American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies — one of the few rabbinical programs on the West Coast and the only Conservative one — is going to undergo a significant overhaul in the coming months, according to officials at the university. Though what that overhaul will look like remains unclear.

It may mean dropping its denominational connection, it may mean a radical reconsideration of its curriculum and pedagogy; it may mean all of those things. But it is not shutting down, Jay Sanderson, AJU’s president, told eJewishPhilanthropy on Friday.

The rabbinical school’s uncertain future came to light last Wednesday when Sanderson told a gathering of faculty and staff that Ziegler’s longtime dean, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, was leaving his current role — while staying on at the university — and that discussions were underway to reenvision the program. 

The news was not greeted with overwhelming applause. One person cried; others passionately voiced their opposition. While understanding of their concerns, Sanderson was unmoved and unsurprised.

Last May, when Sanderson was announced as president of American Jewish University, his friend Eric Fingerhut, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, gave him some advice: embrace his reputation as a disruptor.

“Nobody in a situation wants change, even if they’re not happy,” Sanderson told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Everybody would rather be uncomfortable than go through a change process.”

Larry Platt, the chair of AJU, told eJP that the board stands behind Sanderson, having hired him because he’s a disruptor. “He’s doing exactly what the board wants him to,” Platt added.

Founded in 1996 with its first class ordained in 1999, Ziegler is located in Los Angeles, offering a West Coast alternative to New York City’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Enrollment has only declined since, a trend among all non-Orthodox rabbinic schools, causing what is referred to as “the rabbinic pipeline problem” — an abundance of congregations unable to find a rabbi to lead them.  

The overhaul of the Ziegler School comes amid a long-running discussion about the future and purpose of the American rabbinate, a conversation that was supercharged in November, with the release of Atra dual study on rabbis and rabbinical students.

“Everybody talks about the challenges [of rabbinic schools] over and over again,” Sanderson, who prefers the term “conscious disruptor” to describe himself, said. “It’s a very complex issue that, honestly, in the nine months I’ve been here, I’ve been surprised at how little real, actual transformation is happening in the field.”

He added: “I would argue that in really reimagining and thinking about rabbinic education, we are doubling down our investment in the space.”

Titled “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership,” the Atra study showed that new rabbis preferred non-pulpit roles over congregational roles, despite lower pay, because pulpit positions were considered far more emotionally taxing with unrealistic expectations. At the same time, new clergy were increasingly being ordained at non-denominational schools, often chosen because of convenience, not ideology.

Liberal American religious “institutions like AJU, HUC, JTS and Hebrew College all have very challenging and demanding questions before them,” Steven Windmueller, emeritus professor of Jewish communal service at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, told eJP. “And those questions include, where do we go from here?”

To counteract the dwindling number of students at the school, over the past half decade, Ziegler has undertaken a number of moves to make its program more attractive. It truncated a year off the program, shortened the amount of time students needed to spend in Israel, slashed tuition by 80%, sold off its 35-acre campus and shuttered its undergraduate program. Still, the student body remains small, with 34 students currently.

The 2011 Pew Jewish Community Study of New York, which showed the Reform and Conservative movements’ numbers were plummeting, should have been a “wake-up call for the Jewish world,” Sanderson, who is also CEO of AJU’s 2050 Institute, said. “But instead, people denied the facts.”

The question of how rabbinic schools should or shouldn’t change is not simply about how they define themselves denominationally, Windmueller said, “but also the ways in which we prepare that generation or next generation of rabbinic leadership” and “how we change the culture of how American Jews and American Jewish institutions understand the role of rabbi.” 

These questions are not unique to the Jewish world — all American religious institutions are seeing their numbers declining, Windmueller noted, adding that nondemonationalism appears to be the way of American Jewry’s near-term future.

On a mid-January episode of Jonah Platt’s “Being Jewish” podcast, which was taped in July, Sanderson said he would like to see Ziegler go nondenominational. But when he spoke with eJP Friday, he emphasized that no decisions have been made and it will be a thorough process involving the board and the entire community that will lead to the school’s transformation. 

The changes to the school will affect the entire program, especially the course catalogue, so it can better train rabbis for the roles and issues of the Jewish community today, such as artificial intelligence and moderating conversations between generations.

“The job itself is not a job that is attractive to the same number of young Jews as it was 25 years ago,” Sanderson said. “We’re being courageous and saying, ‘Let’s figure out what we need to be doing for the next generation of Jewish life, not for the last generation.’”

The only thing Sanderson officially announced at Wednesday’s meeting was that Artson, who also serves as vice president of AJU, is transitioning into a new role as the Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar, effective July 1. His new position is named after the founder of the Reconstructionist movement. 

“Rabbi Artson’s move certainly makes it seem like we are making big changes,” Sanderson said. “It doesn’t signal big changes. It signals a process to make these changes.” These changes, he said, are being made “about 20 years too late.”

Artson’s retirement as dean “signals a process publicly that has been going on privately since I started,” Sanderson said, adding that he considers Artson’s new position an “elevation” to “a more global institutional job.” Instead of simply focusing on the Ziegler school, he will serve as one of the faces of AJU and will be “in essence, the Jewish voice around all the tables of all the programs we have.”

Artson will be honored at a May 19 gala that will be held at Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, a Reform congregation. 

In Sanderson’s view, employees should not fill positions indefinitely, he said. In 2021, after 12 years at the helm, Sanderson stepped down from his role as president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, where he shook things up by pushing for increased security a decade before other communities, changing how funding and referrals for social services were done and forcing collaboration between L.A. Jewish organizations. 

“If we really want to propel a pipeline of Jewish leadership, you can’t stay at the same job,” he said, “because when you stay in the same job, the next generation of people don’t get a chance to leave.”

Sanderson acknowledged that the meeting on Wednesday was lively and, at times, fraught. Some students had come to the meeting upset after hearing Sanderson’s appearance on the “Being Jewish” podcast. They had felt he was talking down to the student body at times, which he said was a misunderstanding. 

“Some of the emotions [were] around Rabbi Artson,” he said, “and it’s human nature to think about yourselves first. My job is to think about the Jewish people first and the institution.”

One attendee at the meeting reported to eJP that Sanderson avoided questions and raised his voice when responding to a comment, prompting seven students to file grievances about him. “The only reason I raised my voice was so that people could hear me because there was no microphone, and there was a [large] room,” he said. “Were there students that cried? One for sure.”

Prospective changes at the school are going to cause friction, Sanderson said. “At the end of the day, [students] should understand — as future leaders — that leadership means sometimes you have to put other people in uncomfortable positions for the greater good of the Jewish People.” Still, he understands the students’ confusion, comparing the current situation to someone going to a restaurant and not knowing what the menu will be.

Nothing about the curriculum or the school is going to change for current students, and Artson will remain dean through the end of this academic year, Platt told eJP.

“Will Brad be replaced?” Platt said. “Yes. Will the position be exactly as the position is constituted today? That’s to be determined.”

Platt estimates it will take half a year before significant changes to the school are decided, he said. But that, like everything, is “subject to change.”