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As day school educators gather, focus is on investing in leadership and creativity
When Rabbi Adam Englander arrived at a recent national gathering in Denver of Jewish day school and yeshiva educators, he had a good sense of what conference sessions he wanted to attend and whom he wanted to meet.
But it turns out that one of the most valuable benefits Englander experienced at the Prizmah educators conference were the serendipitous encounters he had with colleagues and the new opportunities for collaboration and creativity they presented.
As head of school at the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, or HALB, in Woodmere, New York, Englander’s main focus usually is what’s happening at his school, not elsewhere. But at the conference he met with two colleagues with whom he shares a leadership coach, they created a WhatsApp group chat for sharing ideas, and Englander soon walked away with a new idea for a dynamic workshop to run with his leadership team this summer.
“Already just from this group I have an amazing idea,” Englander said. “That kind of good stuff can happen where you might meet someone who is like, ‘Oh, yeah. I have the same problem as you.’ Now you are connecting with some principal from San Francisco whom you’d never have met in a million years.”
He added, “Day school leaders really need to take the time and energy to invest in themselves, and their own growth.”
“Creative Spirit” was the theme of the conference in January organized by Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, the national network organization that was created several years ago through a merger of five different day school organizations. The conference in Denver drew more than 1,000 professional and lay leaders from over 200 Jewish day schools and yeshivas across North America. It was the third-ever iteration of Prizmah’s national conference.
With tens of thousands of students spread out over hundreds of schools across the continent, day schools have become laboratories of creativity: for learning, for Jewish action, even for tackling societal challenges.
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein. “The exceptional level of shared optimism and imagination around the bright future of Jewish day schools was palpable at the conference. Day school leaders clearly share a belief and innovative determination in the opportunity to grow enrollment in the next decade — by promulgating the value proposition of Jewish day school, ensuring a pipeline of excellent educators and addressing the challenge of affordability.”
A salient example of creativity in action is how day schools adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic, not just adjusting to remote learning and figuring out how to return to classrooms safely, but in reconfiguring teaching approaches to suit different kinds of learning.
“Because of schools’ creativity, and because of the way that different stakeholders in schools — from administrators to teachers to parents to students — were able to work together, they solved these brand new problems we hadn’t seen before,” Bernstein observed.
Another area of tremendous creativity is how Jewish schools are managing the challenges of affordability: Day schools are almost entirely privately funded, tuition is a barrier for many families, and yet tuition fees alone are insufficient to cover costs. In recent years, some schools have adapted innovative and flexible fee models, from setting tuition based on a fixed percentage of a family’s income to using Jewish community grant funding to cap tuition for new families.
Much of the conference was devoted to ideas for the future of Jewish day school education, covering everything from curricula to leadership to finances. One main area of focus is recruiting and retaining quality educators and school leaders.
Debra Skolnick-Einhorn, head of school at the Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School in Washington, D.C., who spoke on a conference panel about professional development, said she believes the key to better educator retention is improving compensation and benefits, providing more opportunities for professional growth, and expressing more gratitude toward staff.
Tal Ben-Shahar, an American-Israeli bestselling author who teaches about the psychology of leadership, spoke at the conference about the importance of investing in leaders.
“It’s important to focus on self-care for the teachers, invest in people in the field,” Ben-Shahar said. “It’s critical to treat teachers well, keep them involved, treat them as professionals, and value their opinions.”
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein at the organization’s biennial conference in Denver, January 2023. (Courtesy of Prizmah)
John D’Auria, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of four books on leadership, spoke about how great leaders focus on mutual learning — getting colleagues to share and learn from one another — rather than top-down leadership. It’s an approach embodied by many day school curricula, which focus on collaborative and experiential learning.
At the conference, Lisa Kay Solomon, Louie Montoya, and Ariel Raz from Stanford University’s d.school K12 Futures team offered an art project dubbed Hall of Descendants where participants could create a portrait and message for future children and educators.
“While we can’t predict the future, we know it’s going to be filled with a lot of uncertainty, complexity and tensions that we can’t solve,” Solomon said. “The hall creates a relatability to that distant time travel and a sense of responsibility about what we might do today to serve that future descendant.”
Brad Phillipson, head of school for the Jewish Community Day School of Greater New Orleans, said he found the Hall “a powerful exercise in prioritizing the values with which I most closely identify, personally and professionally, and in contemplating the world I want to pass along to future generations — through our students, through my child, and, indirectly, through what my students, and my daughter, will teach their children.”
Tal Grinfas-David, who led a session at the conference on creative leadership and Israel, said it’s important for leaders to take risks. More often than not, she noted, leaders can be “risk averse to placate, to take safe pathways.”
Grinfas-David, who is vice president of outreach and pre-collegiate school management initiatives at the Atlanta-based Center for Israel Education, turned to Israeli history for examples of leadership that educators could emulate.
“What I wanted them to see was examples of courageous leadership and risk taking and where that could lead,” Grinfas-David said. “Hopefully, they see that leaders of Israel have had to strengthen the future of the state regardless of the circumstances, just as the school leaders need to leave behind a legacy of a stronger institution.”
Bernstein, Prizmah’s CEO, said that the recent gathering underscored how important collaboration is to Jewish education — and that regardless of location or denomination, colleagues have a lot to learn from each other.
“What we are seeing is that when Jewish day school leaders come together, whether you are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, pluralistic, or nondenominational, whether you are from the Southwest or the Northeast, from the U.S. or Canada and beyond — there is so much more that unites than divides,” Bernstein said.
Prizmah’s next conference will be held in the winter of 2024.
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The post As day school educators gather, focus is on investing in leadership and creativity appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New Year, Same Terrorism: Palestinian Authority’s Ruling Party Keeps Promoting Violence
A group of Palestinian children being taught that Israel will be destroyed. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.
Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority (PA), continues to promote terrorism as legitimate, necessary, and inevitable. This comes more than three decades after Yasser Arafat was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for claiming that the PA and PLO (also ruled by Fatah) had given up terror.
Fatah’s terror wing recently used the anniversary of Fatah’s founding — January 1, 1965 — to amplify its ongoing glorification of its Martyrs and “prisoners,” i.e., terrorists, and to promote “armed struggle” as the “foremost” form of “resistance,” which is the “shortest and only way to deter” Israel “and expel it from our land”:
On the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the Intilaqa of the Palestinian revolution and the Fatah Movement … we renew the covenant with the Martyrs, the prisoners, and the wounded [i.e., terrorists] — our compass will continue to point towards Jerusalem, and our rifles will be directed at the occupation [i.e., Israel] … We in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades emphasize the following permanent principles … Resistance in all its forms, foremost among them the armed struggle, is the shortest and only way to deter this oppressive enemy and expel it from our land. [emphasis added]
[Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Telegram channel, Dec. 31, 2025]
The Intilaqa, or “the Launch,” of Fatah refers to its first terror attack against Israel, when it attempted to blow up the National Water Carrier.
When Fatah says that the “only way” to “deter” Israel is through “resistance in all its forms” as well as when it uses terms such as “all means” and “armed struggle,” it consistently refers to shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, Molotov cocktail attacks, and other acts of terror against Israeli civilians.
In recent months, similar statements have been made by various senior members of the PLO, the parent body that established the Palestinian Authority.
PLO Executive Committee member Azzam Al-Ahmad stated that he supports “armed struggle” to serve the Palestinian “political cause”:
PLO Executive Committee member Azzam Al-Ahmad:“The Palestinian cause is a political cause and not a military one. However, politics is not disconnected from military activity and is particularly not disconnected from the struggle activity … an armed struggle of a people fighting to regain its land and its rights.”
[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, Nov. 11, 2025]
Hamada Farana, who is a member of the Palestinian National Council, which is the PLO’s legislative body, promoted “armed struggle” and “popular intifada” as means and tools.
Palestinian National Council member and political commentator Hamada Farana:“[We need] an agreement on the methods of the struggle. We must see the armed struggle, popular intifada, and negotiations as means and tools — not as principles. Therefore, when a shared political platform is formulated [between Fatah and Hamas] and there will be a unified representative institution, then necessarily they will reach the [appropriate] means. If armed struggle will be required, they will conduct armed struggle. If a popular intifada will be required, they will hold a popular intifada. If negotiations will be required, they will conduct negotiations.”
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, Nov. 27, 2025]
Tamer Aziz, who is a political bureau member of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, a faction within the PLO, was proud to “renew the oath” to armed struggle and recalled the Intilaqa as well:
Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) political bureau member Tamer Aziz: “We stand with admiration and respect in memory of the late leader, the symbol, the Martyr Yasser Arafat to renew the alliance and the oath with him, with the Launch [of Fatah], with the first bullet, the first Martyr, the first proclamation of the Launch of Fatah-Al-Asifah.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 11, 2025]
These statements reveal an unbroken pattern that has never changed. Across its factions and institutions, the PA continues to openly promote terrorism as a usable and repeatable tool, to glorify terrorists as role models, and to reaffirm it as a core strategy.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a researcher at Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), where a version of this article first appeared.
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The History of the Jews of South Florida: Antisemitism, Resilience, and Hope (PART ONE)
The University of Florida campus. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish population of South Florida is about 650,000. It has the third largest concentration of Jews in the country and the single largest concentration of Jews (13 percent of the total population of South Florida) outside of Israel.
The story of Florida is a surprising one, with visions becoming dreams, and antisemitism in places we would not have expected.
Here is the history of one of the most popular Jewish vacation spots, which is home to growing, vibrant communities in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
Florida’s Early History
In 1513, Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida for Spain, making it the first American territory to be discovered and settled. Under the Spanish Inquisition, only Catholics could live in Florida, although it is believed that Jewish Conversos were among the early settlers and soldiers of St. Augustine.
Under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, England acquired Florida from Spain, and Jews were permitted to reside there. The first-recorded Jews to settle in Florida, Alexander Solomons, Joseph D. Pallaccios, and Samuel Israel, arrived in Pensacola.
More Jews moved to northern Florida over the next few decades, though the Jewish population still comprised only a dozen individuals.
In 1783, England returned Florida to Spain. Once again under the rule of the Inquisition, Spain ordered a census that revealed Jews, including a Polish Jew, David Moses, who had a hide store in St. Augustine. Remarkably, Spain decided to allow the few Jews to remain, as the area needed settlers.
Florida became an American territory in 1821, and between 30 and 40 Jews lived in the northern part of the state.
Samuel Myers, a lawyer, settled in Pensacola in 1821. In 1822, his wife, Louisa, gave birth to Virginia Myers, the first documented Jewish child born in Florida.
A Vision for Florida: Moses Elias Levy
Moses Elias Levy was born in Morocco in 1782 to an influential Jewish merchant who served in the sultan’s court. Levy was fluent in five languages and was a man of many talents. He was a successful merchant, a social activist, an abolitionist, and a supporter of universal education.
In 1818, Levy began work on an ambitious project. His vision was to create a Jewish settlement that would give oppressed Jews from Europe an agrarian community where they could freely practice their religion and preserve their culture.
He purchased over 50,000 acres in Alachua County, Northern Florida, in 1820, which eventually grew to 100,000 acres. He constructed three properties: A sugar cane plantation on the Matanzas River, the Hope Hill plantation in present-day Astor, and Pilgrimage, a few miles from Micanopy. Levy’s dream started to come to fruition in 1823 when his business partner, Frederick Warburg, arrived with 21 settlers.
Historical roadside marker, Micanopy, Fl. (Photo by Jrryjude – Own work, Wiki Commons)
However, the community lasted only 13 years before the Second Seminole War broke out in 1835. At that point, the community dispersed.
Although it was a financial failure for Levy, it was successful in that it was the first Jewish farming settlement in the United States and created possibilities for persecuted Jews from Europe. The Jewish colony he built in Micanopy is today home to the University of Florida. In an interesting turn of history, this University has the largest Jewish population of any public university in the United States.
Florida Becomes a State
On March 3, 1845, Florida became the 27th state of the United States. Out of a population of 66,500, there were fewer than one hundred Jews living there.
Yet their numbers did not diminish their influence. Moses Levy’s son, David Levy Yulee, served as the first US Senator from Florida, making him the first Jew to serve in the US Senate. He is known as the Architect of Florida Statehood, having helped write the state’s Constitution and organizing the first cross-state railroad in 1853.
Even his very name remains associated with the state. Levy County, on the Gulf Coast in Northwest Florida, and the town of Yulee in Nassau County, are both named in David Levy Yulee’s honor.
David Levy Yulee
In the second half of the 19th century, Florida’s Jewish population continued to slowly grow, and Jacksonville was at the center of that growth. It was there that a Jewish cemetery, the first Jewish institution in Florida, was established in 1857, and the first synagogue was formed in 1876. By 1900, six congregations had been established in Northern Florida.
A 1591 map of Florida by Jacques le Moyne de Morgues.
The Barrier to Jewish Migration from Northern to Southern Florida: Antisemitism
South Florida’s Jewish community lagged behind the Northern and Central Florida Jewish communities for decades. In 1928, roughly 40 percent of the Jewish population of 10,000 lived in Jacksonville. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, Jews moved south, building communities in Miami and Miami Beach, and then spread to Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The primary reason for the small Jewish population in South Florida was the very visible antisemitism.
It was common to see signs in Miami and Miami Beach that read “Gentiles Only” or “No Jews or Dogs.” Wealthy and influential developers, including highway builder and entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, refused to serve Jewish customers, and oil and railroad mogul Henry Flagler (1830-1913) prohibited land sales and hotel lodgings to Jewish clients.
By the 1930s, advertisements for some of Miami Beach’s oceanfront hotels said, “Always a view, never a Jew.”
In Miami Beach, Jews were only permitted to live south of Fifth Street, as developers placed restrictive covenants in their land deeds prohibiting the sale of Miami Beach lots to Jews north of Fifth Street. Resourceful Jews made purchases of modest hotels and apartments on property south of Fifth Street, but the overall feeling was one of antisemitism.
The discriminatory laws began easing up in the 1930s and officially ended in 1949.
Miami’s Jewish Foundation
The first Jew to arrive in Miami was Samuel Singer, who migrated from northern Palm Beach in 1895.
By 1896, Jews owned 12 of the 16 businesses in the pioneer town of Miami, and the Jews held religious services in Miami that year. Yet, when the city was damaged by fire and struck with a yellow fever epidemic, the community fell apart. By 1903, the Jewish population had declined to a single person: Isidor Cohen.
In 1904, Isidor Cohen married Ida Schneidman, and when they had a son in 1907, the first documented bris was celebrated in Miami. In 1913, the death of a Jewish tourist forced the still tiny Jewish community of 35 to create the first congregation and a cemetery.
Advertising, combined with abundant land, new roads, automobiles, and commercial aviation, created a tourist and real estate boom in Miami in the 1920s. The population of 100 Jewish families grew to 3,500 during this period of prosperity. Yet, due to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, the stock market crash, and the failure of five local banks, the city’s population decreased significantly again.
In the mid-1930s, Jewish Miami began a steady recovery. The hotel, banking, and construction industries flourished thanks to Jewish contributions. The post-war economic boom brought additional tourists and settlers to Miami, many of whom were Jews. By 1950, there were 55,000 Jews in Miami, and in the coming decade, almost ten thousand Jews arrived yearly.
In 1952, Abe Aronovitz became Miami’s first (and, to date, the only) Jewish mayor. In 1963, the first two Jews from South Florida were elected to the state legislature, and in 1973, William Lehman (1913-2005) was elected to the United States House of Representatives for the first of 10 terms. In this period, large groups of Jews began moving to North Miami and North Miami Beach.
Initially, Jews were economically based in tourism, building industries, or real estate. Eventually, many began moving into medical, legal, and financial professions, and these trends continue to this day.
Three Jewish men, Miami, 1898. Isidore Cohen (center) is believed to be the first permanent Jewish resident of Miami. State Archives of Florida.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA, from 2007 to 2020. He is a popular speaker and writes for numerous publications on Torah, Jewish History, and Contemporary Jewish Topics. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org
A version of this article was originally published at Aish.
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In Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ echoes of Nazi justifications for aggression
When Adolf Hitler was justifying German aggression, he invoked Lebensraum — the claim that a superior nation had the right to expand into neighboring territories to secure the resources it needed. For Donald Trump, whose “Donroe Doctrine” seems to have much in common with the idea of Lebensraum, the prizes are Venezuelan crude, Greenland’s mineral wealth, and uncontested hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
During the first year of Trump’s second term, the 47th president of the United States attempted his own version of what Germans call Gleichschaltung — the Nazis’ forced alignment of institutions and society with Hitler’s will. Trump moved to bend the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence services, the military chain of command, and the civil service into a single, obedient apparatus.
But unlike Hitler in 1933, Trump has run into real limits at home: courts that won’t bend, Democratic-led states that won’t yield, a resistance that keeps gathering strength, weak polling, and a MAGA movement that’s beginning to splinter. And so, he has shifted his gaze to the outside world — a pivot laid bare in Stephen Miller’s volcanic interview with Jake Tapper on CNN and in Trump’s own Oval Office conversation with New York Times reporters.
Sounding a bit like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, Trump’s deputy chief of staff told Tapper, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Two days after Miller’s bellicose comments, Trump echoed the same worldview in his interview with The Times: international law is whatever the United States — meaning he — decides it is.
“I don’t need international law,” he said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Regarding his push for Greenland to become part of the U.S., Trump stated, “Ownership is very important. Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.’’
There are echoes here of Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that “the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.” In multiple speeches, Hitler made clear that the state’s own interests were supreme and that international law could be brushed aside.
Trump’s foreign policy for the Western Hemisphere comes right out of the authoritarian’s playbook for domination — threats of invasion, extortion, and exploitation of a country’s weaknesses to force that country to bend to the bullying country’s will.
When it comes to Venezuela, Trump, Miller, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are counting on Delcy Rodríguez, interim leader after Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, to cooperate with the Trump administration in reviving Venezuela’s oil industry — with oil-sales money going not just to America, but supposedly also to the Venezuelan people.
Trump said that Venezuela “will be turning over” between 30 and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the U.S. “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he declared in a Jan. 6 social media post.
“That money,” Rubio told reporters, “will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it is disbursed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime, so we have a lot of leverage to move on the stabilization front.”
The American president has not hidden the fact that his motive all along has been to get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. Only recently, and mostly as an afterthought, has Trump talked about eventually allowing new elections in Venezuela.
In Trump’s mind, at least, he is now dictator of Venezuela.
The Trump–Rubio game plan for Venezuela, as developed so far, hinges on U.S. control of Venezuelan oil as the lever for everything else: a Washington-run “stabilization” period in which the United States sells Venezuela’s crude, controls the revenue, and dictates the terms of economic reopening; a caretaker role for Delcy Rodríguez and the remaining bureaucracy to keep order and carry out U.S. directives; and, somewhere down the line, a vague promise of elections once the country has been reshaped to Washington’s liking.
But how realistic is this plan?
History offers plenty of warnings about how often great-power fantasies collide with the realities of occupation.
When Nazi Germany invaded Norway in 1940, one of its aims was to control Scandinavian resources — including Swedish iron ore and Norwegian shipping routes. Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling proclaimed himself head of the government, becoming a puppet of Berlin.
But Quisling never delivered the stability Berlin expected. His government was despised, resistance spread, and the occupation became far more volatile and costly than the Germans had planned. After the war, those who had collaborated with the Nazis paid dearly. Thousands of Norwegians were convicted and 25 — including Vidkun Quisling — were executed.
Venezuela is not Norway. But the assumption that a hand-picked local leader will quietly manage a country whose sovereignty has just been shattered is a dangerous one. Venezuela is thick with armed actors who may see cooperation with Washington as betrayal — heavily armed pro-government paramilitary groups called the colectivos, splintering factions of the military, and a constellation of irregular forces operating along the borders.
For the moment, Trump insists no American boots will be needed on the ground. But that could change quickly, especially if U.S. companies establish a significant presence at Venezuelan oil facilities and an insurgency threatens to topple what many Venezuelans may view as a collaborationist regime in Caracas.
In his interview with The New York Times, Trump said it could take years before Venezuela becomes the stable, petroleum powerhouse he envisions. Which means that U.S. control of Venezuela — however the White House chooses to describe it — will pass to whoever succeeds him as president.
Whatever the outcome of Trump’s Venezuela power grab, the troubles it will unlease may well persist far into the future. And if Trump continues to rattle sabers over Greenland, the consequences could be even direr, raising the specter of Denmark’s NATO allies mobilizing to defend the island against the ambitions of an American president.
The post In Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ echoes of Nazi justifications for aggression appeared first on The Forward.