The Jewish Theological Seminary of America – To expand the seminary’s fellowship for high school students by enriching the curriculum and offering additional learning opportunities with both professors and rabbinical student mentors.

How do you plan to recruit the students you’re looking for?

Our goal is to cultivate a diverse cohort so that students learn as much from one another as they do from the scholars who teach and mentor them each month. Emerging Leaders Fellows (ELF) are curious and thoughtful teens from across the U.S. and Canada. They come from a variety of backgrounds in learning, Jewish practice, and life experience; the majority do not come from a day-school educational background. We recruit partly through direct nominations from clergy, educators, and alumni, as well as through strategic partnerships with teen-facing organizations. As word spreads about the program, we are seeing more teens apply directly themselves.

What makes your goals and methods stand out?

Jewish teens today are navigating an increasingly complex and polarized world, with challenging questions about identity and community. We strive to provide a learning space where they can ask about what matters most to them, explore what it means to be a Jewish teen today, and develop skills to investigate those questions critically. For 200 years, JTS has been a home for academic inquiry, and ELF welcomes teens into that lineage, helping them imagine a future in Jewish leadership. Our approach is distinctive in supporting fellows to direct their own learning through research, online learning, Shabbatonim, and mentorship from rabbinical students, guiding them to add their voices to the conversations that shape Jewish life today.

Which kinds of projects are you excited to see in your upcoming cohort?

We’re excited by any project that excites our fellows! We welcome teens to choose a question that matters to them, explore it through academic research, and present their learning creatively, whether through a d’var Torah, an art piece, or another medium. Recent projects that reflect this approach include antisemitism across different decades in America, historical understandings of slavery in Jewish texts, the role of women’s ritual items throughout history, and Jewish cultural interaction with Muslim art in medieval Spain. We’re excited to see upcoming cohorts continue bringing their own voice and flair to their research.