A familiar Wexner leadership lesson teaches us the value of “standing on the balcony." As we approach MLK weekend, I am reminded of how, just a few short months after graduating from the Wexner Heritage Program, I found myself standing on a balcony with a very different view. This time, it was a real balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, on the very spot where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life came

Three and a half years ago, while finishing my Wexner Heritage program in Israel, I visited Yad Vashem on a free afternoon before Shabbat. I wanted some reflective time in a place that has long been important to me as the son of a Holocaust survivor. After touring the museum, I settled at a computer to search the database of victims of the Shoah for my relatives that had lived

Many people ask us, "What is the Jewish Funders Network (JFN)?" When people express confusion about something you are so involved in, it comes as a surprise, and a prompt. Since most of us in the Wexner network are very connected to philanthropic giving, the three of us thought we would share what JFN does and why it is strategic. More than twenty years ago, a handful of funders convened to

Very quietly, and with little international attention, one of the most delicate and interesting engineering projects in the Middle East took a big step forward this month: the mutual Jordanian/Israeli Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Project was published to investors for the development and execution of the project’s first phase. The project includes a large desalination plant which will be built in Jordanian Aqaba, near Eilat, and will eventually result in

We've completed building our new facility, following a successful multi-million dollar capital campaign for the Ida Crown Jewish Academy, the premier coeducational modern Orthodox high school in the Midwest. As if that weren't challenging enough, we now turn our attention to the challenge of bringing our educational experience in line with the challenges of the modern world. To adequately inspire our future students, it's no longer sufficient to educate children in

This past summer, the Boston area vegetarian restaurant chain Clover became certified kosher by Rabbi Barry Dolinger, an Orthodox rabbi in Providence, Rhode Island.  A controversy erupted, both because Rabbi Dolinger's standards differ from many mainstream kashrut-certifying organizations and because a Clover employee mistakenly tweeted that the restaurant was under the supervision of the Rabbinical Council of New England.  Often such incidents have a tendency to turn political and nasty.