) understood this well. He championed reason as a divine gift, but at the same time he believed God’s essence exceeds human grasp. He also warned that “the truth is not always apparent and requires careful investigation” (The Guide to the Perplexed). Anyone insisting there is only one way to understand the world should make us suspicious. That was true in the 12th century, and it is just as true now.

Yet over the last several years, as social media presses in upon us every minute of every day, holding more than one truth is almost impossible. We are constantly presented with the false premise of binary choices — not a good thing for our society.

Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation. Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

Last spring, I returned from my second parental leave. Like my first leave, returning after significant time away was full of personal, professional, and global emotions and experiences. However, something felt different this time. It seems that over my six years at the Foundation we’ve experienced a lifetime of change, from a global pandemic to October 7^th and more. In an environment that continues to feel more uncertain and complex, finding a sense of grounding is difficult. I’ve been holding onto some VUCA mindsets the past few years that help me live with a readiness to adapt and act. As parents, friends, workers, and members of the Jewish community, we march on.

Since the Foundation adopted five first principles a few years ago, I’ve increasingly leaned on them. These principles—a guide for the Foundation team’s approach—offered me a playbook and structure during a fast-moving, evolving re-onboarding period at the Foundation over the past six months. At a time when keeping a north star bright was more challenging, marching onward grounded by these first principles was both a meaningful and productive path forward. Others in the field coming back from an extended time away may find this approach helpful as well.

1. First Principle: Center Young People – Our work focuses on young people and those who work with them. We center them as end-users as we forecast and solve for unmet needs and challenges. Their ideas and actions will shape the future.
Re-Onboarding Principle: Reconnect with Young People and Learning – Upon my return to the Foundation, I was encouraged to prioritize site visits to reacquaint myself with the Foundation’s diverse audiences up close and personal. It was both inspiring and an important reconnection to our work to experience powerful Jewish learning experiences side by side with educators and learners. I spent a day in Berkeley with Jewish Studio Project’s Studio Immersive, attended a number of learning sessions with the Shalom Hartman Institute, and am excited to join thousands of teens at BBYO International Convention 2026.

2. First Principle: Build Meaningful Relationships – Connecting meaningfully to other people and organizations honors our shared humanity and accelerates the change we seek. When we know our partners in genuine ways, we can better support efforts toward a common good.
Re-Onboarding Principle: Reestablish Relationships with Care and Intentionality – I was eager to jump back into my work after time away. While there was much to do, I was encouraged to spend my first few weeks back slowly wading into the flow of work. I was even invited to work with a coach to support my re-integration. This personal and professional investment in my re-onboarding, centered in relationships, rooted me back into a vibrant team culture that is premised on trust among the team and our partners across the country.

3. First Principle: Look Around Corners – Bold and transformative solutions come from peering into the future and being eager to take risks. Failing is part of our risk-taking and experimenting. Learning from failing leads to new ideas and greater impact.
Re-Onboarding Principle: Lean on Your Team and Think Big – Over the last two years, our Grantmaking team has taken intentional time to retreat a few times a year to center connection, meaning, and purpose into the fabric of our team and work. Our June 2025 retreat, Mashmaut (meaning), was fortuitously scheduled within my first few weeks of returning to the Foundation. The day was full of meaning in every sense – including a fail forward session – a discussion of some of our hardest experiences, challenges, and learns over the year. It was an opportunity to listen and learn from what my colleagues experienced while I was away and hold space for normalizing that things don’t always work despite our best efforts. This was followed by an exciting, boundless big ideas brainstorm, which reminded us all that failure and growth come hand in hand.

4. First Principle: Be Curious – Our journey to creative ideas and smart planning is steeped in a diversity of perspectives, research, personal stories, and results from our work in the field.
Re-Onboarding Principle: Ask Big Questions, Listen, and Learn to Go Further – Rigorous independent evaluation and research has always been a part of the Foundation’s DNA. Often, these projects stem from the professional team asking hard questions. As I settled back into the flow of work, multiple research studies crossed my desk. Our Director of Research and Learning, Stacie Cherner, hosted a Team Learning session to bring eight studies to life. Of note were Strength, Stress and Support: A Portrait of American Jewish Teen Wellbeing by BeWell at JFNA with Stanford University, and Jewish Families Today by Rosov Consulting. Both reports were timely and rich with learnings, helping to reorient me to how best to serve and support our diverse audiences through our investments in Jewish education organizations.

5. First Principle: Leverage Time – In different contexts, we use time to create urgency or provide space for deeper thinking and learning. Going fast or going slow is a choice we make with intentionality.
Re-Onboarding Principle: Be Open to New Ways of Working – A growing team can often open new opportunities for optimizing how we work. People might feel beholden to the ways things have always been done, until new team members help to widen the aperture and create an openness to change.  While I was on leave, my newer Program Officer colleagues, Orly and Leah, championed our adoption of new project management systems. This was an instance of going slow to go fast. A very thoughtful research process and training process has now materialized in our team’s ability to streamline projects, meetings, and conversations.

Re-onboarding is a journey, with its own distinct cadence, interpersonal experiences, and important moments for learning and adapting. Planning with these principles in mind strengthens the re-onboarding experience for you and your team. Now, back with the team, I’m stepping into 2026 with fresh tools, sharper insights, stronger relationships, and renewed energy.

Rachel Shamash Schneider is a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

In recent years, the Jim Joseph Foundation has invited the field to reconsider how we think about Jewish identity and Jewish learning. We’ve resisted easier, but less helpful, binary categories — like affiliated vs. unaffiliated or in vs. out — and encouraged more nuanced language that reflects the complexity of how people relate to their Jewish selves. We’ve asked how educators and institutions can better understand learners in context, not as blank slates but as individuals who bring many parts of themselves to their learning experience: personal histories, emotions and experiences. And we’ve looked to research in the learning sciences to better understand how people actually learn — not just what they’re taught or what we want them to know.

As more programs reach more diverse audiences in more expansive ways, one insight has become increasingly clear: impact is relative.

The same experience that might feel like a light touch to one person may open an entirely new possibility of connection or meaning for someone else. What feels familiar to one learner might feel disorienting, expansive or deeply personal to another. These differences reflect the richness of Jewish life today — and the need for evaluation frameworks that can capture the range of outcomes appropriate for different learners.

This doesn’t mean content, fluency or frequency no longer matter. But if we’re serious about engaging the full diversity of Jewish learners, we need to ask different questions that factor in a learner’s orientation, their own schemas. What are we paying attention to? What are we missing? And how might we widen the frame of what counts as success?

Rachel Heiligman is the strategy advisor and senior portfolio lead of R&D at the Jim Joseph Foundation. 

Stacie Cherner is the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Read the entire piece in eJewish Philanthropy