Writing “Moneyball Judaism” is one of the best parts of my week. Sometimes, though, I worry I leave an impression of fatalism.

When a person spends time writing about the cognitive biases that hinder leadership excellence, it is natural to start seeing these biases everywhere and, in the process, lose the ability to recognize the many ways people rise above their circumstances, beat the odds and achieve excellence.

Courtesy/Jewish Kids Groups

Illustrative.

Far too often, the innovations we valorize in Jewish life are more subject to circumstance than we care to recognize. Many models depend on the presence of a visionary founder; the magic of being in a large, dense urban Jewish community; or the backing of a single, deeply committed funder who will provide an endless runway to sustainability. It’s neither fair nor feasible to impose these ideas on struggling organizations, yet we do so all the time.

Instead, I’d like to showcase how to identify innovative models with real potential to scale, and the framework we can use to distinguish great case studies from those that could change the landscape of Jewish life as we know it. 

With that, let’s take a journey to Atlanta.

Something different

In August, I attended the finalist conference for the Atlanta-based Jewish Kids Groups (JKG) and their Jewish Afterschool Accelerator (JASA) program. JKG provides camp-style supplementary Jewish education during the school year to Atlanta kids in kindergarten through 10th grade. Following more than a decade in Atlanta, JKG launched the JASA program in 2023 to help synagogues launch their own Jewish after-school programs.

(Full disclosure: JKG invited me as their guest to attend the conference in hopes that I would write a piece on my experience, covering my travel and hotel. You can decide if any bias shines through.)

At first glance, the JKG/JASA story seems similar to many previous attempts at innovation in the Jewish community: A visionary founder creates a successful model, and eventually an effort is made to replicate the organization’s secret sauce. And sadly, few of these attempts succeed at scale; you can review the “Moneyball Judaism” archive for the myriad of reasons why. 

But several years after JASA’s launch, many of the participating congregations have developed their own financially sustainable models. Of the 20 congregations that have participated in JASA, only three needed to be sunsetted, two of which were in the program’s first cohort. As of 2025, at least 500 children nationwide have participated, with increasing numbers expected as the programs gain local recognition.

As I took notes during the conference, I asked myself: Why does this approach seem different from others?

The clue that sparked my interest came in JKG founder and CEO Ana Robbins’ opening address:

“I am a 200-mile runner,” she said. “You don’t succeed at that point by willpower, but by design.”

Her framing of why JKG works in Atlanta and why it could work for other communities was markedly different from what I heard at similar conferences. It wasn’t that Robbins didn’t talk about vision: she emphasized design over ideas.

And that brings us to this article’s big idea.

Where’s the voltage?

John List knows more than a little bit about innovation.

Currently a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, List was previously the chief economist for Uber and Lyft. In his most recent book, Voltage: What Makes Good Ideas and Great Ideas Scale, List examines in depth why so many innovations cannot be replicated. To identify innovations with the potential to grow at scale, List argues that people should look for five vital signs:

1. False Positives: What proof exists that this idea is as innovative as some say it is?
2. Slice of the pie: How many people could realistically be impacted if this idea achieves maximum reach?
3. Unscalable ingredients: Can this idea be replicated across a variety of settings, or does it depend on unreplicable ingredients, like a uniquely charismatic founder or a specific geographic location?
4. Spillover effects: Does this idea have unintended consequences that might work against the ultimate goal this idea seeks to address?
5. Cost: Would scaling this idea be cost-prohibitive?

In our context, using List’s model, Jewish life is filled with amazing individual ideas that should be celebrated and studied, yet not overly idealized because they lack the voltage needed to scale. In contrast, JKG meets all of the vital signs of voltage:

1. Not a false positive: The original model in Atlanta remains successful and sustainable.
2. Big slice of the pie: Supplementary Jewish education remains the largest form of Jewish education by a wide margin, and yet there are still thousands of completely unserved children, and tremendous untapped potential for what could be if philanthropists develop the same enthusiasm for funding it at the level of confidence they show for day schools, camps, Hillels, etc.
3. Scalable ingredients: What makes JKG successful in Atlanta is not a single ingredient that can be replicated elsewhere. While the JKG team evaluates a variety of criteria when selecting the organizations that are best suited to participate in the program, the communities they choose vary in size, demographics, and other factors.
4. Spillover effects: Pointedly, JASA deliberately chose to expand this model using existing synagogue infrastructure rather than incubate completely independent models that would need to be developed from scratch. Should these models succeed, they will strengthen existing institutions from within while also expanding the scope of what is possible.
5. Cost: The business model for a successful after-school program is mainly similar to that of Hebrew schools in attaining financial sustainability. Other than the requirement that all programs provide transportation to the site, the costs of running a program are not markedly different from those of a conventional Hebrew school.

No model is perfect; some educators I spoke to expressed concern that the JKG curriculum is too cookie-cutter and that the program prioritizes educators with strong social and emotional skills over Jewish content knowledge. Time will tell whether critiques harm the model in the long term; ultimately, the test of any model should be whether it promotes lifelong Jewish commitment. 

But at a time when communities are struggling to attract families to models of Jewish life they might realistically adopt, and when too many attempts at innovation have not resulted in revolution, the ingredients for a sea change in Jewish education do exist, as does a paradigm for the right way to take a great idea and scale it.

Lessons from the Benderly Boys

Over a century ago, Samson Benderly and a network of educators, sometimes known as “The Benderly Boys,” planted the seeds of what would become the model of supplementary Jewish education in the United States, a process that Jonathan Krasner masterfully outlines in The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education. Rereading Krasner’s book after my trip to Atlanta, it’s fascinating to see parallels between the world Benderly sought to transform and the current environment JKG and its JASA program are navigating.

Benderly quickly recognized several challenges to the supplementary school framework for Jewish education, including that students arrived too tired to learn after a full day of study in public schools, as well as widespread “societal devaluation” of the work of supplementary Jewish education. Sadly, these challenges have not changed at all, even a century later, and are unlikely to.

But Benderly made a conscious choice that he could not ignore the fact that if he wanted to “attract the children of the Jewish masses,” he needed a model that reflected and affirmed the choices of the most significant number of American Jews, rather than trying to convince those masses to take a counter-cultural approach and choose Jewish day school.

The situation we find ourselves in is essentially the same. 

All of my children go to Jewish day school and Jewish camps, and I am proud to make that significant financial investment. And there is nothing wrong with trying to lower the barriers and increase the encouragement to push other families to do the same. But it is a fool’s errand (albeit a noble one) to expecting that, even with our best efforts, we will convince thousands of families to change their preferences. Most Jewish families will choose either some form of supplementary education or no supplementary education at all, and I think we should choose something over nothing every time.

Will JKG and JASA take off at the level of Samson Benderly and his acolytes? Time will tell. But at a time when our communal resources continue to underresource the institutions that serve the most significant number of Jews, consider me a believer.

Rabbi Joshua Rabin is the rabbi of the Astoria Center of Israel in Queens, N.Y., and the author of “Moneyball Judaism.”