Building the Intellectual Infrastructure Judaism Needs
When culture shifts on campus, it eventually shifts everywhere. IJSS is working where the change begins.
Campus culture today is often defined by conflict, polarization, and public pressure campaigns. Most responses to that environment have matched it: loud, reactive, and aimed at winning the moment. IJSS is doing something different.
IJSS is meeting a real and underappreciated need in higher education: the need to bring Jewish wisdom into academic life through respected faculty who are already embedded in their disciplines. Not through outside pressure. Not through activism. Through the scholars students actually listen to, in the classrooms, journals, and conferences where ideas are formed.
A study of more than 900 university professors by Prof. Samuel J. Abrams found that more than 75% showed “disciplinary disengagement” — they were focused on their academic subjects, not political activism. IJSS is designed for exactly this audience: scholars who want serious ideas, not ideology.
After October 7, when 30 Penn professors publicly traveled to Israel in solidarity with the Jewish community, each one was contacted by dozens of colleagues. That response revealed something important: the public impression of where campuses stand does not always reflect the full reality.
IJSS is built for exactly this audience, and for the long game of ensuring that Jewish wisdom becomes a lasting presence in the institutions that shape what the next generation believes.
“The leaders of IJSS have vision and the will to bring Jewish ideas into places they have never reached before. My IJSS experience moved me in deep and profound ways, learning that Jewish ideas permeate every aspect of the work I have done as an educator for over forty-seven years.”
Elaine Sneierson-Leeder — Dean Emerita of Social Sciences, Sonoma State University
Campaigns end. Protests are forgotten. But a generation of university students shaped by professors who treat Jewish wisdom as serious intellectual currency — that changes culture in ways that last. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Society is building that infrastructure now, precisely because the need has never been more urgent.
IJSS is not a rapid-response organization. It is a long-game strategy rooted in a simple, proven insight: the most durable cultural change happens through those who shape what people learn, read, and believe — and on a university campus, that means the faculty.
IJSS is not a new idea seeking its first test. This model has been developed and refined over ten years of direct work with deans, department heads, and distinguished scholars. The results speak for themselves:
faculty engaged across Stanford, Case Western, Penn, Brandeis and leading universities nationwide
conferences convening scholars around Jewish wisdom and contemporary scholarship
peer-reviewed books establishing Jewish wisdom as a serious academic resource
of articles seeding Jewish ideas across academic fields
IJSS is currently recruiting and supporting faculty fellows at leading universities — scholars in education, ecology, mental health, social justice, and AI ethics — who draw on Jewish and Hebrew sources to enrich their research, teaching, and scholarly communities. These are respected professors already embedded in their fields. We are not asking them to become advocates. We are giving them intellectual resources that strengthen their work and expand the presence of Jewish ideas in American academic life.
Our model is inside-out: rather than trying to change campus culture through public advocacy or outside intervention, we equip respected scholars to introduce Jewish wisdom from within the disciplines that shape public thought. This is the foundation, not the ceiling. As IJSS grows, so will the fellowship — reaching into new disciplines, new institutions, and new conversations where Jewish wisdom has something vital to contribute. The five areas are a beginning. The vision is far larger.
“By developing a network that college professors can understand what Jewish spirituality means, in terms of common sense wisdom, relaying fundamental core ideas — and ideals – that are clear and concise and easy to digest and are irrefutable. And to communicate those ideas to their fellow professors and then to students.”
Stanley Middleman — CEO, Freedom Mortgage
IJSS organizes its fellowship and programming around five initial focus areas where Jewish wisdom has distinctive and underappreciated things to say:
Education
How Jewish approaches to learning, questioning, and knowledge transmission can enrich pedagogy across disciplines.
Ecology
Jewish frameworks for human responsibility, stewardship, and the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Prison Reform & Social Justice
Teshuvah, dignity, and restorative models drawn from Jewish legal and ethical tradition.
Mental Health & Wellness
Insights from Jewish contemplative and ethical tradition applied to well-being and psychological health.
The Ethics of AI
Jewish sources on human dignity, responsibility, and the limits of technology in an age of artificial intelligence.
The research areas are a framework, not a finish line. The deeper goal is the creation of a genuine intellectual community — one that sustains itself, grows, and multiplies its influence over time. IJSS provides fellows with hands-on research support, facilitates collaboration among fellows and their peers across institutions, and actively helps scholars connect Jewish wisdom to the work they are already doing.
As fellows deepen their engagement with Jewish wisdom, something important happens: they move from participants to champions. They write and present articles that carry these ideas into their teaching, their publications, and their collegial networks. This is how Jewish wisdom actually disseminates into academia — paper by paper, conference by conference.
Fellows introduce Jewish wisdom to colleagues. Colleagues become fellows. The network grows not through recruitment drives, but through the natural spread of ideas that have proven their worth. What IJSS is building is not a program with participants, but a movement with believers.
“Many scholars lack intellectual community and feel pressure to avoid new interdisciplinary thinking. IJSS seeks to show that Jewish mystical sources are not only relevant to contemporary problems, but a source of real positive transformation.”
Ariel Evan Mayse — Stanford University, Senior Scholar in Residence
Overwhelmed With Response
When IJSS opened its fellowship call for 2026–2027, applications arrived over two months from scholars across the country and around the world: professors, researchers, educators, and practitioners from disciplines ranging from systems engineering and AI to bioethics, psychotherapy, and Jewish mysticism.
initial core fellows selected
disciplines represented
continents represented
outputs per fellow — academic and public-facing
The cohort is intergenerational, from junior faculty to distinguished emerita professors, spanning education research and AI ethics to bioethics, Jewish spiritual wisdom, rhetoric, and interfaith studies. Fellows come from research universities, theological seminaries, and independent institutes across the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom — Jewish and non-Jewish institutions alike. Some bring decades of immersion in Jewish texts; others are encountering this tradition seriously for the first time.
Fellows are working on questions as varied as how communities preserve and transmit knowledge in an age of machine-generated text, what ancient practices of reading can offer to the design of trustworthy AI systems, whether language itself can be violent, how to teach religious texts in secular public school classrooms without bias, and what Jewish frameworks of repair and transformation can contribute to contemporary justice movements.
“A cohort of people who already share a framework tends to refine what they already believe. This group is built to surface the assumptions each side doesn’t know they’re making. The newcomers to Jewish sources ask questions the Jewish text scholars stopped asking years ago, and the text scholars catch moves the newcomers don’t realize are contestable. What I’m most looking forward to is watching methods travel — seeing a tool or question native to one field get picked up, misused productively, and turned into something neither side would have arrived at alone.”
Ziva Hassenfeld — Lead Fellow, IJSS; Associate Professor of Jewish Education, Brandeis University
Spiritual Wisdom and Education: Ancient Sources, Contemporary Questions
IJSS convened a two-day conference at Stanford bringing together scholars and educators from across the country — Jewish and non-Jewish, academic and practitioner, experts in Jewish texts and entirely new to them — to explore what Jewish spiritual traditions have to offer contemporary education. Organized by Ariel Evan Mayse and co-sponsored by IJSS, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and the Stanford Department of Religious Studies.
Rather than formal lectures, the conference centered on small-group text study and facilitated dialogue — a format drawn from Jewish pedagogical tradition itself. Scholars who had never encountered Hasidic and Jewish spiritual texts found themselves in genuine intellectual conversation with them. Non-Jewish educators discovered frameworks for their own pedagogy. Jewish scholars found their ideas taken seriously by colleagues who had no prior stake in Jewish thought.
Attendees reported that the conference’s sourcebook became an ongoing resource for their teaching, and several planned to implement specific facilitation models in their own classrooms.
“I felt like we really took the ivory tower out of the ivory tower, and showed how Talmudic and Hasidic and Jewish spiritual texts of all kinds and ideas can speak profoundly to smart people across divides of expertise and background.”
Conference attendee
Since its inception in 2016, IJSS has published four books:
Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Transformative Paradigm for the World
Philip Wexler (z’l), founding Executive Director of IJSS, with Eli Rubin and Michael Wexler (2019)
The first volume to seriously explore the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s social ideas and activism. The Rebbe not only engineered a global Jewish renaissance but also became an advocate for public education, criminal justice reform, women’s empowerment, and alternative energy. From the personal to the global, his teachings chart a practical path for the replacement of materialism, alienation, anxiety and divisiveness with a dignified and joyous reciprocity.
Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation: Hasidism and Society
Philip Wexler (2018)
A collection of essays presented at the Institute’s inaugural conference in Briarcliff Manor, New York in the summer of 2017, bringing together internationally renowned scholars from diverse disciplines who bring Jewish spiritual knowledge and practice to bear on contemporary issues in society, including gerontology and education. Contributors include Jonathan Garb, Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Elliot R. Wolfson of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov’s Mysticism
Moshe Idel (2019)
Deals with the central practices of the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, and their sources in the Safedian Kabbalah of Rabbi Moses Cordovero — including the loud pronunciation of vocables during prayer, study of the Torah and eventually profane speech, as conducive to some form of union with the divine.
Spiritual Education: The Educational Theory and Practice of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson
Aryeh Solomon (2019)
An expansive volume presenting the different educational methodologies shared by the Rebbe throughout the period of his leadership, bringing this collection of teachings to bear on a wide array of contemporary issues in the education system.
IJSS is meeting a real and underappreciated need: the need to build a trusted, enduring Jewish intellectual presence inside the American university. We are not promising quick fixes. We are doing the patient, rigorous work of planting ideas in the institutions that will shape the next generation’s understanding of the world — and of Judaism’s place in it.
We invite you to be part of that work.