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As he approached 14 years as dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), Rabbi Daniel S. Nevins thought he would remain at the Manhattan school, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement, for the rest of his career — until the coronavirus pandemic. Nevins spoke with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff about how his experiences during the coronavirus pandemic inspired soul-searching, followed by some job-hunting and finally the decision to start a new phase of his career — as the head of school at Golda Och Academy (GOA) in West Orange, N.J.

A shifting center: “Some people feel like 3080 Broadway [JTS’s address in Morningside Heights] is the center of the Jewish universe,” he acknowledged. “And JTS is a national organization.” But the coronavirus pandemic caused him — and many other people — to reconsider his career path. Nevins had also thought about going back to the pulpit, but the contrast between JTS’s remote learning program — which was suitable for adults — and the immersive experience offered by day schools struck him as especially compelling. “Day schools were lifted up in my mind as the place where the most important Jewish identity formation was happening,” he said.

Heft and humanity: Raised in New Jersey and educated at Harvard University, Nevins received ordination from JTS in 1994. That same year, he took a job as a pulpit rabbi at Adat Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills, Mich., where he both taught at the local day school and helped to found a non-denominational Jewish community high school, the Frankel Jewish Academy. His pastoral and scholarly abilities were very appealing to the hiring committee at GOA, said Rebecca Berman, one of the members. “We were really moved by his intellectual heft and his menschlichkeit,” she said, using the Yiddish word for humanity. One of his references, a colleague at JTS, was so moved as she described Nevins’s skill as a listener that she cried. Nevins is a member of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, and has written on the participation of Jews who are blind in the Torah service, electricity and Shabbat and artificial intelligence.

Read the full story here.

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“What in the world is there for American Jewry to learn from differences and commonalities they might share with tiny communities in far-flung parts of the planet?” writes Adina Bankier-Karp, a research fellow at the Center for Communal Research at the Orthodox Union, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Down under: “The Australian Jewish community (population 117,903, .49% of the overall population) conducted the ‘Gen17 Australian Jewish Community Survey (2017)’ which was recently compared with the Pew ‘Jewish Americans in 2020’ report. Is there anything that a small community down under could contribute to conversations about how to support American Jewish thriving?”

The numbers: “Australian Jews are twice as likely as American Jews to have received a Jewish day school education (51% versus 24%) and are even more likely to have received seven or more years of Jewish day school education (33% versus 13%). Australians were also much more likely than Americans to have visited Israel more than once (76% versus 26%), to report being ‘very’ emotionally attached to Israel (74% versus 25%) and even more likely to follow the news in Israel ‘very closely’ (68% versus 14%). Considering marriages which occurred in the decade prior to the Australian and U.S. surveys and excluding those of the Orthodox who predominantly marry other Jews, Australians were much less likely than Americans to be married to a person who was not Jewish (16% versus 72%).”

Forces at work: “What might be behind Australian Jewry’s comparatively higher engagement and what insights might this uncover? The answer appears to lie in the strength of Jewish communal connectedness. Australian Jews are more likely than U.S. Jews to regard being part of a Jewish community as an ‘essential’ part of what being Jewish means to them, more likely to have attended a Passover Seder and donated to a Jewish communal institution in the past year and were more likely to report that all or most of their friends are Jewish.”

Read the full piece here.