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Dispatches from the network and updates from the Foundation.
The Wexner Foundation has always focused on developing talented leaders. In the last few years we have expanded our reach, launching Wexner Senior Leaders, for Israel’s most influential senior leaders in the public sector, and Wexner Summits: the Network in Action, allowing our alumni from all programs to work together to tackle major problems in the Jewish world. We have also piloted an important program to support emerging young professionals working
Some of the Montreal Wexner Heritage alumni recently brought Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to town for several teaching engagements that were shared with the greater Jewish community. Additionally, we were fortunate enough to get to study in an intimate group with him over breakfast. Rabbi Sacks shared with us a very empowering message that he had learned as a child from his father. He would ask many questions about Judaism, and
Mar 2016
A year ago, we embarked on a new project in Toronto to model the power of interdenominational conversations and to facilitate a wide spectrum of Jews talking to each other about big ideas. Could four rabbis — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist — sit together and discuss substantive issues of modern Jewish life in a public forum? The result was “Young Rabbis Speak,” a four-part series focusing on Jewish Text
Mar 2016
Link to photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/48256970@N00/sets/72157663753137944
Mar 2016
It sounds simple enough, but at a deeper level it can actually be emotionally complex. Or, maybe I simply overthink these matters. But, the reality is, I have a say in what the next generation will call me….forever. I take that very seriously. I also have an opportunity to rebrand my vision of what a Bubbe is – an older, slightly overweight, kitchen bound, loving grandmother. I am none of
Mar 2016
I spent the afternoon in Hebron today with #CCAR16. It was a powerful, holy, agonizing day. On the bus ride up, we were stopped at Gush Etzion where a stabbing had just taken place. To see the soldiers, the murdered army reservist, the workers cleaning up the blood on the side walk, was a horror. In Hebron, we met Yishai Fleisher, a settler who offered a potent perspective on the
Mar 2016
Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Week. Growing up in Israel in the 1950s as a child of Yemenite émigrés, I learned the standard Zionist Israeli narrative. It was of the great sacrifices made by Ashkenazi European Jews — settling and cultivating the land, building kibbutzim and the city of Tel Aviv out of the sand. All of this, decades before the State of Israel won independence
Mar 2016
Purim is a festival of inversion, a time when the lowly are honored, the esteemed are mocked, the serious is parodied, and the forbidden is — for a moment — permissible. By turning things upside down for a day, Purim reaffirms what right-side-up should look like. It is only in this context of inversion that there is a religious mandate to drink until one is so drunk that one does
Reprinted with permission from HaYidion. Can the students in your school name Israel’s capital? Its most populous city? A way it has brought technological advancement to the world? The religions that view Jerusalem as holy? When students can correctly answer these factual questions, it is often assumed that they have achieved Israel literacy. But there’s a big difference between knowing facts about Israel and knowing how to participate in its