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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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Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza
The Whitney Museum of American Art has over 27,000 pieces in its collection. On July 3, artist Jonathan Allen tried to add a couple more to call attention to what he considers “Israeli atrocities.”
Late that night, Allen vandalized two electronic displays outside the Whitney, a contemporary art museum in Manhattan, plastering them with posters accusing Israel of genocide and targeting Palestinian children.
Staff soon removed the posters after being notified of the vandalism, the museum said in an emailed statement.“I think it’s important artists take risks and use private property and unconventional spaces towards political and social ends,” Allen told the Forward.
Whitney Director of Communications Ashley Reese wrote, “The Museum maintains a zero-tolerance policy for vandalism, harassment, discrimination, or bias of any kind.”
This is not the first time a pro-Palestinian protest has targeted the Whitney. Last year, the museum planned to hold a performance mourning Palestinians killed during the Israel-Hamas war. When footage surfaced of a performer telling audience members to leave a previous performance if they “believe in Israeli in any incarnation,” the Whitney canceled the event.
Shortly afterward, the group Writers Against the War on Gaza held a protest at the Whitney, passing out brochures demanding “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid.”
Allen’s installation is part of his Interruptions series, where he puts translucent poster-size vinyl stickers with political messages atop digital advertising screens to create a flickering effect.
Since 2019, Allen has installed over 400 interruptions, which began with traditional paper posters. When New York City and the MTA added more digital ad displays, he transformed the posters into their current iteration, most recently featuring quotes from public figures that criticize either Trump or Israel. Allen installs most of his interruptions on city-owned property, such as sidewalk ads or subway monitors — even the children’s entrance of the Brooklyn Public Library.
He acknowledges his project “is temporary vandalism, technically,” but explains that the pieces are very easily removable and don’t damage the displays underneath.
For his most recent interruption, Allen used monitors owned by the Whitney without authorization from the museum. Allen chose the Whitney because he believes it “is the contemporary corporate sphere of the art industry.”
“I feel like bringing attention to this sort of issue in that context was important,” he said.
A joint Instagram post by Allen and Eye on Palestine said the installation highlights the findings of a recent UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report.
The Israeli government has heavily criticized the report, calling it “defamatory” and a “libellous sham,” and from its inception has accused the commission of bias. Israel did not provide any information to the commission for the investigation.
“The Israeli security forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children,” one poster says. Another poster stated: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Critics of the installation echo the Israeli government’s criticisms. Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and content creator, called the display “blood libel.” The StopAntisemitism campaign also criticized the display on X. “they don’t care about Palestinian children,” they wrote. “The goal is to vilify Jews.”
Allen believes this is a mischaracterization. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and I support Israel, insofar as its right to exist,” he said. “I don’t think the discussion about what’s happening in Gaza hinges at all on that.”
Though Allen’s installations are typically removed “within hours,” he says each one “has a second life, because it lives on social media, which is where it tends to get the most attention.”
The post Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian
A new White House report accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism,” and demanding the museum revise its exhibitions to elide the darker elements of the nation’s past, mirrors a troubling trend in Europe, where right-wing nationalist governments have spent the past decade forcing museums to minimize their countries’ roles in the Holocaust.
The 162-page report, issued this past weekend, faults the Smithsonian museum for dwelling, in the administration’s eyes, too heavily on slavery, and for teaching about race and gender in ways that President Donald Trump’s administration considers to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It follows a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal institutions to purge “improper ideology” from their exhibits.
Reasonable people can disagree about specific details in museum exhibitions. But there is a difference between engaging in productive disagreements about historical emphases and demanding a national museum be solely devoted to make citizens feel good about their country. And the way that the latter approach has been used to downplay crimes against Jews in Europe should give American Jews, in particular, pause about it being deployed in their own country.
Propaganda in Poland
In 2017, Poland opened a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which delivered a multi-layered account of the war. The exhibit highlighted Polish suffering under Nazi occupation as well as the Holocaust and the pogroms Poles carried out against their own Jewish neighbors, including the infamous 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which several hundred Jews were burned alive in a barn by their fellow townspeople.
The right-wing Law and Justice party, known as PiS, called the exhibit “not Polish enough,” forced a merger that replaced the museum’s director, and altered the exhibition to foreground Polish heroism while softening material on Polish complicity in the extermination of three million Polish Jews. Five hundred eminent historians labeled those changes an attempt to turn the museum into a “propaganda institution.”
The following year, the Polish parliament went further, criminalizing any claim that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi crimes, with penalties of up to three years in prison. Yad Vashem warned that the law “jeopardizes the free and open discussion of the part of the Polish people in the persecution of the Jews at the time.” Under international pressure, Poland later dropped the criminal penalty, but the campaign to legislate a flattering national story had made its point.
Hungarian ahistoricism
The nation of Hungary offers an even starker case.
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government spent years developing the House of Fates, a Holocaust museum on the site of the Budapest rail station from which 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944. Yad Vashem and Hungary’s largest Jewish federation, Mazsihisz, boycotted the project, warning that its planned narrative would leave visitors believing “the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” In fact, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up and deported their Jewish neighbors with minimal direct German involvement.
Orbán separately made efforts to rehabilitate Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime ruler, as an “exceptional statesman,” and backed a Budapest statue honoring Holocaust victims that was widely seen as covering up Hungary’s role in the deportations by depicting the country as an angel attacked by a Nazi eagle. The implication: all Hungarians were equal victims of the Nazi occupation, an idea that conveniently overlooks the fact that the Nazis had many Hungarian collaborators.
The museum sat empty for years amid the dispute. Jewish leaders in Hungary have only recently reported progress toward a version that names Hungarian, and not just German, responsibility for atrocities against Jews.
The dangers of whitewashing
The recent histories of Poland and Hungary demonstrate that when a government decides that its national story shouldn’t include honest examinations of what its people did to vulnerable minorities, the nation’s integrity as a whole is imperiled.
This is the same demand the Trump administration has issued to the Smithsonian. The White House report does not claim that the museum has facts wrong; rather, it objects that the museum treats history as a tool for “social justice.” The administration demands, instead, “patriotic history” — exactly the same ultimatum issued by governments in Warsaw and Budapest.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III says his institution’s goal is scholarship, not partisanship. The administration’s answer is that scholarship itself is the problem, if the story it tells is not celebratory enough.
The kind of “patriotic history” the administration wants entails, instead, a thinner historical accounting, built to avoid making visitors uncomfortable with the actions of their ancestors. A country pressured to foreground its heroism while pushing its failures to the margins is one that shows its own people that, effectively, minorities do not belong.
When Poland won’t discuss Jedwabne, or Hungary won’t acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, they send the message that they don’t see Jewish citizens as fully human — in either the past or the present. A U.S. that treats discussing the facts of slavery — or the immigration quotas that helped trap Jews in Europe — as a betrayal of national values is one that suggests the people it wronged, and their descendants, don’t matter.
A serious national museum has to depict a nation’s failures and achievements in the same frame. What the White House is proposing for the Smithsonian is very different, and very dangerous. Jews have watched this play out before and seen where it leads. A nation’s museums are essential to its capacity to reckon with the worst of its history. This is a capacity worth defending in Gdańsk, in Budapest, and now in Washington.
The post European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose outspoken criticism of Israel has made him a frequent target of Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,022 Jewish adults nationwide, conducted from June 11 through June 17, found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view of the longtime Israeli leader
The poll suggests that Mamdani’s positions on Israel have not prevented him from maintaining a net-positive image among American Jews overall.
Mamdani won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election. Since taking office, he has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country. He has also pledged to order the arrest of Netanyahu if he visits the city on his watch, complying with an ICC arrest warrant. That will be tested in September when Netanyahu arrives to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.
Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade, where participation is a longstanding tradition for New York City leaders, and he also called for divestment from Israel’s economy. In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani actively campaigned for candidates who made inflammatory statements on Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for an 18-month hiatus from 2021 to 2022, has seen his standing with Americans erode in recent years despite longstanding ties to the United States. He spent part of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, attended college in Boston and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. Netanyahu has often spoken directly to American audiences, giving frequent interviews to U.S. television networks more often than he has spoken to Israeli media.
The AP survey, which had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, also found that American Jews are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war and its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While a majority of American Jews — 73% — said Israel’s initial military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was justified, just 42% said they supported the continued military operations in Gaza through last year’s ceasefire. The survey also found that, similar to the broader American public, 30% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows appeared first on The Forward.
