The Tisch Fellowship: 20 Years of Rabbinical Excellence
July 9, 2026
Twenty years ago this spring, Bonnie and Daniel Tisch envisioned an enhanced approach to rabbinical education: a co-curricular program dedicated to leadership development beyond traditional seminary training. Their vision led to the establishment of The Tisch Fellowship at Hebrew Union College, a transformative initiative, specifically for the New York campus, designed to prepare rabbis who could reimagine and revitalize Jewish communal life for the twenty-first century. Soon after, Sara Star extended this vision to cantorial students by creating the Star Fellowship, which runs in parallel with the Tisch program, ensuring that future cantors have access to the same extraordinary opportunities for growth and leadership development.
Led by program director Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman and associate program director and Tisch fellowship alumnus Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot, the Tisch Fellowship is far more than an academic program—it is a comprehensive community of learning, mentorship, and community building. Fellows study the sociology and history of American Jewish life while spending meaningful time with both Jewish changemakers and innovative thinkers from beyond the Jewish world. The curriculum challenges students to further articulate and refine their own religious commitments through intensive reflection on God, Torah, and the Jewish People.
Through fall and winter retreats, fellows learn from Hebrew Union College’s remarkable faculty, while also exploring alternative community models, transformational experiments in interfaith settings, and visionary artists. The program’s structure includes monthly discussions, guided tutorials, summer residencies at outstanding Reform congregations, and the capstone experience of crafting personal autobiographical theologies.
Rabbi Skloot described the program in a d’var torah he gave recently as “one of the joys of my career to spend extended time with these students, often traveling the country and the world, learning from dynamic and creative leaders and thinkers.”
This winter’s retreat saw the fellows traveling to Memphis to engage “with our country’s difficult history of racism and chattel slavery, as well as meet religious (and non-religious) changemakers in the cities we visited,” according to current fellow Margeaux Dressner-Wolberg. Out of that visit came several d’vrei torah, two of which are linked below.
D’var Torah Rabbi Joseph Skloot, Ph.D.
The fellowship’s impact has exceeded its founders’ ambitious goals. More than 60 alumni have emerged as recognized changemakers across the American Jewish landscape and the Reform movement, with their influence extending internationally to communities in England and Australia. These graduates now lead some of the largest and most dynamic congregations in North America, fulfilling the program’s original vision of transforming the American synagogue into a spiritual and moral center for contemporary life.
As current Tisch Fellow Alexina Haefner says, “the Tisch fellowship has provided an incredibly valuable opportunity to expand my thinking beyond the day-to-day of rabbinical school with brilliant thinkers and thoughtful peers. It’s a space where I can settle into the soul behind our work and learn to listen deeply.”
The Tisch Fellowship represents a remarkable investment in the future of Jewish leadership—one that has demonstrably changed the trajectory of Reform Judaism and synagogue life across continents.
Our first cohort of Tisch Fellows, as pictured in a 2007 issue of the Hebrew Union Chronicle.
Rabbi Shirley Idelson, Ph.D., Director of the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management, and Bonnie Tisch with the 2007-2008 Tisch Fellows at Hebrew Union College: Rabbi Yaron Kapitulnik ’10, Rabbi Jill Perlman ’10, Rabbi Rachel Safran ’10, Rabbi Matthew Sofer ’10, and (now associate program director) Rabbi Joseph Skloot.
To view the original article in the Hebrew Union College Chronicle announcing the Fellowship in 2007, click here.
