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Dispatches from the network and updates from the Foundation.
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
Mar 2016
It is not surprising that there are at least three words in Hebrew for “transition.” Most of us are in transition more often, more regularly and more routinely than we realize. It’s a constant factor in our lives, in the lives of those close to us and in the life of community. The first word for transition is ma’avar – to cross over, to pass through. The very name Ivri (a
This past Shabbat, ten leaders from across the Boston Jewish community opened their homes to the Wexner Senior Leaders ’16 for Shabbat dinner. Everyone had a wonderful time meeting, eating and conversing late into the night. At a point in the program when the participants are very much missing home, the Bostonians made them feel that they have a home away from home. In the words of two of the
The American Jewish community is in a real estate crisis. We are a wandering people. Rarely by choice and more often by circumstance or force, Jews moved from one place to another; sometimes across seas and other times across town, but we were always in perpetual motion. My undergraduate thesis followed the Jewish community of Detroit during the unrest of the ’60s, from mile road to mile road, as it
Feb 2016
I created a collage for The Wexner Foundation — for me, the culmination of our fabulous conference in April celebrating the 30th anniversary. I was exhilarated by the hope generated by the hundreds of bright and talented alumni who are each working so hard to build a better Jewish future and, additionally, by hearing Shimon Peres speak optimistically about the peace process in Israel. The way that I process
Feb 2016
Last week, the Portland Heritage Class, which graduated in 1997, got together as a group for the first time in about 15 years. We have all seen each other informally and at various communal events, even board meetings over the years, but this was the first time we gathered intentionally as Wexner alumni to think about the future of the Portland Jewish community. We also reached out to Graduate Fellowship
Feb 2016
Foundation Chairman Leslie Wexner was at Harvard’s Kennedy School yesterday. He taught a master class in leadership to our 40 Wexner Senior Leaders, who are participating in an Executive in-residence program for the month and our year-long Wexner Israel Fellows. Les emphasized that leaders must take responsibility for ongoing leadership development, that effective leaders self-coach. “They know that leadership is not about them,” he stressed, “It’s about me. Its about
Feb 2016
Back in 2012, the Israeli Consulate in Boston reached out to campuses, declaring March the “Month of the Israeli Woman” and providing a list of Israelis in the area who could speak to student audiences. WGF alum Michelle Fisher (Class 10), Executive Director of the MIT Hillel, saw the list, but none of the women seemed appropriate for MIT. Wanting still to support the endeavor, she remembered there were Wexner