Commencement & Ordination 2026/5786

rabbinic ordination & master of arts in jewish studies

Max Davis
Risa Dunbar
Alex Goldfarb
Nicole Golomb
Joshua Greenberg
Sara Klugman
Jayce Koester
David Magazine Malamud
Abigail Oshins
Sarah Rovin
Julia Spiegel
Lisë Stern
Samuel Tygiel
Carrie Watkins
Anna Wolfe
Talia Young

master of Jewish education

Dalilah Conen
Tamara Kipper
Maayan Lev
Talia Rasiel
David Ratz
Eliana Stein

Master of Arts in Jewish Studies

Rayden Marcum

Certificate in Jewish Educational Leadership

Alexandra Droz

certificate in teaching & learning in Jewish education

Lisah Bernstein
Jessica Glick
Tova Weinronk

Certificate in Jewish Sacred Music

Allie Weiner

Honorary Degrees

Robert Bank
Former President and CEO of American Jewish World Service

Robert Bank served most recently as President and CEO of American Jewish World Service (AJWS) from 2016-2026. Working at the intersection of Jewish values and global issues, AJWS advances community-driven change in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and advocates in the United States for foreign policies that prioritize human rights and democratic norms, in partnership with rabbis and cantors nationwide. Under Robert’s leadership, AJWS launched and completed a $50 million, ten-year initiative to advance gender equity, supporting organizations that help young women make informed choices about their lives and develop the skills to advocate for their rights.

Throughout his career, Robert has fought for the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQI+ people, and people living with HIV/AIDS. Before joining AJWS, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and worked as an attorney with the New York City Department of Law, litigating on behalf of vulnerable populations. Robert serves on the advisory board of the Safety Respect Equity Network, a coalition addressing sexual harassment and gender discrimination in Jewish workplaces and communal spaces, and on the board of Leading Edge, which helps Jewish organizations strengthen performance through culture and leadership.

Born in South Africa, Robert’s commitment to social justice is rooted in his experience growing up under apartheid. He was deeply influenced by members of his family and other indefatigable activists, many of them Jewish, who fought for justice in the anti-apartheid movement. His Jewish identity was further shaped by the Jewish day schools he attended in Cape Town and by the values and history of his grandparents, who fled antisemitism in Russia and Europe.

Gerald Chan
Co-founder and chair of the Morningside Group, a private equity and venture capital group

Gerald Chan is a scientist who has forged positive change across medicine and healthcare through technology.

Gerald is a co-founder of Morningside, a venture investment enterprise that works with technology-based startups. Working with academic scientists, he has started over two dozen biotech companies across diverse therapeutic areas. Some of these biotech companies have opened up entirely new fields of medicine addressing mitochondrial dysfunction, innate immunity, and dementia. He has also launched a number of companies that use artificial intelligence to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare.

Gerald is the Chairman of NASDAQ-listed biotechnology company Apellis Pharmaceuticals. He also chairs or serves on the boards of several privately held biotech companies.

He is a trustee of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and a member of the Dean’s Board of Advisors of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He chairs the Advisory Committee of Emory University’s Center for Innovative and Affordable Medicine and was the former Chair of the Innovation Advisory Committee of the Wellcome Trust in London.

Gerald has received eight honorary degrees conferred by universities in the United Kingdom, United States, and Hong Kong. He was elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.

Benjamin Shevach memorial Award for Excellence in Jewish Educational Leadership

Sharon Feiman-Nemser
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Professor Emerita of Jewish Education at Brandeis University and founding director of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education

Sharon Feiman-Nemser is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Professor Emerita of Jewish Education at Brandeis University. Before coming to Brandeis in 2001, she served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Michigan State where she directed innovative teacher education programs and pioneered research on teacher learning. At Brandeis, she was the founding director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education which promotes scholarship on learning and teaching in the diverse settings of Jewish education. She founded the DeLeT program which prepared new teachers for Jewish day schools and co-founded the Teacher Leader Fellowship which turns experienced day school teachers into instructional leaders. Signature features of her work are the close interplay between research and practice and an abiding curiosity about how people learn to teach well.

A former high school English teacher, Feiman-Nemser earned a BA from the University of Michigan, an MA in English from the University of Chicago and an EdD in Curriculum and Instruction from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has written extensively on teacher education, learning to teach, mentoring and professional development. A collection of her writings, Teachers as Learners, was published in 2012 by Harvard Education Press. In 2018, she received a presidential citation from the American Educational Research Association for her groundbreaking scholarship on teacher learning.

Sidney Hillson/Rose Bronstein memorial Award Award for Promotion of Hebrew Language and Literature

Abigail Gilman
Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University

Abigail Gillman is Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. In addition to serving as Department Chair, she convenes the Hebrew Program and is a core faculty member of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

She is a scholar of Jewish literature and the author of two books: Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (Penn State Press, 2009) and A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Her recent articles deal with Bertha Pappenheim, Emma Lazarus, and Heinrich Heine. She is currently writing a history of the mashal that traces the influence of the ancient parable—a genre for teaching wisdom–on modernist and postmodern writers such as Franz Kafka, Aharon Appelfeld, and Etgar Keret.

Throughout her career, Gillman has enjoyed teaching on an adjunct basis at Hebrew College. She taught adult learners and M.A. students in online and in-person courses on Jewish literature, Israeli Cinema, Hebrew language and other topics, and she taught three week-long intensive summer seminars on Jewish memory, Jewish modernism, and parables.

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