In the Foundation’s ongoing efforts to identify and analyze best grantmaking strategies, we have seen grantees achieve outcomes that both strengthen organizational capacity and position organizations for future growth. By virtue of grantees’ strong performance, the Foundation is gaining experience as a capacity building funder.

Before I share examples of successes, it is helpful to understand what a capacity building grant actually is designed to do. The term itself is somewhat general and may refer to different types of grants, depending on the context and situation of the potential grantee.

Capacity building, broadly defined, refers to “activities that strengthen nonprofits so that they can better achieve their mission.”[1]  Tools exist to help organizations assess their capacity.[2]  Organizations at different points of relatively predictable organizational life stages[3] potentially can benefit from differentiated, targeted capacity building support.

The goals of capacity building grants are equally as general and can apply to various aspects of the grantee’s operations: “In theory, capacity building is designed to change some aspect of an organization’s existing environment, internal structure, leadership, and management systems, which, in turn, should improve employee morale, expertise, productivity, efficiency, and so forth, which should strengthen an organization’s capacity to do its work, which should increase organizational performance.”[4]

To shed light on capacity building, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) offers detailed answers to this grantmaking strategy and to related factors such as readiness and assessment.  In general, GEO is an excellent source of information for those readers seeking insight into current trends in funding of capacity building.

For our purposes, the Foundation sees that regardless of an organization’s size, age, target audience, and goals within the arena of Jewish education, capacity building grants can be a catalyst for improved performance and major growth.

Hillel, for example, is 101 years old. The Foundation awarded Hillel a capacity building grant in 2014 that built on the success of its Senior Jewish Educators/Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative. The 2014 grant award included funding for the development of a comprehensive business plan as well as funding for efforts that are part of Hillel’s three pillars for future growth of the organization—Excellence on Campus: Supporting and Measuring Quality; Excellence in Recruiting and Developing Talent; and Excellence in Resource Development.

Under the leadership of CEO Eric Fingerhut and with support of Hillel’s Board of Directors, Hillel is taking decisive steps to grow from a $90 million per year organization to a sustainable $200 million per year organization. The Jim Joseph Foundation recent grant is assisting Hillel to determine if this aspirational future is achievable and to enable the organization to chart a path toward desirable growth.

Moishe House, an organization much younger than Hillel, has been in existence for just nine years. Yet it already has exhibited rapid growth, and it has positively influenced the lives of tens of thousands of young Jewish adults across the United States and internationally. Moishe House is poised, potentially, to accelerate its growth and positioned to reach ambitious milestones in part because a group of foundations joined together to help Moishe House design and implement a Strategic Growth Plan. The development of that plan was funded significantly by the Jim Joseph Foundation after a 2011 external evaluation of Moishe House demonstrated that the organization had developed an effective, affordable, and scalable approach to executing on its mission.

In both these cases, Hillel and Moishe House conducted careful strategic planning that was core to their capacity building. The Jim Joseph Foundation believes dedicating resources for this type of planning is an effective way for the Foundation to support not-for-profit capacity building.

The Jim Joseph Foundation also has seen that capacity building grants can actually help to advance an entire field. The clearest example is the emerging field of Israel education, which has been rapidly developed by the iCenter during the last five years. Through a series of grants, the iCenter’s capacity has grown—evidenced, for example, in its remarkable network of expert educators and skilled staff who work with major organizations and educational institutions across the country to advance Israel education.

Recently, I attended a Taglit Fellows seminar for Cohort 2, a project generously funded by the Maimonides Fund. The iCenter, in partnership with Taglit-Birthright Israel, designed the seminar, bringing together experts in Jewish education to train and support nearly 100 Taglit Fellows (for just one cohort) who will staff Taglit-Birthright Israel trips serving in a pre-trip, trip, and post-trip role to augment participants’ Birthright Israel experience. A cohort 2 Fellow and leaders of the program shared their thoughts here, indicative of the deep impact and broad reach the iCenter now enjoys.

Finally, over the last two years, the Foundation has awarded multiple grants designed to build capacity of organizations in the very active emerging field of Jewish Outdoor, Food, and Environmental Education (JOFEE). The JOFEE report, commissioned with other funders, was an important determining factor in the Foundation’s assessment that this field is ripe for maturation and further professionalization, with the potential for significant outcomes in Jewish education.

Obviously, we have much to learn still about capacity building grants. Professionally, I am of the persuasion that “in order to reach and sustain social impact, philanthropists need to assign greater value to grantees’ capacity to implement programs; encourage ongoing learning and adaptation as work unfolds; and support a foundation of organizational and operational structures, processes, and capabilities that ultimately turn vision into change on the ground.”[i] At the Jim Joseph Foundation, we are seeing that smart funding, tailored to an individual organization’s life stage, capacity building readiness, and demonstrated commitment to maximizing organizational effectiveness and field impact, creates exciting philanthropic opportunity.

[1] Connolly and York. Building the Capacity of Capacity Builders, 2003, p.3

[2] TCC’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool – the CCAT – has also had more than a decade of use.

McKinsey and Company’s Capacity Assessment Grid has been in use since 2000.

[3] Brothers. Building Nonprofit Capacity: A Guide to Managing Change Through Organizational Lifecycles. 2011.

Connolly. Navigating the Organizational Life Cycle. 2006.

Olive Grove Consulting. Characteristics of Organizational Life Cycle Stages.

[4] Light, Paul. Sustaining Nonprofit Performance, p. 46

[i] Patrizi and Thompson. Beyond the Veneer of Strategic Planning, The Foundation Review 2, no. 3 (2011): 52-60.

This week, more than 3,000 Jewish teens from around the country and across the globe will join together in Atlanta for three days of service, learning and celebration as part of BBYO and NFTY’s International Conventions. They will come from cities near and far, towns big and small, each on a leadership journey, all inspired to contribute to the future of the Jewish people.

We can think of no better moment to focus our communal attention on the vital importance of Jewish teen engagement and education.

That is why our foundations are simultaneously bringing together 250 Jewish philanthropists, foundation professionals and communal leaders for the first-ever Summit on Jewish Teens. Concurrently, the leaders of the major youth movements will run a Coalition of Jewish Teens Summit to set shared goals and present a coordinated plan for engaging and educating as many teens as possible about Jewish life and leadership.

These summits come at a time when we more fully understand the positive, long-term impact of engaging teens. Indeed, the good news is that study after study proves that when young people are involved in meaningful Jewish experiences during their teenage years, they are much more likely to be active, lifelong members of the Jewish community. They participate in Jewish life, take on Jewish professional and lay leadership roles, and build a strong connection with Israel and the global Jewish people. What’s more, they often directly credit the organizations and programs they participated in as teens for shaping their Jewish journeys throughout adulthood.

Participants at 2014 BBYO International Convention (IC); photo courtesy.

And yet, the bad news is that as far as we have come, we still have a long way to go before we fully address the disturbing fact that in most communities, an estimated 80 percent of Jewish teens drop out of Jewish life after their b’nai mitzvah.

As funders and community leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that the post-bar/bat mitzvah years become an on ramp to, rather than exit route from, active Jewish life and leadership.

It will take continued hard work, significant additional investment and sustained commitment if we are going to realize the full potential for Jewish engagement and education during the teen years. We are sharing here a few of the lessons we have learned that we hope will encourage and guide increased investment in the teen space.

The most successful programs put teens in the driver’s seat.

Teens today are an empowered generation. They know what they want, how to find it and how to build it. That’s why teens are most attracted to opportunities that allow them to take ownership for creating experiences, rather than simply consuming one-size-fits-all programs.

BBYO, for example, has seen tremendous success basing its entire model around allowing teens to shape peer-led experiences – a philosophy that has helped them grow from engaging 12,000 to nearly 50,000 teens annually over the past decade. What they and others have found is that ownership inspires leadership and continued excitement to be part of a community that values members not just as consumers but as creators.

Likewise, Jewish teen philanthropy programs are attracting more and more participants by putting teens front and center, empowering them to make strategic philanthropic decisions that have direct impact on their local communities.

Talented Jewish youth professionals make a difference.

The North Shore Teen Initiative (NSTI), a pilot project supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation, provides another successful model, due in large part to the staff. NSTI invests in talented staff who, in turn, make a point of empowering teens to be involved in everything from event planning to recruiting friends to program implementation. Indeed, according to a 2013 study, “Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens,” it is that combination of empowerment and support from talented educators that best yields attractive and meaningful experiences.

Other organizations including BBYO, iCenter, Union for Reform Judaism, Foundation for Jewish Camp, Moving Traditions and Jewish Student Connection also understand the importance of investing in training and support to help develop professionals who serve as close mentors, role models and guides to our teens.

Service and Israel play crucial roles in teen experiences.

Service opportunities can be one of the most effective ways to engage teens in Jewish life. Teens are eager to join a community of like-minded peers and make a difference in the lives of others, as evidenced by Repair the World’s J-Serve, the American Jewish Society for Service, summer and gap year service programs and the overall increase in these opportunities and recurring findings from research about the millennial generation.

Likewise, opportunities to connect with Israel are effective catalysts for Jewish engagement. Teen Israel trips play a vital role in helping young Jews forge connections with their peers, with Israelis and with our beautiful and diverse homeland. Studies also show that the impact of an Israel trip actually grows over time, inspiring increased and ongoing involvement in Jewish life and with Israel.

Collaboration is key and leads to creative, new teen engagement opportunities.

It is fitting that the theme of BBYO’s International Convention this year is “Stronger Together.” As funders and communal leaders, we too are stronger together. As we push forward and take action to support and inspire teens, we should remember that no one foundation or organization can tackle this critical issue alone. Many of us are part of a Funder Collaborative that is focusing on how we can create local and national partnerships to help engage more teens in select communities across the country. Already we are seeing that through forming strategic partnerships, scaling innovative initiatives and strengthening the pipeline of continued engagement, we each have unique and vital roles to play.

Now is the moment for us to embrace those roles as part of a broader ecosystem with shared goals and outcomes. We have models of engagement that are working. We have teens who are hungry for opportunities to tap into something larger than themselves, to live as engaged global citizens and to find new ways to connect with Israel and to repair the world. We have studies that show the quantifiable impact of this work and its direct effect on the strength and vibrancy of the Jewish future.

But we need the communal commitment. There are many who are already doing important work in this space. We hope even more will join us, starting this week at the Summit in Atlanta.

Together we can scale successful models and seed new ones so they can reach and engage growing numbers of teens. With this strategy, a generation from now, the 80 percent figure may reflect the number of teens engaged with, rather than disengaged from, Jewish life. And we can inspire teens to have a love of Jewish life and learning, to actively work to strengthen our peoples’ future, and to draw on Jewish values as they create change in the broader world.

Source: “Investing in Jewish Teens: “A Golden Opportunity for Action,” eJewishPhilanthropy, February 9, 2015

In the dead of winter, with a Nor’easter bearing down, what compels someone to travel from Miami to Boston? If you work in Jewish education, it’s the opportunity to see first-hand and learn about all of the elements of a successful project called B’Yadenu. I had the opportunity as well to sit-in on this dissemination, known as the Community Partner Workshop. Important takeaways from this process can help other foundations, schools, and organizations as they decide when and how to disseminate a successful model.

As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu aims to create an effective, sustainable, and adaptable model to provide a Jewish Day School education to more students with a range of special learning needs in the Boston Jewish Day School community. The project is managed by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston in partnership with Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, based in Newton, MA, and Yeshiva University’s Institute for University-School Partnership in New York. Now in its 3rd year, and with two cohorts of five Boston-area Jewish Days Schools, we are beginning to see positive results. Each participating school has developed a Leadership team consisting of administrators and teacher leaders who plan a professional development program for their school as they create and implement a whole school approach to meet the needs of diverse learners.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, seeing these initial positive results presents a major opportunity in line with our approach to strategic grantmaking and to model documentation and dissemination. This opportunity is why, for two days last month, community and school representatives from Miami and Detroit flew to Boston to learn about the B’yadenu model and the concepts supporting implementation, the project toolkit, and initial outcomes directly from those leading the project.

The Foundation works with grantees to disseminate models in a variety of ways, from websites to hard copy reports. Different models lend themselves to different forms of dissemination. And, the in-person dissemination of B’Yadenu certainly has its benefits:

• A Substantive Model: When the “host” community – in this case Boston – invites other communities to fly in and learn first-hand about an initiative, there is an implicit message that “we have something working here, and we want to help you adapt it for your community.” When different communities take the time and resources to come together in this manner, all parties involved make a commitment to learn and to take the steps necessary to make successful adaption more likely.
• In-person engagement: Even with all of the technology in our world today, the opportunity to interact in-person for two days allows for deep learning. The Miami and Detroit representatives engaged in exercises, asked pointed questions, and had the opportunity to reflect with the Boston representatives on what this might look like in their communities.
• Seeing is Believing: As part of the two-day dissemination, the Miami and Detroit representatives toured schools where B’Yadenu has led to change. They were able to see what the project actually looks like in implementation. By seeing something working, the planning process – while perhaps still daunting – feels incredibly worthwhile. Julie Lambert, Director of Professional Learning Initiatives at CAJE Miami, attended the Workshop and commented, “It was exciting to learn about the B’Yadenu model. We saw how well the project connects to our work in Miami, and how it can be adapted to further develop what we have accomplished in our day school community. We left Boston with renewed energy and increased knowledge to build our capacity for serving our diverse student population.”
• Looking Inwards: While the Workshop was designed to benefit the Miami and Detroit communities, the preparation that the Boston B’Yadenu team went through to lead an insightful and productive two-day workshop was helpful to them as well. The process forced the team – in a good way – to think deeply about the B’Yadenu design and implementation process, what has worked well, what it would change, and how the outcomes are beginning to take root.

“As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu has benefitted from an exceptional interchange of learning between all of our partners (both schools and regional/national agencies),” said Alan Oliff, Director of Jewish Learning and Engagement at CJP and the Project Manager for B’Yadenu. “The dissemination workshop expanded our learning through the questions, ideas, and concerns raised by the Miami and Detroit participants. We appreciated the opportunity to share all that we learned and create new networks that can add to the knowledgebase in the field about best practice going forward.”

Sharing the B’Yadenu model at this relatively early juncture in its development provided a substantial learning opportunity for Boston and the communities considering adapting it. The B’Yadenu team will continue to support Miami and Detroit educators as they determine how to adapt B’Yadenu to their communities.

Other Foundation grantees also are currently involved in model documentation and dissemination. As one example, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma Counties Early Childhood Education Initiative, is about to embark on model documentation of its successful Jewish Resource Specialist program. This four-year-old initiative is expanding the capacity of 15 Jewish pre-schools to enhance the Jewish learning taking place, as well as to engage families more deeply in Jewish family experiences.

The recent Grantee Perception Report on the Jim Joseph Foundation indicated clear field interest in the Foundation continuing to broadly share efforts of its grantees. We hope that the building, documentation, and dissemination of successful models is an effective response to this expressed interest of stakeholders in Jewish education.

Sandy Edwards is Associate Director of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Source: “More than One Way to Document a Model,” Sandy Edwards, eJewishPhilanthropy, January 13, 2015

In the dead of winter, with a Nor’easter bearing down, what compels someone to travel from Miami to Boston? If you work in Jewish education, it’s the opportunity to see first-hand and learn about all of the elements of a successful project called B’Yadenu. I had the opportunity as well to sit-in on this dissemination, known as the Community Partner Workshop. Important takeaways from this process can help other foundations, schools, and organizations as they decide when and how to disseminate a successful model.

As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu aims to create an effective, sustainable, and adaptable model to provide a Jewish Day School education to more students with a range of special learning needs in the Boston Jewish Day School community. The project is managed by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston in partnership with Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, based in Newton, MA, and Yeshiva University’s Institute for University-School Partnership in New York. Now in its 3^rd year, and with two cohorts of five Boston-area Jewish Days Schools, we are beginning to see positive results. Each participating school has developed a Leadership team consisting of administrators and teacher leaders who plan a professional development program for their school as they create and implement a whole school approach to meet the needs of diverse learners.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, seeing these initial positive results presents a major opportunity in line with our approach to strategic grantmaking and to model documentation and dissemination. This opportunity is why, for two days last month, community and school representatives from Miami and Detroit flew to Boston to learn about the B’yadenu model and the concepts supporting implementation, the project toolkit, and initial outcomes directly from those leading the project.

The Foundation works with grantees to disseminate models in a variety of ways, from websites to hard copy reports. Different models lend themselves to different forms of dissemination. And, the in-person dissemination of B’Yadenu certainly has its benefits:

• A Substantive Model: When the “host” community—in this case Boston—invites other communities to fly in and learn first-hand about an initiative, there is an implicit message that “we have something working here, and we want to help you adapt it for your community.” When different communities take the time and resources to come together in this manner, all parties involved make a commitment to learn and to take the steps necessary to make successful adaption more likely.

• In-person engagement: Even with all of the technology in our world today, the opportunity to interact in-person for two days allows for deep learning. The Miami and Detroit representatives engaged in exercises, asked pointed questions, and had the opportunity to reflect with the Boston representatives on what this might look like in their communities.

• Seeing is Believing: As part of the two-day dissemination, the Miami and Detroit representatives toured schools where B’Yadenu has led to change. They were able to see what the project actually looks like in implementation. By seeing something working, the planning process—while perhaps still daunting—feels incredibly worthwhile. Julie Lambert, Director of Professional Learning Initiatives at CAJE Miami, attended the Workshop and commented, “It was exciting to learn about the B’Yadenu model. We saw how well the project connects to our work in Miami, and how it can be adapted to further develop what we have accomplished in our day school community. We left Boston with renewed energy and increased knowledge to build our capacity for serving our diverse student population.”

• Looking Inwards: While the Workshop was designed to benefit the Miami and Detroit communities, the preparation that the Boston B’Yadenu team went through to lead an insightful and productive two-day workshop was helpful to them as well. The process forced the team—in a good way—to think deeply about the B’Yadenu design and implementation process, what has worked well, what it would change, and how the outcomes are beginning to take root.

“As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu has benefitted from an exceptional interchange of learning between all of our partners (both schools and regional/national agencies),” said Alan Oliff, Director of Jewish Learning and Engagement at CJP and the Project Manager for B’Yadenu. “The dissemination workshop expanded our learning through the questions, ideas, and concerns raised by the Miami and Detroit participants.  We appreciated the opportunity to share all that we learned and create new networks that can add to the knowledgebase in the field about best practice going forward.”

Sharing the B’Yadenu model at this relatively early juncture in its development provided a substantial learning opportunity for Boston and the communities considering adapting it. The B’Yadenu team will continue to support Miami and Detroit educators as they determine how to adapt B’Yadenu to their communities.

Other Foundation grantees also are currently involved in model documentation and dissemination. As one example, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma Counties Early Childhood Education Initiative, is about to embark on model documentation of its successful Jewish Resource Specialist program. This four-year-old initiative is expanding the capacity of 15 Jewish pre-schools to enhance the Jewish learning taking place, as well as to engage families more deeply in Jewish family experiences.   

The recent Grantee Perception Report on the Jim Joseph Foundation indicated clear field interest in the Foundation continuing to broadly share efforts of its grantees.  We hope that the building, documentation, and dissemination of successful models is an effective response to this expressed interest of stakeholders in Jewish education.

“True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another.” – Martin Buber, I and Thou

The end of the year is a time when I read voraciously. I do so annually wanting to rededicate myself to the concept of “otherness,” which for me derives from a long cherished belief in specific aspects of Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

Reminding myself that there is an ever-present “other” – both in the amount of content in which I lack knowledge and about which I am inquisitive, and in the “thou” that represents the individuality of every single human being whom I encounter – replenishes my senses of wonder and awe. I invariably come away refreshed from what I fancy is my personal celebration of limerence (social critic David Brooks’ term describing a passionate love for learning). And the personal translates to the public: I begin the New Year listening for understanding with heightened attention to my colleagues and Foundation Board of Directors, and searching more circumspectly with Jim Joseph Foundation grantees for effective approaches to Jewish education.

This December’s reading list included texts in several domains: the spiritual geography of place; teacher training; and contemporary Jewish sociology. On its face this looks like an entirely random set of topics, the content of each unrelated to the themes, main ideas, facts, figures, and findings of the other. But it is precisely this breadth of topic that holds its allure in its challenge for me to integrate what appears disparate and even disconnected. Moreover, and most importantly, is the matter of using discovery and learning to inform my Foundation work.

So, by way of example, Richard Cohen’s controversial Israel: Is it Good for the Jews? has no obvious relationship whatsoever to Mark C. Taylor’s Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill. I accept that it is a surprising coupling of texts dissimilar in many ways. Yet Cohen writes incisively about Herzl’s vision of Israel as a place defining who we are as a Jewish people… “a place where a Jew could be a free Jew, a proud Jew, a totally unfettered Jew, but it could also be a place – and this was most important – where a Jew could be free not to be a Jew” (p.13). Taylor, ruminating poetically on a small town in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, avers “that by pausing to dwell on a particular place, we may once again know who we are by discovering where we are” (p. 3).

Cohen is a syndicated columnist who offers a highly interpretive and personalized brief history of Israel. Taylor, a professor of religion, has compiled a collection of meditations and photographs sanctifying the place where the author lives. Conjoined together, these strikingly different texts awakened in me the need to open my eyes wide to the physical space I inhabit. Absorbing these two sources helps prime me for the June, 2015 Board meeting the Foundation will hold in Israel, knowing that I will have the opportunity to engage deeply with my Israeli brethren and with the sanctity of Eretz Yisrael itself.

While Israel: Is it Good for the Jews and Recovering Place might seem like unlikely companions, Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher and Sharon Feiman-Nemser’s Teachers as Learners are easily read together, without dissonance. Both books make exceptionally strong cases for further professionalizing the field of teaching.

The story-like narrative Green artfully tells and the insightful, rigorous analysis Feiman-Nemser constructs make a compelling case for an epistemology of teaching – content knowledge about pedagogy – that defy notions of individuals “born to be teachers” or educators achieving pedagogical excellence simply by teaching to a set of imposed curriculum standards. Neither book is about Jewish education or Jewish day schools. But reading these two original contributions to the literature on teacher preparation compels me to wonder to what extent Jewish day schools invest deeply in their teachers’ ongoing professional development.

I think both Feiman-Nemser’s and Green’s books may ultimately be viewed as landmark contributions to the literature each seeks to enrich. True, secular education at certain levels is something different than Jewish day school education. Yet Feiman-Nemser and Green prompt me to think critically about what Jim Joseph Foundation investments in teacher preparation and professional development at HUC, JTS, YU, Brandeis, Pardes, and the Jewish New Teacher Project are producing. I also ponder what role the Consortium for Advanced Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) can ultimately play in professionalizing day school teaching. These books inspire me to want to believe that the craft of teaching can be mastered. I ponder what a multitude of demonstrably great teachers might mean to the future of Jewish day school education.

My final holiday pairing of Keren McGinity’s groundbreaking Marrying Out and Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute’s American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012 probably seems like another logical concurrent reading of two texts. The Steinhardt study, estimating the U.S. Jewish population at 6.8 million, received a good deal of attention when it was initially released. I find the study to be informative on a number of levels. Perhaps most noteworthy is the authors’ persuasive contention that most Jewish population studies conflate demographic and sociological data. The result is both miscalculation of the population of Jews (underestimating the number) as well as distortion in representations of the nature of contemporary American Jewish life.

McGinity’s fascinating qualitative analysis of the lives of 52 men in interfaith marriages (all of the couples reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan) reveals a host of dynamics having to do with men’s identities that – to my knowledge – have rarely been researched. McGinity’s portraits are realistic, nuanced, and detailed. They uncover a depth of Jewishness and strength of Jewish identity in interfaith marriages that the literature ignores – as do the critics of interfaith marriage.

The research conducted by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute and Keren McGinity makes me wary of many commentators on the 2013 Pew study whose rhetoric of fatalism is countermanded by these empirical and qualitative findings. These texts point me in the direction of ensuring the Jim Joseph Foundation continues to track population studies while separating from them sweeping, flawed generalizations about the character of Jewish life that too often accompany the studies.

My December reading—varied and inspiring it certainly was—again showed me that in nearly all aspects of life, the need for continued learning is great. It is a simple but stark reminder that Jim Joseph Foundation personnel should read widely and respect “otherness” as a means to consider an array of solutions (some still undiscovered) to complex problems of improving Jewish teaching and learning.