Low-Residency Two-Year Program 

Inspired by the rich tradition of Jewish storytelling, this MFA welcomes writers who have a story to tell and want the opportunity to work with cutting-edge contemporary writers and artists in an environment that offers the freedom to create fiction, poetry, performance, non-fiction, songs, or work that lives in between. 

A Seat and a Story,
A Vision by Etgar Keret, MFA Director 

When I was about eight years old, my mom took me to the pediatrician. A boy and his mother were sitting in the only two chairs in Dr. Bokokovski’s waiting room. The mother was roughly forty, like mine, and the boy looked around my age. When we walked in, the mother elbowed her son and whispered loudly, “Get up. Go on, get up! She’s a Holocaust survivor.” The boy quickly stood up and offered my mother his seat. It was an awkward moment, but Mom instantly diffused the tension with her radiant smile. “What a polite boy,” she said, “there aren’t many children like you anymore. But let me ask you: why do you want to give me your seat?” “Because you’re a Holocaust survivor,” the boy replied proudly, like a student giving the correct answer. “And what do you think that means, that I’m a Holocaust survivor?” my mother asked curiously. The boy said, “It means that you suffered a lot, that you were tortured, that they killed the people you loved best, and the least I can do to make up for it is give you my seat.”  

Mom smiled and shook her head from side to side admiringly. Then she said, “You are such a clever and articulate boy. But in my opinion, the fact that I’m a Holocaust survivor means something completely different. I think that what it means…” – she leaned over to the boy as if she were about to share a secret – “…is that if your mother and you and I stood here in this waiting room for hours and hours and hours, with no food and no water, the two of you would collapse long before I did. And so I’d recommend that you keep your seat, honey. You never know when you might need it.” 

I think that was the first time in my life that I encountered the power of storytelling. Because when my mother walked into that waiting room, and the well-bred boy stood up, he wasn’t just offering her a chair to sit on. He was offering her a story. My mother politely refused both things, and made it clear that she had no need for the diminishing tale of victimhood that the boy had obviously heard at school. She could tell her story herself. She could own it.   

It’s no wonder that the Jewish people has always had an exceptional gift for telling stories. In the Diaspora, it faced two options: either embrace the local narrative and give up its own identity, or try to create a different story for itself, one that did not abandon its roots and yet was engaged with the time and place in which it lived. For generation after generation, from Hasidic tales to Seinfeldian anecdotes, Jews have made remarkable use of stories to define their individual and communal identities, and to voice the insider/outsider perspective that typified their social status. In such circumstances, storytelling was almost a survival mechanism. I don’t know if the capacity to tell a story was what saved my mother’s life, but I can say beyond a doubt that it did save her soul.  

In our precarious reality, which offers many frightening, wearying, and demoralizing stories, it seems that the existential need to tell stories is no longer unique to Jews and other immigrant communities trying to preserve their identities in exile. Instead, it has become a fundamental life skill that every person must adopt.  

In our writing program at JTS, we will help our students find their unique ways to tell their stories. Alongside the option of submitting a fiction or non-fiction manuscript as their capstone project, students will be able to choose alternative storytelling formats. They will be supported by a faculty working in a range of genres and a flexible approach that encourages each student to navigate their own storytelling path. Program graduates will be empowered to share their voices in ways that spread beyond traditional audiences, reaching a diverse readership that is hungry for a good story. 

Etgar Keret, MFA Director

Etgar Keret is one of the foremost writers of contemporary Israeli literature. His books have been published in some fifty languages and won numerous awards. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed virtuoso of the short story, Etgar explores a variety of storytelling techniques, including plays, screenplays, songs, animated and live-action films, comic books and choreography. Etgar is an Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is excited to guide the JTS MFA program’s vision and mentor emerging storytellers. 

Jonathan Safran Foer, Founding Creative Advisor

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of three novels (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Here I Am), as well as two works of non-fiction (Eating Animals and We Are the Weather) and several collaborative books with visual artists. His work has won numerous awards and been translated into more than 40 languages. He teaches creative writing at NYU.

On Sunday, May 4 at 2:30 p.m. ET, Jonathan will interview Etgar in a special online launch event. Click here to register.

Our Creative Advisors 

List in formation

Ira Glass 

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the public radio program This American Life. The show is heard each week by three million people as a podcast and radio show. It has won the highest honors for journalistic and broadcasting excellence, including the Pulitzer Prize. 

Nicole Krauss

Hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation,” and by the Financial Times as “one of the great novelists working today,” Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers, Man Walks Into a Room; Forest Dark; Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize; the Wingate Literary Prize-winning short story collection To Be a Man; and The History of Love. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.

Regina Spektor

The Russian-Jewish-American singer, songwriter, pianist, and Grammy nominee gained commercial success with her Gold-certified LP Begin to Hope, featuring the Billboard Hot 100 single “Fidelity.” Her albums Far (2009) and What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (2012) both debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. She has performed at The White House, on Broadway, Saturday Night Live, and contributed to many projects spanning music, film, and television.

Liev Shreiber 

Liev Schreiber is an acclaimed actor, director, and writer known for his powerful performances in film, TV, and theater. Dubbed “the finest American theater actor of his generation” by The New York Times, he has starred in Spotlight, Ray Donovan, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Manchurian Candidate, and Everything Is Illuminated. A dedicated humanitarian, he co-founded BlueCheck Ukraine and serves as a United24 ambassador. His work reflects a deep commitment to storytelling, advocacy, and cultural heritage.

Shalom Auslander 

Shalom Auslander is an internationally-acclaimed writer of fiction, non-fiction, stage, TV and film. His memoir Foreskin’s Lament was an international bestseller, his novel Hope: A Tragedy was a finalist for the James Thurber Award and his recent Feh was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the creator and writer of Showtime’s Happyish, and a long-time contributor to NPR’s This American Life. He has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and GQ, among many others.

 Jodi Kantor 

Jodi Kantor is a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter and author whose work reveals hidden truths about power. In 2017, Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of sexual abuse allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, setting off a global reckoning. Jodi’s current focus is one of our most critical, secretive institutions: the Supreme Court.

Alex Edelman 

One of the most critically hailed comedians of his generation, Alex Edelman is best known for solo shows that blur the line between his stand-up comedy roots and narrative-driven storytelling. His last offering, Just for Us, played more than 500 performances all over the world, including on Broadway, before premiering as an HBO original comedy special in April of 2024 earning him a place on the Time 100 list, a Tony Award, and an Emmy award.

Jessica Cohen

Jessica Cohen is an independent translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Hebrew prose by authors such as Amos Oz and Etgar Keret, Ronit Matalon, and Maya Arad, as well as other creative workers including filmmakers Ari Folman and Nadav Lapid. In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with David Grossman, for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Deborah Treisman 

Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor at The New Yorker since 2003. She is the host of the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and the editor of the anthologies 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025.

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, co-translator, and essayist Jane Hirshfield’s most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University’s Translation Center Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, et al. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Joseph Cedar

Two time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker (for his films Footnote—2012 and Beaufort— 2008), Joseph Cedar is a recipient of Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival and Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film festival. Cedar wrote and directed Time of Favor (2001), Campfire (2004) Norman (2017), Our Boys (2019), the 10 episode limited series for HBO. He also recently directed the show Constellation for Apple TV+. 

Judith Shulevitz

Judith Shulevitz is a critic and contributing writer to The Atlantic and the author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (2010). She was the founding culture editor of Slate and a founding editor of Lingua Franca and has been a columnist at The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The New Republic, and New York Magazine. She is currently writing a book for the Yale Jewish Lives series. You can find some of her recent essays here.

Program Highlights 

In the MFA, students experiment with different methods of storytelling while working towards the development, production, and completion of a substantial storytelling piece. This four-semester, two-year program combines in-person residencies at JTS with personalized study and mentorship with world-renowned storytellers.  

The MFA Residency 

Each semester begins with a ten-day in-person residency on campus at JTS, held in the early fall and early winter. Through craft classes and workshops with celebrated storytellers, study of Jewish narrative forms with JTS faculty, and meetings with editors and agents, each cohort will form community, build their literary network, gain concrete skills, and draw inspiration for their storytelling. Following their final semester, students will participate in a fifth graduate residency, where they will have the opportunity to share their completed piece. 

The MFA Semester Project  

After the residencies, students will engage in independent study from wherever they live, working closely with a faculty mentor on a personalized curriculum that includes creative work and deep exploration of readings and other artistic materials. On a monthly basis, students will share drafts of their work in progress as well as reflections on their process and sources of inspiration, which will serve as the foundation for a rich and evolving dialogue with their faculty mentor.  

Jewish Learning Opportunities 

During the residency, students will immerse themselves in Jewish storytelling traditions. Throughout the program, students will have the opportunity to learn from JTS Jewish Studies faculty and explore the treasures of The JTS Library, which has the largest collection of Jewish manuscripts in the world. To supplement their MFA coursework, students can optionally enroll in Jewish Studies courses and seek feedback and guidance on their work from JTS’s diverse and distinguished scholars. 

The Festival of Jewish Storytelling 

In conjunction with each in-person residency, JTS will host a Festival of Jewish Storytelling, open to the public. Over a series of evenings, a lineup of world-renowned authors, including the MFA faculty, will take the stage at JTS to teach and inspire. The festival will feature masterclasses, networking events, and storyteller roundtables.  

Application and Fees 

For our first cohort beginning Fall 2025, the priority deadline is May 15. After this deadline, we will accept applications on a rolling basis. 

Tuition and fees: $15,500 per semester.

FINANCIAL AID

• To be considered for a tuition fellowship, please submit the FAFSA application.
• If you plan on applying for federal loans to supplement your fellowship award, visit our financial aid page to find the loan application.

Program FAQ 

This program is generously funded through the support of Abby Joseph Cohen.