News & Blogs Category: From the Foundation Team

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

In eJewishPhilanthropy’s exclusive opinion column The 501(C) Suite, leading foundation executives share what they are working on and thinking about with the wider philanthropic field. 

We talk constantly about the threats facing the Jewish community — antisemitism, isolation, polarization. But I am afraid we’re missing the crisis that could quietly break us from the inside: The people holding up the Jewish world are running on fumes.

I’m not talking about a faceless “sector.” I’m talking about the tens of thousands of professionals who make Jewish life possible. Our educators, camp counselors, rabbis, JCC staff, program staff, security directors, fundraisers, youth leaders, museum curators, social workers and CEOs. They are the connective tissue of Jewish life in North America.

For them, the matzav — the situation — isn’t just a news cycle. It is their daily job. They run security drills before preschool drop-off. They field donor calls demanding explanations for Israel’s every move. They stand in front of 12-year-olds and try to explain why the world feels like it’s coming apart. Then they wake up and do it all again tomorrow.

There’s no escape hatch. No “log off and go live your life.” The very thing that fuels their purpose is now the thing that’s draining them.

Read the entire piece at eJewishPhilanthropy.

Insights from One of the Foundation’s Newest Team Members

I’m from Mexico City, where I grew up in a small-ish but mighty Jewish community. My parents are active lay leaders and have worked in several organizations within the Jewish community to support both Israel and Mexico for most of their lives. I’ve always actively participated in Jewish communal life, but am only now working as a Jewish professional in the U.S.

The Mexican Jewish community has around 44,000 people, with “sub-communities” of Ashkenazi (Eastern-European origins), Sefaradi (Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Turkish origins), Shami (Damascus origins), and Halebi (Aleppo origins) Jews. Each has its synagogues, schools, and institutions, yet all are overseen by a Central Committee and all participate in umbrella organizations like Keren Hayesod and WIZO. Everyone has access to communal institutions and services, like the Jewish Sports Center. In this way, each sub-community can maintain its distinct traditions and customs while working together to create a stronger, broader Jewish community.

Even though I’ve lived in the U.S. for six years and have been part of Jewish life here, there are nuances to the American community that I am only now beginning to understand. It’s very different when a Jewish community has millions of people (like in the U.S.) compared to just tens of thousands where everyone seemingly knows, or knows of, each other (like in Mexico). I even ran into my dad’s architect at this year’s BBYO International Convention (IC)! He was accompanying the first Mexican delegation to participate at an IC.

Now as a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation, part of my onboarding is to increase my understanding of the multifaceted American Jewish community while using my experience from Mexico (and other countries where I’ve had the privilege to live and study) to enhance my work. Having several perspectives and a broader worldview, I believe, enables me to better support the grantee-partners with whom I engage. I’m on a learning tour that is fascinating and eye opening in many ways.

I’ve learned from Prizmah about the impact of Jewish Day Schools and challenges they face in the American Jewish community (in Mexico, 90% of Jewish kids go to Jewish schools). I’ve seen the leadership and community-building skills teens acquire with BBYO. I visited Hillels at Berkeley and Stanford and saw how staff help make the college experience meaningful for Jewish students (especially after October 7) while also helping them learn what kind of Jewish life they can create as independent adults. I’ve made art with the Jewish Studio Project to help me process grief and uncertainty. I studied with Hadar and became curious about aspects of Judaism I didn’t even know existed. I’ve learned about AI and the impact of social media on antisemitism with 70 Faces Media, and breathe a little deeper every time I listen to Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi on Shalom Hartman Institute’s For the Sake of Heaven podcast. I’m looking forward to visiting more grantees and understanding their work in greater depth.

At the same time, when I work with grantee-partners I also bring to bear my past experience in several entrepreneurial ventures, mainly in adult education. As a CEO seeking funding, I experienced firsthand the strong bond a positive grantee-funder relationship can build. I understand the joys, pains, and multiple roles that founders of small (and not-so-small) organizations must take on. I am happy to have learned that a key element of the Foundation’s grantmaking approach is to build strong, honest, and fruitful relationships with grantee-partners. My experience helps me empathize more with our grantees, especially in our Build Grants portfolio that aims to support newer and growing organizations. I am especially excited about our growing capacity building work, in which I am exploring new areas to support grantees while also leaning on my facilitator and entrepreneur background to tailor services to their needs.

Particularly after October 7^th, we see the enormous efforts (and myriad challenges) of grantee-partners to support Jewish learning and engagement—and the educators and leaders who make it possible. It is both a personal and professional honor to do my part and see the ripple effects of our work.

I have been immersed in this work for six months, and my learning has only begun. It is a privilege to work with incredibly knowledgeable and kind team members and mentors at the Jim Joseph Foundation, colleagues from other foundations, and grantee-partners. Every time I talk with a grantee, attend a conference or site visit, or read new research, I think ‘what a fantastic infrastructure the Jewish community has built, in Israel, Mexico, the US, and the rest of the Diaspora, that enables all these organizations to exist, flourish and make our lives better’. Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, indeed.

Orly Goldsmith is a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation

My dear friend and fellow traveler in Jewish life, Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, recently shared some commentary with me that resonated deeply. She said: “Jewish history is always this balancing act of how much energy we spend combating what’s around us versus how much we invest in fortifying and building who we are. The real question isn’t whether we’re fighting antisemitism enough — it’s whether we’re making the right call on how to allocate our limited resources between the two. The outside forces are always going to be larger than us. We can’t control them. But the inside — that’s ours to build.”

We know we are facing a significant rise of antisemitism, which has increased tremendously since Oct. 7, most visibly on college campuses. Our communal organizations have responded to these events, working to counter antisemitism with reporting mechanisms and with safety systems, people, and physical infrastructure.

Read the full piece in eJewish Philanthropy.

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

One recurring learning from our research at the Jim Joseph Foundation is that Jewish people are complex and covered by a broad spectrum of identities. In our Jewish communal outlook, we sometimes default to thinking of our people in binaries when we assess Jewish institutional and organizational affiliation. Our professional community often refers to young Jews in North America as being connected vs. disconnected, engaged vs. unengaged, involved vs. uninvolved and so on. Communal professionals and stakeholders tend to utilize these simplistic categorizations to make sense of those who are “participants” in Jewish life, and those who are not — who is in, and who is out. While this shorthand approach may serve us in some contexts, we run the risk of undermining our basic idea of Klal Yisrael (the Jewish People) by relying on hierarchical labels like these.

As the Jim Joseph Foundation team delves deeper into understanding the nuances of the broad and diverse spectrum of our people (for example, this framework for how people learn), it is clear that oversimplification is unhelpful. At best, these binaries fail to capture and honor the rich complexities of individuals’ Jewish experiences, motivations and desires. At worst, it is a damaging obstacle to understanding ourselves as a people, and our work as educators and progenitors of Jewish community.

Stacie Cherner is the Director of Research and Learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Read the full piece in eJewish Philanthropy.

Insights from One of the Foundation’s Newest Team Members

Last August, I stepped into my role as a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. As I’ve settled in, I’ve reflected on how my professional journey helped to shape the perspective I bring to my work.

Relationships have always been at the heart of my professional life. Prior to my time at the Foundation, I worked for a decade at Hillel in various capacities. From engaging students as an early-career Hillel professional, to cultivating meaningful partnerships with donors, and into my last job as the Director of Strategic Grants at Hillel International, the principle of centering relationships has been my guiding star. This is why I was especially pleased to learn that “Build Meaningful Relationships” is one of the Foundation’s First Principles.

Much of the relational wisdom I gained from my work with Hillel is applicable to my new job too, and the last six months have heightened my awareness about some key lessons.

1. See someone as a person and as a professional: Even in my interview process, I spoke about how important it is that people see me as Leah the human and as Leah the professional. I strive to do the same with all of my colleagues. At Hillel, building relationships meant sitting with students to hear their stories, engaging community stakeholders, and partnering with organizations to amplify impact. But I never immediately asked a student to become a student leader, nor immediately asked a donor for money. I started by simply getting to know them. The Foundation takes this approach too. From day one, I saw that calls begin with asking how people’s kids are, how their winter holidays were, and the like. People’s lives outside of work matter and certainly can impact how they are on a given day during work hours. I want to know who a person is, what brings them joy in their lives, and learn how they got to where they are. This makes the working relationship more meaningful and less transactional.
2. It’s a blessing to carry old professional relationships into new jobs: One of the most beautiful lessons I’ve learned is that professional relationships often come full circle. I’m currently in a conversation with a colleague I met 10 years ago whose organization is now a grantee-partner of the Foundation. I have known a handful of other CEOs of grantee-partners in my portfolio for about five years each. When I went on my first site visit, I spotted someone I knew well as soon as I arrived. I met my graduate school mentor from years ago for the first time in person at a conference; we rejoiced and shared a big hug upon seeing each other. At Hillel International’s Global Assembly in December, I couldn’t even make it across the room without running into people I had worked with over the years and stopping to have a conversation. These moments remind me that the relationships we build are enduring – they transcend job titles and responsibilities, and maintaining relationships is central to how I approach my work.
3. Bring more empathy into our work: While frequent communication is a hallmark of relational grantmaking, that relationship cannot just be premised on exchanging emails or reading reports. Cultivating and practicing empathy—truly feeling for someone’s situation and all that they bring into their work—is critical to maintaining a healthy funder-grantee relationship. Practicing empathy is most important when a grantee-partner faces unexpected challenges (we’ve all had plenty over recent years). I’m heartened by how the Foundation team practices empathy, both in personal interactions (including actively listening or offering support through difficult conversations) and in policy (adjusting reporting requirements and deadlines that account for challenges).

Seeing the whole person; Maintaining meaningful professional connections; Expressing and practicing empathy—I already see how approaching work with these three mindsets is critical to cultivating trust with the Foundation’s grantee-partners. This opens the lines for honest communication and working together to overcome challenges— ultimately enhancing our collective impact.

As I continue to grow in this role, I remain guided by a belief that we all should feel seen and valued in our work. One of the Foundation’s staff values is b’tzelem elohim – to value each person and their perspectives as unique and deserving of respect and attention. When we support each other beyond transactional grant dollars, and approach our work with trust, authenticity, and empathy, we increase our chances to create real change. At the end of the day, I aim to be Leah the human first, just as I strive to see others as their full selves.

I’m excited to continue building relationships, learning from colleagues, and supporting the meaningful work of grantee-partners. If our paths cross in this work, I hope we can connect – not just as professionals, but as people invested in creating a thriving, inclusive Jewish future.

Leah Chakoff is a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation, helping to lead the Foundation’s work in its Exceptional Jewish Leaders and Educators focus area.

What can social science and education research help us understand about how people learn?

We are asking first-principle questions about the nature of Jewish education and, even more fundamentally, how do we learn anything? The science of learning is a rich and established field of academic study that has a lot to teach us when we think about our vision for Jewish learning. Yet, for all of its rich resources, Jewish education has no theory of learning.

As part of our Emergent Strategy at the Jim Joseph Foundation, we have a desire to explore new and more effective pathways in understanding and practicing Jewish education. To this end, we looked to familiarize ourselves with landmark research and learning theory. We turned to Ari Y. Kelman, the Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Kelman shares a model for how people learn that we think is foundational for understanding more about how people learn to be Jewish. 

Read the full piece in eJewish Philanthropy. 

Stacie Cherner is the Director of Research and Learning and Yonah Schiller is the Chief R&D Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. 

As the Jim Joseph Foundation aspires to enable all Jews, their families and their friends to lead connected, meaningful and purpose-filled lives, and to make positive contributions to their communities and the world, we invest in powerful Jewish learning experiences. In this investment area, BBYO, Foundation for Jewish Camp, Hillel International, Birthright Israel and Moishe House are categorized as “signature grantee-partners” in our Deliberate Grantmaking Strategy. These grantees have made evaluation an integral part of their work, informing their own efforts, the Foundation’s, and the field. More recently, the Foundation has also integrated cross-portfolio evaluation into more of our work to learn about shared outcomes across different sets of grantee-partners.

In cross-portfolio evaluation, we’re able to identify overarching trends and opportunities. Our latest cross-portfolio evaluation, for example, conducted by Rosov Consulting, covers all five of these signature grantees and identifies a set of common outcomes and ways to measure the participants they serve. When we began this evaluation, we didn’t know this would be the end result. However, as we convened the grantees and dug into their own evaluation structures and findings, we recognized the opportunity to learn about the value of participating in multiple experiences during the teen years and 20s/30s. Through a qualitative study with the alumni of programs, we came to understand the added value of the programs, the interactions between outcomes created by the programs and the pathways that take young people from one program to another.

Read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy.

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

Over a decade ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation convened more than a dozen local and national funders of Jewish teen programming for a series of discussions on expanding teen involvement in Jewish life. We recognized that adolescents are a critical demographic and adolescence is a moment of inflection. Moreover, teens are holders of great insights and have the ability to articulate them and the realities they hope those insights can create. To paraphrase Joel 3:1, while those of us around the table had dreams, we knew it would be teens holding the vision to move us forward. We felt and continue to believe that teens are the futurists and optimists that our world needs.

These early conversations, which included teens themselves, taught us a lot — namely, how much more we still needed to learn. As a result, we commissioned groundbreaking research to identify and unpack strategies from both the non-Jewish and Jewish worlds are most effective in educating and engaging teens. This research ultimately gave us the knowledge to design responsive local teen initiatives in 10 communities across the country, under the banner of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative. United by the shared aspiration of creating and nurturing contemporary approaches to Jewish teen education, engagement and growth, this new network of national and local funders and practitioners worked side by side with teens. Together, they reimagined the youth-serving ecosystem in these communities of varying sizes and demographic composition, with a commitment to sharing whatever unvarnished lessons they would learn.

read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy