The Latest From The Foundation

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

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

There is nothing that bothers me more than people who complain but never take action to change things.  This generally stems from a lack of leadership.  In the face of criticism that the Los Angeles Jewish community was not doing enough to train effective new communal leaders, I decided to create a new program.  After two years of planning, the development of a creative funding strategy and the hiring of

The Community Foundation for Jewish Education of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago (CFJE) is tasked with, among other things, improving support for some 50 congregational education programs in the Chicagoland area. I have long been concerned that congregational education is not engaging kids with meaningful curricula and compelling teachers. I know there is great work being done across the Wexner network on improving what we all formerly referred

I wrote “The Tide is Rising” after being asked to lead a song at Coming Together In Faith On Climate, an interfaith service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC during Pope Francis’s visit. Raised in the folk scene, I have experienced the power of music to move groups of people and inspire shared vision and identity. “The Tide Is Rising” has gone viral in the climate movement, and I’m

If you want to influence someone’s behavior, it helps to ask who they know.  Thanks to the groundbreaking research of Nick Christakis and others, there is now a mounting body of evidence showing that a range of our behaviors and attitudes are influenced by our social networks.  Your friends help shape whether or not you smoke, if you can lose weight, how happy you say you are, where you live

Opening night of the Miami Jewish Film Festival is tonight!  We will be screening 80 films over two weeks and are almost entirely sold out. I am especially proud that we will be screening the North American premiere of Natalie Portman’s new film, A Tale of Love and Darkness. This is her directorial debut and she stars in the movie, too. Most people don’t know that she was born in Israel

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

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

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