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Looming Jewish teacher shortage prompts new accelerated training in well-known Jerusalem program
When Rabbi David Wallach was looking for an institution to help him become a better Jewish day school teacher, he was frustrated to find that most of the places he researched offered either training in Jewish studies or general teacher training. It was hard to find both.
Then he discovered the Pardes Teacher Fellowship in Jerusalem, where he ended up getting his master’s degree in Jewish education.
“Pardes is the only place that integrated for me both the Jewish studies and the pedagogy,” said Wallach, now 32 and a teacher and assistant director of Jewish studies at Les Ecoles Azrieli Herzliah High School in Montreal, Canada. “It wasn’t that you learn Judaism in one place and learn education in another. This entire program is about the pedagogy of Jewish learning. That approach is unique, powerful and invaluable for me.”
More than 270 Jewish teachers and educators-in-training from North America have gone through the Pardes Teacher Fellowship, a two-year master’s program that offers participants intensive Jewish learning, Jewish educational pedagogy, practical student-teacher training and mentoring in North American day schools.
A mainstay for over two decades, the well-known fellowship is being redesigned for next year to make some key changes that administrators believe will better serve the future teachers of Jewish day schools: Instead of requiring two years in Israel with monthlong student-teaching stints along the way, Pardes is offering an accelerated program that requires just one year of intense study in Jerusalem followed by a second year of teacher training in schools in North America.
The program is funded, so students’ expenses are minimized and they receive a stipend, and at the program’s conclusion they obtain their master’s degree. Pardes is currently accepting applications for the fall.
“This is a unique opportunity to study pedagogy with spectacular teachers in Jewish education,” said Aviva Lauer, director of the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
There’s another reason for the changes at Pardes: a looming crisis in Jewish education to which the Jewish world hasn’t fully woken up, according to some educational leaders.
“The crisis that we knew was coming is here. Jewish day schools, early childhood centers and part-time congregational schools across the country face a shortage of educators to fill multiple openings for lead teachers, assistants and substitutes,” wrote the authors of a recent piece in the online publication eJewish Philanthropy published by leaders from the Association of Directors of Communal Agencies for Jewish Education. “This is no longer simply a ‘challenge.’ Rather, it is a crisis because of continuing trends in the overall job market, exacerbated by the pandemic.”
The shortage is related in part to low salaries in the profession. A recent report by the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education showed that fewer new teachers are entering education and more current teachers are leaving. As a result, many Jewish schools are hiring staff without appropriate training.
“We are looking for teacher candidates who love Jewish text, Jewish living, and Jewish tradition, recognize that the children are our future, and want to serve their communities as role models for the next generation,” said Rabbi Avi Spodek, director of recruitment at the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
Rabbi Jordan Soffer, head of school at the Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon, Massachusetts, used his training in the Pardes Teacher Fellowship to enhance his classroom teaching. (Courtesy of Pardes)
Pardes’ revamped fellowship program tightens its format with a more modular structure that offers more credit for the pedagogy courses students take in Israel and credit for some courses online. The purpose of the change is to enhance the practical training and enable those who can only get away to Israel for a single academic year (plus two summers) to participate.
“The new format is a soft easing-in to teaching,” Lauer said, giving students time to immerse themselves in a school before becoming full-time teachers.
The principle that guides the Pardes approach is subject-specific pedagogy, according to Lauer: “Not just how to be a teacher but how to be a Jewish studies teacher. It’s learning how to integrate and balance textual content with what we call ‘meaning-mining.’ It’s about introducing our students to varied lenses through which they might teach Jewish texts, and helping them explore what will be important and meaningful to them to teach their future students.”
The Pardes program boasts a star-studded staff, including Yiscah Smith, Rabbi Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, Judy Klitsner, and Rabbi Zvi Hirschfield for Jewish studies, and Rachel Friedrichs, Reuven Margrett, Sefi Kraut, and Susan Yammer for the pedagogical components.
“The teachers are so special,” said Josh Less, a current fellow. “They are all unique in their own ways and have a great grasp of their subjects.”
Pardes attracts students from a diversity of Jewish denominational, cultural and professional backgrounds. The program’s alumni include six heads of school, five principals, 12 Jewish studies department chairs and six directors of Jewish life, among scores of Jewish teachers.
Less, 28, who recently completed a round of teacher training at the Milken School in Los Angeles, said the Pardes program has given him critical classroom experience and essential Jewish study skills that he learned in Pardes’ beit midrash, or Jewish study hall. He plans to become a full-time day school teacher but first wants to get his rabbinical ordination.
“My advice to someone thinking about this program is: Definitely do it!” Less said. “The program is such a blessing for the right person who wants to do intense learning and teaching. It’s intense but indispensable.”
Wallach said the most valuable thing he took away from the Pardes program was how to connect learning to practice. When he teaches about Passover, for example, Wallach turns his classroom walls into an art gallery, hanging dozens of images of the Seder’s four children drawn from different haggadahs and asking his students to explain which images speak to them. That gets them talking. Once they’re done analyzing, he asks the students to create their own images of the four children.
“This kind of exercise always gets them. They are intrigued by it. They are involved,” said Wallach, who has been teaching for seven years. He credits Pardes with showing him this kind of approach to learning.
“It wasn’t just: Here’s how to teach, in theory. It was about how to teach this specific Jewish studies text, the pedagogy of it,” he recalled. “We practiced it, and we had a chance to actually live it, both with our peer training and the teaching.”
Wallach added, “All the best teachers I know went through Pardes.”
Having excellent teachers is critical for the future of the Jewish people, Lauer said.
“Our goal is to give our fellows outstanding training – for their own sake, for the sake of the schools that will hire them, for the sake of the children and for the sake of the future of the Jewish people,” she said. “People who graduate from our program are avidly sought-after and seen as stars in the field. We are hoping to find the new stars. The Jewish world needs new stars.”
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Israel’s culture minister called this documentary about IDF tactics ‘vile.’ It deserves to be seen.
VENICE — At its premiere here last week, towards the end of the 83th Venice International Film Festival, Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, received a 25-minute-long standing ovation, a record at the festival. Two nights later, the film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. By Sunday, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, was calling the film “vile,” describing it as treason and threatening to revoke its directors’ citizenship. Zohar invoked his reform of cinema funding, saying Israelis should no longer have to pay for work that harms the army and the state.
I left the press screening of Naza angry, depressed and utterly convinced of its importance. Its account of the procedures that govern the deaths of civilians is devastating precisely because so much of the testimony sounds like people describing an ordinary working day. The film will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26. It deserves to be seen, and debated with considerably more patience than some of its detractors have displayed.
Venice has traditionally worn its politics more lightly than Berlin, where a filmmaker’s acceptance speech can cause an international incident. This year, however, festival director Alberto Barbera programmed a competition that invited controversy. Alongside Naza was Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which drew Ukrainian objections over the production’s Russian connections (including to Sergei Adoniev, a businessman who has been sanctioned by Ukraine and the U.S.) In the run-up to the festival, Barbera defended DAU as a denunciation of totalitarianism. Both films are international productions by directors whose countries have become objects of international opprobrium. Both venture into their societies’ heart of darkness. Barbera deserves enormous credit for programming them both in the main section of the world’s oldest film festival despite the objections of many.
Berlin supplies a cautionary precedent. No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary Abraham and Szor made with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, premiered there in 2024, where it won the festival’s documentary prize. After Abraham and Adra gave speeches condemning Israel’s policy of apartheid in the West Bank, the German culture minister Claudia Roth, caught on camera applauding at the ceremony, clarified that her applause had been intended for the Israeli director. I shudder to imagine the official response Naza might have elicited there. Venice at least offered an opportunity to discuss what was on screen.
The film, which presents testimonies from 24 serving and former military personnel, grew out of years of investigative reporting. Produced by the British newspaper the Guardian and JW Films, in collaboration with the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 and its news website Local Call, it builds on Abraham’s investigations into Israeli intelligence and his work with Guardian journalist Harry Davies. Revelations about targeting systems had appeared in print while filming was underway and were subsequently reported on by both The New York Times and Washington Post. All this means that the disclosures made in Naza are not brand new. However, the stark, focused and lean approach that Abraham and Szor take in the documentary ensure that the information hits home with chilling force.
The film’s unusual title is the Hebrew term for collateral damage — specifically, the anticipated civilian toll of a military strike in Gaza. Speaking to Abraham from a series of Tel Aviv rooftops at night, the interviewees, whose appearances and voices are digitally disguised, explain with patient detachment how targets in Gaza are identified and eliminated. One of the tools used to identify suspected militants is an AI system called Lavender. The frightening efficiency of such technology is discussed alongside the human decisions that determine what constitutes an acceptable loss.
One of the most disturbing claims has prompted a specific military rebuttal. An interviewee says a strike was once approved with 500 civilian deaths anticipated; he does not know how many were actually killed. The IDF claims it has never planned, approved or conducted a strike expecting anything near that toll, and challenges the filmmakers’ ability to verify the account. It also maintains that humans authorize strikes and questions the witnesses’ competence to discuss broader strategy.
The film’s restraint gives incendiary testimony such as this time to register. For the majority of the film, we only glimpse the interviewees’ faces in silhouette and watch as they crudely draw diagrams to explain the logistics of a military strike, say, on a crowded building. Every so often the camera wanders off the roof, peering into the illuminated homes and high-rise office buildings of Tel Aviv at night. The point is precisely to convey an unsettling sense of normalcy.
I was particularly struck by the absence of the racist invective I had half expected. Some interviewees describe themselves as educated, liberal people. Their accounts nevertheless reveal a callous disregard for civilian causalities. One recalls the pleasure of a job well done. “It’s so much fun,” he says of reaching his targets and we hear in his voice how the remote killings he takes part in gives him an indescribable rush. After a pause, he tells Abraham that as someone raised in the Israeli context, someone who had got to visit the death camps in Poland, he always considered and asked himself how they could do what they did. “For me the Nazis are evil,” he says. “So what does that make me?” It is perhaps the film’s most damning exchange.
One of Naza’s strength as a documentary is that it does not demand agreement that Israel is committing war crimes, including genocide, before its investigation begins. That gives it a chance to reach people who have defended Israel and remain capable of reconsidering their position.
Some of the most vociferous criticism of Naza has not come from IDF spokesmen or other Israeli officials. Almost immediately after the premiere, footage from the film’s lengthy ovation (where Abraham and Szor stand looking intensely uncomfortable and withdrawn) went viral, with numerous commentators on X and other platforms making ugly accusations against the filmmakers, including for granting anonymity to the whistleblowers who feature in the film.
“A viscerally nauseating spectacle. Imagine SS officers, shielded and protected by anonymity, getting a 25-minute standing ovation for recounting their tortures and murders. Criminal perpetrators should only be heard at their trials not at gala celebrations,” read one tweet that has been viewed close to 150,000 times. Though the language of that post is particularly incendiary, the sentiment it expresses is surprisingly widespread on social media.
Confidentiality was a condition of obtaining these accounts, a standard journalistic arrangement that confers no clemency. At the press conference, Abraham described that his sources were motivated variously by remorse and professional pride. He affirmed that his goal was to keep the victims of Gaza at the film’s center — and not to congratulate its witnesses.
The tenor of this debate recalls Nadav Lapid’s withdrawal from the Marseille film festival in June after boycott calls. His Yes, an infernal satire of post-Oct. 7 society, is a ferocious attack on Israeli complacency. It would take considerable ingenuity or imagination to claim that either it or Naza is an apology for Israel.
Accepting his award in Venice, Abraham said that he made Naza because “the denial of a crime is what helps it persist.” He later pledged to distribute the film as widely as possible in Israel. The interviewees, he explained, “spoke in Hebrew because they wanted to reach out to the Israeli public.” Not surprisingly, the film, sight unseen, has already been widely condemned within Israel. Former defense minister and opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman called the directors “haters of Israel” and accused them of turning Oct. 7 into a blood libel. Such accusations should make the necessity to reach Israeli viewers even more urgent.
Days after the film’s victory in Venice, Haaretz ran an editorial with the blunt headline, “Israelis Must Finally Confront What Israel Has Done in Gaza.” After years of trying to “air dirty laundry at home” with limited success, Abraham and Szor now had found in the Venice Film Festival a major platform where the conclusions of their investigations were impossible to ignore. The editorial’s key sentence is also its shortest: “Israel’s problem is not public relations, but reality.”
Naza only leaves the rooftops of Tel Aviv for two brief occasions. In the first of these, we see archival footage of a young Benjamin Netanyahu promoting his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism, In the clip, a much-younger Netanyahu defines terrorism as a policy of deliberately killing and maiming civilians to advance political goals. Bibi’s words hang uncomfortably over the rest of the film, inviting and daring viewers to draw their own conclusions.
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Macklemore dropped from Ed Sheeran tour after ‘Free Palestine’ backlash
Macklemore has been dropped from the remainder of Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour following backlash to pro-Palestinian comments the social justice rapper made onstage.
The promoter of Sheeran’s U.S. tour said several stadiums refused to allow Macklemore to perform after his headline-grabbing “Free Palestine” plea during a Sept. 4 show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Ensuing backlash to the comments included a petition by the Israeli-American Council to get him canceled from the tour.
Macklemore was set to open for Sheeran at eight of the remaining 10 tour dates. Seven of the eight host venues said the concerts could not go on with Macklemore, according to Rolling Stone: Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia; Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts; Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta; Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis; Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina; AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas; and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida.
Macklemore’s long record of pro-Palestinian remarks predates the tour, including a song, “Hind’s Hall,” about the 2024 takeover of a Columbia University building by student protesters. During his controversial Sept.4 speech, he said his ambition on the Sheeran tour was to promote the Palestinian cause.
In a statement on Instagram, Macklemore claimed Robert Kraft — the Jewish owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, and arguably the NFL’s most powerful figure — pressured Sheeran to drop him.
“Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium,” Macklemore wrote. “Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”
The post had received 1.6 million likes on the platform within four hours of its posting.
The controversy over Macklemore’s comments also embroiled the Jewish pop star Pink, who faced backlash for sharing a post by the pro-Israel organization StopAntisemitism. Pink later said she did not agree with all of the post’s contents, but felt alarmed as a Jewish person who had grieved both sides of the conflict and didn’t like being told she supported genocide.
She also brought up a 2014 incident in which Macklemore wore a fake nose, beard and black hair onstage in a costume some criticized as playing on antisemitic stereotypes. (He later apologized, saying that he had no antisemitic intent and linking to the Anti-Defamation League website.)
“Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was,” Pink wrote on Instagram. “But he apologized, and I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go. Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us.”
The ADL was part of the 2026 anti-Macklemore movement, calling his speech “performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism.’”
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Jewish sleepaway camp made them comedians, so they made a movie about it
Jewish sleepaway camp is where parents send their children to forge a lasting connection with their ancient peoplehood. Perhaps regrettably, many also leave having developed something else: shtick.
“It’s a breeding ground for comedy bits,” said filmmaker Michael Lewen, 36, a proud alumnus of Camp Modin in Belgrade, Maine. “Everyone learned how to be a comedian at summer camp. This is where you first try out your stuff.”
Years after retiring his color-war uniform, Lewen, a regular collaborator of Judd Apatow, is returning to the cradle of his comedy career. His sophomore feature Tiny Fugitives, hitting theaters Sept. 18, takes us to Camp Fineman, where 12-year-old Jacob Udell (Benjamin Pajek) commands a cool-kid cachet apart from his public-school tormentors.
Jacob’s goals for the summer start off simple — a bunk-wide record for “ask outs” to the social and telling his longtime crush how he feels. But when his parents show up on visiting day to announce their divorce, and that they may not have the money to send him for another season, Jacob and his best friend Charnis (Aaron Harris) hatch a plan: When the buses leave camp, they won’t be on them. They will live at camp year-round.
It’s a notion not completely foreign to Lewen’s co-writer, Jacob Kaplan, 28.
While Kaplan spent less time than Lewen at his own camp (Young Judea in Amherst, New Hampshire), he keeps finding fresh material in the experience. He toured a standup show, Kings of Camp, about those halcyon days of canteen privileges and Capture the Flag. Lewen connected with Kaplan after reading a cartoon pilot he wrote about an alien child who sends dispatches back to his home planet from a Jewish summer camp, mistakenly believing his idiosyncratic environs to be representative of human civilization.
Kaplan remembers camp as his first brush with independence. The divorce plot is drawn from his life and he remembers it as a merciful break from parental logistics.
The jokes are an amalgam of his and Lewen’s field notes from back in the day and ideas from their capable cast of 12-year-olds, one of whom does a credible impression of Barack Obama saying kiddush. The foil to Jacob and Charnis’ great escape is a “lifer” named Bob, played by Johnny Knoxville, who gives chase and is often grievously injured in the pursuit. Thank Hashem for the infirmary.
“There was definitely some push and pull with the stunt coordinator,” Lewen said of Knoxville’s presence on set. Coming off of the later Jackass films, he wanted to drive his ATV without his glasses and urged people to hit him harder.
But for all the slapstick, Bob, based on a familiar archetype of a fanatical counselor is, along with Charnis and Jacob’s friendship, the heart of the film. His message, and one I’ve heard from many a counselor of my own: camp is special because it ends.
If it didn’t quite end for Lewen and Kaplan, who got to relive those days on the set of a couple different Toronto camps, and recreate some of the magic for their actors, they insist they’ve now had enough.
Tiny Fugitives Lewen said, is indebted to Stand By Me, includes visual nods to Francis Ford Coppola films like Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and seems to have no anxiety about the influence of another raunchy two-hander like Superbad (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produced). It owes a less obvious debt to Michael Mann’s Heat, Lewen said, only “instead of De Niro and Pacino, it’s Johnny Knoxville and a 12-year-old who both want the same exact thing out of life, and only one of them is going to get it.”
Among the comedy’s most understated features is its ambient Jewishness, in no way essential to the plot, as it is in another recent camp film The Floaters, but key to its sensibility.
The kids find ancient Manischewitz in a dining hall. Jacob pads his elbow with a loose kippah to break the frame to a map of the old camp grounds. In a fanciful moment, he suggests laundering petty cash in $18 sums to skirt suspicion. A line, delivered out of context and without elaboration: “Charnis, what do you mean a three-state solution?”
Asked if the film might have been more marketable with a generic sleepaway camp, Kaplan and Lewen seemed to have heard that note a lot.
“For the comedy you want to go from what felt the most true to your life and the situations and what actually happened and painting as vivid a picture as possible,” Kaplan said, invoking Wet Hot American Summer, which presented a Jewish summer camp without ever quite announcing that it was one.
Lewen said they focused on the bigger idea when they went out to pitch: “When you’re young, there are places where you feel like you make sense. For some people, it’s the baseball team. For some people, it’s debate camp. For some people, it’s your cousin’s house. And for us, it was Jewish summer camp.”
The producers are betting big on Tiny Fugitives’ cross-quadrant appeal, making it a rare R-rated comedy to play theatrically. Among the hoped-for viewers are some actual 12-year-olds, who will need a parent or guardian owing to the film’s coarse language, which is likely not very scandalous to the tween set it’s depicting.
“I actually think it’s a totally good movie for young people to see,” Lewen said. “I just remember being that age and watching stuff that felt a little bit real, and like I actually saw myself in it, and it’s so satisfying and cathartic.”
To that end, he said, Knoxville is chartering a bus to take camper-aged kids to the theater.
“I think it’s cool for there to be a cool movie that’s also Jewish,” Lewen said. “It’s the same reason I like Jewish summer camp and want my kid to go there.”
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