From the Associate Dean

I welcome you to the spring 2025 issue of Gleanings, a publication of The William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. The issue, focusing on “Training for Leadership” spotlights the Executive Doctoral Program, which was launched in 2009. Since then, 17 students have graduated with an EdD, a momentous accomplishment in the lives of scholars and practitioners. Studying towards the EdD, taking classes, conducting research, and writing a dissertation is a major challenge and an inspiring and worthwhile undertaking. It changes the learners and consequently allow the newly minted EdDs to assume new responsibilities and make a meaningful impact on their work as well as the field of Jewish education.

This semester, Davidson faculty and administration have envisioned a new iteration of the Executive Doctoral Program. As the world around us continues to change, we have adjusted the program’s length, structure, and delivery style to better fit into the world of practitioners. We know that learning towards the EdD while holding a professional position has its own unique demands. Please take this opportunity to learn about our recent innovations.

For this issue, we approached four experienced alumni of the program whose thoughtful and innovative dissertations informed and changed their practice and their leadership contexts. Laura Novak speaks about her passion for Israel education and her new position as the director of the MA in educational leadership at HUC, and Benjamin Mann describes his interest in special education and inclusion and his professional road culminating in a position as chief planning officer at the Jewish Federation of Metrowest New Jersey. Lauren Applebaum describes her research on teaching and learning and her new position at the School of Education at HUC, and lastly, David Kessel, who explored executive leadership and is currently working at JCC Association of North America, reflects on the importance of on-the-job learning.

As I write these words, we are still very much during a war, and many challenges face us in Israel and at home. I hope that reading about these young leaders will inspire you and transmit a sense of optimism as we share the feeling of accomplishment when we see our students learn, grow, graduate, and make an impact on the world of Jewish education. Especially in this difficult time, the trauma of war and personal losses makes it even more challenging for educators to find hope and compassion. We trust that you will find this issue interesting and helpful in your own professional life.

We send our thoughts to the people who lost their dear ones and to the families of all who have suffered. As we write this in early March, we pray for the returning of the hostages and for restoring safety for the land of Israel and all who dwell there.

On a personal note, I wish you, your families, and friends strength as we all hope for calmer and more peaceful days and as we approach Passover, a sweet and meaningful holiday.

Ofra Backenroth
Associate Dean, William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education

Transformative Learning for Teachers

Research alongside practice has driven the course of Lauren Applebaum’s career in Jewish education, making her decision to enroll in the William Davidson Executive Doctoral Program a natural one. Her doctoral research on how adult teachers learn continues to influence her work as she recruits and trains future educators.

“Even if you create the best possible environment for teachers to learn, teaching is an incredibly complex set of skills and habits of mind to develop,” said Lauren Applebaum, who was one of the first three graduates of The William Davidson School of Jewish Education’s Executive Doctoral Program. Nine years after completing her doctorate, she is still passionate about the same question: how do teachers learn? Answering that perennial question calls on Applebaum as both a practitioner and researcher.

Applebaum is the director of DeLeT programs at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and was recently named interim director of the School of Education there. DeLeT recruits and trains future Jewish day school educators. Along with her colleague and noted Israel educator Sivan Zakkai, she also leads “Learning and Teaching About What Matters,” a national study of 4th and 5th graders in both supplemental and Jewish day school. The study explores how contemporary children make sense of these extraordinary times and how their educators make sense of what it means to teach in them. 

A career in Jewish education was not what Applebaum envisioned after graduating from Williams College and starting her first job in education reform in Boston Public Schools. At Williams, which did not have a formal Hillel at the time, students did everything themselves to live Jewishly, and Applebaum got highly invested in a type of “scrappy, DIY” Jewish life. After graduation, when she learned about Kesher, an alternative model to Jewish afterschool programming in the Boston suburbs, it spoke to her, and she took a job there as an educator and even worked as the bookkeeper to earn a bit more money.

“Kesher was an amazing, radical experiment in audacious Jewish education,” Applebaum recalled. “They took professional learning for teachers as seriously as they did for kids.” The staff arrived at Kesher at 1:00 p.m., considerably earlier than the children, in order to allow time for teachers to connect and plan together. “At Kesher they were incredibly ambitious and not bound by institutional definitions of Jewish education,” she said. “That’s what hooked me.” Many of Applebaum’s colleagues at Kesher have gone on to illustrious careers in Jewish education. “It was a kind of laboratory where many leading educators got their start,” she said.

While teaching at Kesher, Applebaum participated in the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI), a two-year long “train the trainers” program dedicated to a sustained approach to professional development for Jewish educators. She also completed an EdM at Harvard. Dedicated to the deep relationship between practice and research, Applebaum felt it was important to pursue advanced work in education at the same time as she was working in education, and she secured special permission from Harvard to complete the EdM part-time.

“A lot of the research I am doing now goes back to the basement of Kesher, where teachers together worked to improve their practice,” Applebaum said. “I loved working with kids, but my real talent was working with teachers.” Applebaum has deep empathy and admiration for teachers who expose themselves regularly to the challenges of the classroom and engage in their own complex learning process. “Teaching in an ever-evolving puzzle, and you never have one ‘aha’ moment that means you are done learning the craft.”

Life brought Applebaum to Los Angeles for what she expected would be a year or two, and she took a consulting position providing internal professional development for teachers at Valley Beth Shalom alongside teaching pedagogy and supervising fieldwork for students at what was then called the University of Judaism (now American Jewish University). Over time, she became associate dean of the education program there.

The draw of research alongside practice has continued to fuel Applebaum’s career, and she decided to pursue her doctorate in the Executive Doctoral Program at Davidson in order to gain the skills needed for rigorous research. “I never wanted a purely academic career, but I really wanted serious academic training, and I was fortunate to have the flexibility to be able to balance my professional responsibilities at that time.”

Applebaum was in the second cohort of the executive EdD. She entered the program with a firm idea of her dissertation research question—how adult teachers learn—and along with the immersive time she spent learning with her cohort at JTS, she was able to take some courses towards her degree in person at AJU and online through Teachers College. Applebaum started the EdD program when pregnant with her son and defended her dissertation in 2015 just after his fourth birthday party.

Reflecting on her own learning in the program, Applebaum was inspired by the different perspectives she gained from her “smart, capable cohort,” and recalled learning to practice ethnographic notetaking at Starbucks under the guidance of Meredith Katz. In her dissertation research, Jeffrey Kress provided deep support as her advisor and connected her to outside reader and advisor Miriam Raider Roth of the University of Cincinnati who specializes in action research and educator learning.

Applebaum titled her dissertation “When You Change Me You Change What I Do: Challenges and Possibilities in Transformative Learning for Teachers.” Her research focused on teachers engaged in Israel education, which even before October 7 was “as complicated as it gets,” she said. For Applebaum, her research method and approach is designed to connect more to the teachers themselves than the subject matter or content they are teaching. In this way, her ongoing research has relevance across educational settings and content areas.

“I can’t do what they’re doing,” Applebaum said about the teachers she studies, such as early childhood or Israel educators. “My part is to help them.” Applebaum called it “the privilege of her career to accompany teachers in their work.”

“Putting the voices of teachers at the center of the conversation is a powerful way to strengthen Jewish education,” said Applebaum. “When we listen to the learners—even the adult learners—we can figure out what we really need.”

Throughout her career, whether training emerging teachers in DeLeT or publishing articles on how preschoolers understand Israel, Applebaum embraces the relationship between research and practice. “Research makes practice better, and practice should make research better,” she said.

Making Learning Stick for Next Gen Professionals

Rabbi David Kessel sees the workplace as a potent learning space. In his experience engaging young Jewish leaders, he knows that in big tent settings, professionals who create a culture of welcome can come to see themselves as educators.  

A “stretch assignment,” explained Rabbi David Kessel, a 2024 graduate of the Executive Doctoral Program of The William Davidson School of Jewish Education, is one that requires individuals to go “one step beyond their comfort zone, gaining new knowledge from working and reflecting with others, recognizing that learning is a social process.” A well-planned stretch assignment can help managers cultivate talent and enable employees to develop skills and confidence for future opportunities. In Kessel’s research, he showed that a stretch project at work played a key role in communal program and event-planning professionals seeing themselves as experiential Jewish educators and reporting higher job satisfaction.

Kessel’s own career path, and his pursuit of the doctorate at Davidson, can be seen as one great stretch assignment—with significant benefits for the organizations where he has worked, including roughly a decade each at Texas Hillel in Austin, BBYO, and JFNA. He is currently senior vice president and director of the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at the JCC Association of North America.

“I’ve had tremendous opportunities to work for legacy organizations at moments of reorganization and change,” Kessel said. He has developed expertise in engaging next gen Jewish leaders. “The ability to balance Jewish content and depth while also growing the number of stakeholders and participants involved has become my superpower, blending content and strategy.” To develop that superpower, Kessel has had ample opportunities to learn and grow along the way.

As a student at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Kessel met Richard M. Joel, then head of Hillel International. While Kessel was impressed by Joel’s vision and organizational acumen, he was inspired by his ability to contextualize the work in a Jewish frame with an emphasis on Jewish impact. “When I told him that I was interested in a career working in Hillel, he told me straightaway that I needed more Jewish knowledge,” Kessel recalled. It was that first “stretch assignment” that led Kessel to rabbinical school at HUC.

Kessel has never forgotten what it was like to feel that his lack of strong Jewish content coming out of college impeded his access to Jewish life. “I remember being that person, not having a background in Jewish text or traditions” he said, and even after completing rabbinical school, he was not fully confident in his identity as an educator. “Hillel, BBYO, Federations, JCCs—these are all ‘big tent’ Jewish spaces where we create a culture of welcome through a Jewish lens – we’re accessible and inclusive,” he said. “We want people to walk through the door and to feel welcome, to feel at home, regardless of their Jewish knowledge.” Jewish professionals need to be equipped to make that happen.

It was Kessel’s lifelong love of learning and curiosity and his own embracing of his professional identity as a Jewish educator that drove him to begin the executive EdD at Davidson back in 2012. He finished his coursework while full-time at BBYO. “I loved learning with Davidson faculty. I loved the flexible format of the program,” he said.

He was not yet sure what aspect of Jewish education he wanted to research, but he was drawn to the challenge of leadership development and talent development as related to the workplace. “Reflecting while I was on-the-job at BBYO and then JFNA gave time for potential dissertation topics to materialize,” he said. In his JFNA position strengthening the pipeline of professionals working in the next gen space, Kessel came to recognize “there’s something here that’s relevant to how the workplace itself could be an effective context for adult learning, growth, and development.” Even though some time had passed since his Davidson coursework (Kessel called his path to the degree a “long journey with a couple of idle years”), he began to imagine a dissertation.

At this point, his original advisor, Dr. Aryeh Davidson, who had become a close friend and mentor, had retired, and Kessel developed what he called “a beautiful havruta” with current JTS provost Dr. Jeffrey Kress, who took on the role of dissertation advisor and helped prompt critical thinking and insight as Kessel undertook his original research and “crossed the finish line.” Kessel studied Jewish federation professionals as they worked through their own stretch assignments, as part of a larger next gen talent development initiative envisioned together with the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Kessel’s dissertation, “Understanding the Impact of Project-based Learning on Employee Growth and Development in the Jewish Workplace,” used case study methodology. He described how three federation professionals—none of whom were trained as Jewish educators—experienced a shift in professional identity as they incorporated outcome-based planning and Jewish values into their programming and focused first on the ‘why’ and impact rather than the logistics and marketing. Kessel found that through project-based learning, practice, reflection, and ongoing feedback from thought-partners such as mentors and supervisors, these professionals gained new knowledge and skills, strengthened their job performance, and came to see themselves as experiential Jewish educators.

The story of the professionals in Kessel’s dissertation depicts a kind of “virtuous cycle” that he explored with Kress in relation to how learning takes place. “The cycle includes refining and expanding skillsets and frameworks through practice, feedback, modeling, reflection, and continuous improvement–it repeats over and over,” he said. “The more professionals are given an opportunity to practice and receive feedback, to try out what they are learning and reflect upon it, the deeper the impact will be for their constituents and for themselves as lifelong learners.” Bringing “an education mindset” to these non-educator professionals enabled them to believe in their ability to succeed as educators.

The transformation has stuck, with each of the professionals Kessel studied still working in federation. “Finding motivation around their work contributes to retention and employee satisfaction,” Kessel said.

In reflecting on his own career path and what his research concluded, Kessel remains a strong advocate for creating circumstances at work for people to learn. “We don’t maximize on-the-job learning as one of the most effective forms of adult learning or professional development, but we know from research that 70 percent of professional growth happens on the job, at work, as opposed to 10 percent that happens through training programs or conferences, and 20 percent through developmental relationships like mentoring. All the conferences I have been to were fabulous, but when you are back in your routine, how do you make what you learned at the conference ‘stick?’”

Kessel draws a comparison to the professional training in careers like medicine (his wife is a physician) or social work. “In these fields, through structured internships and on-the-job training, inexperienced professionals take on challenges that help them grow and become teachers themselves,” he said. The old medical school adage, “see one, do one, teach one” is still invoked, because it can be very effective.

As he leads education initiatives for JCCs, what Kessel calls the “front door” for so many to Jewish life, Kessel puts into direct practice what he learned from his EdD research, both about Jewish professionals and about himself. “Throughout my career I have had the opportunity to gain skill sets, to receive feedback, to reflect on my work, and to push myself through stretch projects,” he said. “Working in the Jewish community is not meant to be an independent endeavor. Learning is a social construct. Strengthening talent development and career advancement through learning at work represents a scalable strategy of benefit to our entire communal ecosystem.”  

Love Through Knowledge

Rabbi Laura Novak Winer knew she had found a doctoral research project when she was facilitating a group of supplementary schoolteachers and found them struggling when teaching about Israel. The research and evaluation skills she learned through her William Davidson Executive Doctoral Program continue to enrich her work and inform the field of Israel education.

For Rabbi Laura Novak Winer, the decision to pursue an executive doctorate at The William Davidson School of Jewish Education emerged directly from her consulting work with congregations. She had already worked as a congregational educator and held senior leadership positions in the youth and education departments at Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) when she began consulting. She engaged with congregations who were setting their educational vision and goals, and she found herself being asked to assess and evaluate programs and models, an area where she did not have rigorous training.

“I was hearing a lot of the same kinds of questions in my consulting practice, and at the same time, I was about to become president of Association for Reform Jewish Educators (ARJE), where I knew I would encounter ‘big picture’ challenges,” she said. “I was asking myself what I wanted to do with the next chapter in my career, and the executive EdD was just the kind of opportunity I needed to expand my own learning and gain important skills in educational assessment and measurement.”

Winer had known since high school that she wanted a career in the Jewish world. A graduate of University of California at Santa Barbara and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), Winer had been trained to develop and use her pastoral skills in educational settings, possessed considerable content background and experience as a Jewish educator, and had already dipped her toes in the academic study of Jewish education with a number of publications. She was ready to pursue a doctorate, as she put it, “to swim in the pool of big ideas and get my hands dirty in the big question of assessment.”

When she entered the executive doctorate program at The William Davidson School in 2013, she was fortunate to be part of a unique cohort of six professionals, most of whom knew each other well from the Reform movement. The community they created supported them through their coursework and research. “It was my first time learning online, and I had to learn how to learn all over again,” she said. From the faculty, many of whom were themselves teaching material for the first time in the new program, she gained pedagogic models she now uses in her own online teaching.

Winer kept up her consulting practice while she was in the program, and alongside her volunteer leadership position in ARJE, these became the “sandbox” in which she reflected on and processed her coursework. One of her consulting projects was with the iCenter, which is dedicated to professional development for Israel educators. As she worked with both American-born and Israeli-born Israel educators in supplementary schools, she found herself at a pinnacle moment that became the catalyst for her dissertation research and has had ripple effects in her ongoing research.

She was co-facilitating a professional development workshop in the Bay area for about 30 supplementary schoolteachers. An American-born teacher spoke about the challenge of teaching about Israel given her own personal ambivalence about the Israeli government. Winer recalled the response of an Israeli-born teacher in the room: “What’s so hard?” she said. “It’s Israel, you teach it!” At that moment, Winer understood that American-born teachers have a very different experience teaching about Israel than their Israeli-born colleagues, and she knew she wanted to study how the way teachers understand their own connection to Israel shapes what they do in the classroom.

Using the research and evaluation skills she had gained from her coursework, Winer studied four American-born teachers in two different progressive synagogues. “I spent half the time with these teachers just getting to know them and their connection to Israel,” said Winer. “The other half of the time we talked about their teaching, unpacking decisions they made or observations that emerged from their own reflection.” She identified moments in their teaching when they revealed something about themselves and the dynamic of their own relationship with Israel.

Her dissertation, entitled “Teaching Who They Are: American-Born Supplementary School Teachers’ Connections with Israel,” yielded an articulation of these relationships and a typology.

Since completing her EdD in 2019, Winer has continued researching and publishing about Israel education. She has a chapter in Teaching Israel: Studies of Pedagogy from the Field, a compendium edited by Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold that is widely viewed as a core text for Israel education. As a senior fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, she is currently working on a philosophical piece that calls for reframing the goals of Israel education, a topic that emerged directly from her dissertation.

“For many years, the goal of Israel education in North America was to develop in learners ‘ahavat Yisrael,’ love of Israel,” said Winer. “Yet how do you measure love? You can’t teach love, other than a kind of indoctrination, and our communities tend to measure it a binary love/hate way.” At a time when measuring impact is so prevalent in educational discourse, Winer believes we need to be sure that our goals are sophisticated enough to bear the weight of nuanced assessment.

Historically, said Winer, Israel education in Israel focused much more on Land of Israel studies, “yediat ha’aretz,” knowledge of Israel, which included experiential opportunities like hiking or rafting and formal study of topics like geography or botany, in order to build knowledge about and a connection to the land. “I believe the goal of Israel education should shift from love to knowledge,” said Winer. “Love is not an educational outcome.” She is developing a new paradigm for Israel education, which she calls “yediat Yisrael.”

The wisdom of the yediat Yisrael goal, said Winer, is that “there is an understanding that before one can love a place, one first has to know it.” Yediat Yisrael may lead to ahavat Yisrael, but that is not the primary goal. “The goal of yediat Yisrael is for learners to find and navigate their own meanings and connections with Israel as the historic homeland, as a global, diverse Jewish community, and as the modern State,” said Winer.

In addition to her ongoing research, Winer has continued as an educational practitioner. She directs the masters in educational leadership program at the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles and teaches in both the school of education and the rabbinical school. This coming July, Winer will become associate rabbinical school director at HUC-JIR.

“I have always considered myself a Jewish educator who happens to be a rabbi,” Winer said. “As I teach in the rabbinical school and look ahead to this new administrative role, I am committed to modeling and promulgating the stance of the reflective, supportive educator-rabbi. My hope will be to apply an educator’s mindset—using concepts such as educational goal-setting and assessment—directly into rabbinic training.”

Practitioner, Learner, Leader

Benjamin Mann’s growth mindset opened the door to doctoral study and research, which gave him the chance to explore the impact of inclusion in a Jewish day school for all members of the school community, not only those with diverse learning needs.

“You should be in the Executive Doctoral Program,” Benjamin Mann remembers hearing years ago from a representative of The William Davidson School of Jewish Education. His three children were in elementary and middle school, and he had just started running the middle school at Solomon Schechter Jewish Day School in Manhattan. It hardly seemed the time for him to take on that kind of commitment.

At the same time, though, Mann was thinking about his career trajectory. He had two MA degrees—one in interdisciplinary studies at JTS and one from Teachers College in learning disabilities. He had completed the Day School Leadership Training Institute (DSLTI) for new and aspiring heads of school. As a practitioner, he had not thought much about research but had always been passionate about the idea of inclusion of those with special learning needs. He maintained a personal “growth mindset” and knew that he always wanted to be learning. Mann also suspected that the Executive Doctoral Program would give him to chance to do his job even better.

The flexible format and generous funding enabled Mann to begin the program in 2012. He was able to immerse himself in the four-day in-person intensives each semester and could even walk up to JTS. “Working at the same time as I returned to graduate work was very fulfilling. My school was like my own personal laboratory,” he said.

“I had read just about every dissertation about Jewish day schools during my coursework, and the area of inclusion and special education was barely touched,” Mann said. “I never considered undertaking research to solve a ‘big problem,’ but when I realized there was a gap in what had been studied, I became more convinced that this was something I wanted to do and that it could have a beneficial impact.”

Inclusion, the topic of his dissertation, had been a focus for Mann throughout his career, and after teaching Jewish studies for a few years at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, he became director of special services there. “Disability advocates think of inclusion as a ‘civil right,’ Mann said. Mann sees access to Jewish texts and learning as a birthright that should not be denied to those with a learning disability. “I believe that Jewish learning enriches the lives of Jews, and as educators, we need to be sure all Jews have those opportunities,” he said. “We also know that for Jewish life to be sustained into the future, we need everyone to play an active role, including those who might happen to learn differently.”

Mann’s research was a qualitative case study of one Jewish day school and how the inclusion of students with special needs was understood by various members of the school community. “I learned how being inclusive was integrated across a school’s self-perception,” Mann said. “This touched all aspects of the school, beyond the classroom and academics.”

As Mann became head of school at Schechter Manhattan, his time was even more stretched. “Writing a dissertation is like climbing Mt. Everest,” he said, and support from Davidson faculty helped him each step of the way. With Aryeh Davidson, Mann recalled, he learned in havruta about the halakhot (Jewish laws) of disability. Jeffrey Kress provided tactical help as well as thought-partnership that helped Mann hone his own thinking.

In 2021, Mann transitioned from Schechter Manhattan to the Jewish Federation of Greater Metrowest New Jersey, where he is currently chief planning officer. During the summer before taking on his new position, Mann was able to write and complete his dissertation. “After working in Jewish day schools for 24 consecutive years, it was a great opportunity for me to focus my mind away from the busyness of running a school.”

In his current position, Mann works with lay leaders to invest the funds and enact the mission of the federation. He directly oversees federation’s investments in education, social services, and global Jewry. “Federation itself is a kind of inclusion model,” said Mann. “We are a big tent that is wholly devoted to strengthening the Jewish future.” That metaphor builds from the same vision of inclusivity that Mann promoted as a practitioner and researched at Davidson.

Mann maintains a connection to Davidson and last year became an adjunct member of the faculty, teaching an online, asynchronous course for MA students on Jewish nonprofit leadership. He loves being in dialogue with those pursuing careers in Jewish education. “There is so much research about leadership, and Dr. Ray Levi created this course with a fantastic syllabus and resources,” he said. “I bring the point of view of a practitioner to my class, whether as a day school or federation professional.”

One important lesson that Mann conveys to the students in his class and those he supervises at work is at the core of his decision to pursue the EdD. “Good leaders have to have a growth mindset,” Mann said. “Completing my doctorate gave me an enormous sense of accomplishment and confidence as I face whatever new challenges come my way.”

Mann believes that communities need to give leaders time to grow and learn, to activate their individual growth mindset. “Working for the Jewish future is enormously challenging, whether as a head of school, teacher, agency professional, or pastoral leader,” said Mann. “Making the room and space to grow is an invaluable gift.”