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Jewish Theological Seminary names campus innovator Rabbi Mike Uram as next chancellor
(JTA) — The Jewish Theological Seminary has named Rabbi Mike Uram as its next chancellor, elevating a Jewish educator best known for his time as executive director of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel to lead Conservative Judaism’s flagship university and rabbinical school.
Uram, 49, will succeed Shuly Rubin Schwartz, who is stepping down at the end of the 2025-26 academic year and will become chancellor emerita.
Ordained at JTS in 2005, Uram currently serves as the first chief Jewish learning officer at the Jewish Federations of North America. He previously spent more than 16 years at the Penn Hillel, where he rose from campus rabbi to executive director and built a national reputation for his ideas on encouraging young Jews to take part in Jewish life. He left Hillel in 2020 to lead Pardes North America, a branch of the egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem whose alumni often go on to enroll in rabbinical schools.
In a statement to the JTS community, Alan Levine, who chairs its board of trustees, described Uram as “the right person to help JTS meet this important moment.”
“He brings to our institution a rabbinic voice, a connection to a new generation of current and emerging Jewish leaders, and deep experience serving the broader Jewish community that we need to engage as part of the vital center,” wrote Levine.
His selection marks a notable departure for JTS, which historically has been led by scholars or academics. Uram, who does not have a PhD, did not grow up in the Conservative movement and has not served in a long-term congregational pulpit, called it a “bold move to hire someone who is outside of the molds.”
But in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week, Uram described his novel background as his strength. He pointed to his experiences in higher education, fundraising at both Hillel and JFNA, and in settings where he gained an understanding of “the dynamics of the larger Jewish ecosystem outside of Jewish denominations.”
He also spoke of his signature initiative at Penn, the “Jewish Renaissance Project,” which aimed to reach students who might not otherwise walk into a Hillel building.
“In the process of building that, we more than tripled Penn Hillel’s budget through new fundraising, and we more than doubled the number of students that we were engaging each year,” said Uram. Uram drew on his experience at Penn in his 2016 book, “Next Generation Judaism: How College Students and Hillel Can Help Reinvent Jewish Organizations.”
He has similar ambitions for JTS, both in adding new donors and extending JTA’s reach beyond its walls.
“The idea is that we can both continue to do the things that have made JTS the leading Jewish academic institution for the past 140 years, and open up the power of JTS’s approach to study and religion and community and values to a much larger audience across North America,” said Uram.
At a farewell event Monday night honoring Schwartz, speakers praised her efforts to improve the “pipeline” for incoming clergy, whose ranks had dipped in recent years. The results have been promising: 2025 has seen 23 entering rabbinical and cantorial students, compared to 16 in 2024.
Uram praised those efforts, while emphasizing that JTS is more than a rabbinical and cantorial school.
“People do think of JTS as just a seminary, but it has been built into something much more than that for a long time,” he said, pointing to its undergraduate programs and graduate schools in Jewish education, thought, rabbinic literature and philosophy. Under Schwartz, JTS launched new academic programs, including degrees in creative writing, spiritual care and executive leadership, and expanded online learning.
He described the institution as “a deep R&D department for advancing Jewish knowledge and accelerating that knowledge out into the world.”
That expansive vision is meant to reinvigorate a centrist movement whose membership has flattened while Orthodoxy and Reform, denominations to its right and left, have been growing. A number of prominent JTS rabbinic alumni have also chosen to establish synagogues and educational institutions that do not fly the Conservative banner.
Partially in response to this contraction, the seminary sold roughly $96 million in Manhattan real estate in 2016 to help fund a major campus redevelopment, a project that ultimately replaced its historic library building with a smaller facility and shifted large portions of its famed Judaica collection to off-site storage. In 2021, JTS quietly deaccessioned and sold rare manuscripts and books from its library.
Uram is confident that despite structural pressures facing JTS and the Conservative movement, the institution can preserve its scholarly stature and moral authority while expanding its audience, rebuilding leadership pipelines and persuading a new generation that a legacy institution can still serve as a central address for Jewish learning and life.
For years, he said, the movement has been “stuck in trying to figure out how much it wants to hold onto and how it wants to change.” Now, he argued, the question the movement should be asking is “not about how do we restore the good old days, but what is the Jewish future that we want to build?”
He sees Conservative Judaism’s centrism as a counterweight, even an antidote, to a broader social and political trend toward polarization.
“It’s not surprising that it has lost market share, because we’ve been living in a time where the middle has dropped out,” said Uram, who grew up attending a Reform synagogue in suburban Cleveland.
“We’re living in this moment of incredible political polarization. People are moving more into these echo chambers,” he added. What is needed, he said, is what he calls “the muscular middle” — a space that “has to reject simplicity in favor of complexity.”
He also believes JTS can respond to a Jewish community deeply affected by the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and its aftermath, which, he said, “forced many Jewish folks to reexamine their assumptions about their own Jewish identities.”
In that environment, he said, “there’s a huge hunger to deepen a relationship with Judaism” and “to vanquish imposter syndrome and Jewish insecurity.”
He argued that JTS is uniquely positioned to respond by offering “deep and authentic” Jewish learning that remains broadly accessible.
Although his tenure at Penn Hillel predated the post-Oct. 7 turmoil on college campuses, he earned praise — and a “Forward 50” designation from the Jewish newspaper — for encouraging quiet, student-led responses to the growing campus movement to boycott Israel. His approach stood in contrast to the more aggressive legal challenges and “name and shame” tactics deployed by outside campus groups
As chancellor, Uram said, he will make clear that engagement with Israel will remain central to JTS’s mission and its training of clergy. Asked if he would draw any red lines for current or prospective students, Uram said that a Jewish education — for the rabbinate, academia or the Jewish classroom — would be incomplete without understanding what has become the world’s largest Jewish community and the first expression of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel in millennia.
“Any student who’s coming to JTS has the opportunity and really the obligation to engage deeply in the broadest set of expressions of all things Jewish,” he said. “I can’t imagine a scenario where a JTS education would not include serious engagement with all things related to Israel.”
Asked what message his hiring sends to the broader Jewish world, Uram referred to his track record.
“I think the statement that JTS is making is that it is in an incredibly strong position, and that it’s the right time to hire someone whose background is as an innovator who was a creative and successful fundraiser,” he said, “and someone who has real experience leading a Jewish nonprofit in building a productive culture and navigating political difficulties.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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