Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education

Tamara Frankel

Tamara Frankel is a doctoral candidate in Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her research focuses on tefillah education, particularly the role that day school educators play in shaping curriculum and bringing tefillah and academic learning into dialogue with one another. In 2021, she completed her tenure as Jewish Studies faculty and as the Tefillah Coordinator at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in suburban Chicago. Tamara is a day school graduate herself (TanenbaumCHAT), hailing from Toronto, Canada. She holds a B.A. and B.Ed. from York University and completed her Masters degree in Jerusalem at the Pardes Educators Program in 2011 in conjunction with the Hebrew College of Boston. Tamara considers herself not only a teacher, but a lifelong learner. She recently moved from Chicago to Jerusalem with her avid Cubs fans, Zach, Nadav, and Dorit. 

Andrew Ergas

Dissertation: Making a Professional Home in an Old-New Language: Attributes and Anxieties of Nonnative Hebrew Instructors in Jewish Day Schools (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2023)

Andrew Ergas is a doctoral candidate in Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, with a research focus on Hebrew, identity, and pedagogy. His dissertation examines the attributes and anxieties of non-native Hebrew language instructors in Jewish day schools. He received his BA from UC Santa Cruz, an MPA in nonprofit management from Georgia State University, and rabbinic ordination and a MA in Hebrew literature from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Professionally, Andrew has been a camp director, Israel educator, day school head, and JCC director, and currently serves as the CEO of Hebrew at the Center.

Julie Golding

Dissertation: Vicarious Trauma Exhibited by Visitors to a Central Holocaust Museum (Yeshiva University, 2023)

Julie Golding is a Holocaust educator and the curator at the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education (HMCTE) in Suffern, NY. In 2020 she founded Yesodeinu, an experiential Holocaust education program that teaches resilience at local cemeteries and historical sites. Julie is currently pursuing her PhD at the Azrieli Graduate School for Jewish Education and Administration as the Rabbi Mordecai E. Zeitz Doctoral Fellow and a Wexner Graduate Fellow & Davidson Scholar. Her dissertation “Vicarious Trauma Exhibited by Visitors to a Central Holocaust Museum” investigates secondary traumatic stress, student coping styles, and teaching about difficult histories in museum spaces.

rafa kern

rafa kern (he/him, pronounced hafa, with a soft h like in human) is a Brazilian Jew who aspires to live a good, beautiful life, and to help others do the same. His research is an attempt to figure out how people learn to do that, and especially how they do that through their relationships with various kinds of media. At present, he is working on a doctoral dissertation at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education about adults learning Torah. During his MA (Columbia University Teachers College) he tried to understand how games can (in theory) be used for personal character development. His BA thesis (Yale University) was a production of Martin Buber’s play about the prophet Elijah, in an attempt to enact Buber’s hermeneutics and shift our collective dialogue towards the I-Thou (which is to say, to help us relate to the world around us as replete with subjects). He grew up in São Paulo and now lives in South Minneapolis with his partner, Sarah. 

Sarah Ossey

Sarah Ossey is an advanced doctoral candidate in Education and Jewish Studies at New York University, where she has been a Steinhardt Fellow and a Wexner Graduate Fellow/Davidson Scholar. Her research, for which she was recognized as an Emerging Scholar by the Network for Research in Jewish Education, focuses on social justice education in Jewish day school. She holds an MA from the William Davidson School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a BA from Brandeis University. She and her family currently reside in Atlanta.

 

Nadia Beider

Dissertation: Religious Change: Causes and Effects (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2022)

Nadia Beider is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the construction of, alterations to, and the intergenerational transmission of identities. Her dissertation "Religious Switching: Causes and Effects" explores the nature of religious identity transitions, including conversion, denominational switching, and disaffiliation in the USA and Europe via quantitative analyses of patterns of religiosity and conversion narratives. 

Anna Hartman

Dissertation: A Grounded Theory of Young Children’s Theory Development in Jewish Early Childhood Education (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2022)

Anna Hartman is Vice President, JUF Education, at the Jewish United Fund. Anna holds a master's in Jewish educational leadership from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and is a doctoral candidate in Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She has also participated in three study tours of the renowned municipal early childhood centers in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Anna is a recipient of the Pomegranate Prize, JUF's Samuel A. Goldsmith Young Professional Award, and the Covenant Award.

Saul Kaiserman

Dissertation: Being. Called. Rabbi. Educator (in progress)

Saul Kaiserman, RJE (he/him/הוא) is Scholar in Residence and Founding Director of Lifelong Learning for Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, where he has served as Director of Lifelong Learning since 2007. In 2013, Saul was inducted by Hazon into its “If Not Now Society” as a “Visionary Leader in Jewish Life and Learning” and in 2019 was recognized as a “Distinguished Jewish Educator” by the Association of Reform Jewish Educators (ARJE). Saul is a doctoral candidate in Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he received his MA in 1999. Saul’s dissertation investigates how rabbi-educators, with both rabbinic ordination and an advanced degree in education, understand their role as teachers and their work as teaching.

Elana Riback Rand

Dissertation: A Minority Within a Minority: Sephardic Adolescents in Ashkenazic Schools (Yeshiva University, 2023)

Elana Riback Rand is a PhD candidate at the Azrieli Graduate School for Jewish Education and Administration. She studies school connectedness, teacher motivation, and dynamics among cultural subgroups within the Orthodox Jewish community. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Columbia University.

 

 

Esther Friedman

Dissertation: The Impact of the Student and Milieu on Teacher Ideology: Orthodox Bible Teachers in Non-Orthodox schools in North America (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2023)

Esther Friedman is a PhD candidate at the Melton School of Jewish Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has taught Tanach, chaired the Tanach department, and written Tanach curriculum at Tanenbaum CHAT in Toronto, where she lives with her husband and children. Her dissertation is about teacher personal belief change and is titled “ומתלמידי יותר מכולן [And From my Students Most of All], The Impact of the Student and Milieu on Teacher Ideology: Orthodox Tanach Teachers in non-Orthodox schools in North America.”

Talia Hurwich

Dissertation: Seen but Not Heard? Graphic Novel Adaptations of Texts with Jewish Feminist Religious Significance (New York University, 2021)

Talia Hurwich is pursuing her PhD in Education and Jewish Studies at NYU. Her dissertation “Seen But Not Heard? Graphic Novel Adaptations of Texts with Jewish Feminist Religious Significance” examines the encounter between adolescent reader and graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish texts, particularly where issues relating to gender arise, focusing on how graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish texts shape a Modern Orthodox Jewish student’s reading of women’s roles in these texts. She has published work on multimodal literacy (particularly with graphic novels) in the ELA as well as STEM classrooms.

Joshua Ladon

Dissertation: The Mediated Torah: Source Sheets and Jewish Knowledge Construction in the Digital Age (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2022)

Joshua Ladon is the West Coast Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and subsequently lived in Jerusalem for seven years, completing an MA in Jewish Thought at Tel Aviv University. He received rabbinic ordination from the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is a doctoral student in Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His dissertation investigates practitioner thinking, asking how teachers design source sheets and how source sheets, as a curricular tool, mediate teacher thinking and shape an encounter with the Jewish tradition.

Allison Lester

As an educator, designer, and researcher, Allison Lester is interested in cultivating playful and vibrant learning spaces where one’s rich historical and cultural narrative can be fostered and sustained through socially just transformative paradigms. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati in the Educational Studies: Educational and Community-based Action Research program. Her dissertation is an action research study with preservice teachers on creating “virtual holding environments” for adolescent learners online during the Covid-19 pandemic.