The Abarbanel Institute begins from a simple conviction: education should help students frame fundamental questions, not supply ready-made answers. We create opportunities for serious study and intellectual exchange, trusting students to decide where their inquiries lead.
A Message from the Founder
I founded the Abarbanel Institute because I believe that young people should encounter the world before they are asked to make up their minds about it.
Our students are growing up at a time when they are constantly encouraged to take sides. The questions facing them as Jews are real and consequential, and they will need convictions with which to meet them. But education should not begin by telling students what those convictions ought to be. It should give them the knowledge, experience, and intellectual confidence to arrive at convictions of their own — and the humility to know that even deeply held convictions may need to be reconsidered.
That is why Abarbanel begins with serious books, difficult questions, and encounters with people and places that complicate what students already know. We choose carefully what is worth studying, but we do not decide beforehand what our students should conclude from it. A seminar succeeds when students learn to listen closely, argue honestly, change their minds when the evidence demands it, and live thoughtfully with questions that admit no easy resolution.
I believe this is especially important for Jewish education. Jewish young people should take pride in belonging to an extraordinary people and tradition. But a durable Jewish identity cannot depend on shielding them from complexity or protecting inherited convictions from serious examination. We should trust them with the richness of the Jewish past, the variety of Jewish life, and the difficulty of the present.
My hope is that Abarbanel students leave us more knowledgeable and more confident as Jews, but also more curious, more independent, and less certain that every difficult question must have a simple answer. They will inherit a complicated world. Our task is not to simplify it for them, but to prepare them to live in it with seriousness, judgment, and courage.
— Aaron Tugendhaft
Board of Directors
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![Emil Kleinhaus]()
Emil Kleinhaus
BOARD CHAIR
Emil Kleinhaus is a partner at the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz. He received a B.A., summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale College, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Emil served as a law clerk for Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and for Judge José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is a trustee of several educational and non-profit institutions, including the Ramaz School and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
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![Aaron Tugendhaft]()
Aaron Tugendhaft
FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT
Aaron Tugendhaft founded The Abarbanel Institute in 2024. Educated in Chicago, New York, Paris, and Jerusalem, Aaron currently serves as the Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, and New York University. From 2021-23, he was Chair of the History Department at the Ramaz Upper School in New York City, where he received the Abraham Pilchik Award for Teaching and Mentorship.
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![Aaron Greenberg]()
Aaron Greenberg
TREASURER
Currently a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Aaron Greenberg previously served as Deputy Director of a workforce development organization in Los Angeles, led the U.S. branch of Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, and, while earning his Ph.D. at Yale, served three terms on the New Haven City Council. Aaron has taught at Yale College, Yale-NUS, Wesleyan University, and Deep Springs College. He sits on the board of the Gull Island Institute, is a founding board member of the Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, and serves as an appointed member of the Los Angeles County Economy and Efficiency Commission.
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![Aviva Rothman]()
Aviva Rothman
SECRETARY
Aviva Rothman is the inaugural dean’s associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, where she is a member of the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Aviva is the author of The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and The Dawn of Modern Cosmology: Copernicus to Newton (Penguin, 2023). She also serves as the Secretary of the Board of Trustees of Oheb Zedek Cedar Sinai Synagogue in Cleveland, OH.
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![Leon Wieseltier]()
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier is the editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics. He was educated at Columbia and Oxford, where he studied with Isaiah Berlin, and later did advanced work on Jewish history and thought at Harvard. In 1983, he was appointed Literary Editor of The New Republic, a position which he held until 2014. He is the author of Kaddish (1989).
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Miriam Krupka
Miriam Krupka is Associate Principal at the Ramaz Upper School in New York City. She also chairs the Tanakh/Bible Department, shaping and building curriculum and identifying new and creative resources to help ensure that Torah learning at Ramaz continuously expands in depth, sophistication, and richness. She completed a Masters in Jewish Philosophy from Columbia University, where her thesis work focused on the messianic writings of Isaac Abarbanel, and has lectured widely to adult audiences in a variety of synagogues, academic, and community venues on topics related to Tanakh, philosophy, and education.
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Dave Doneson
Dave Doneson is CEO of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science. Prior to joining the American Committee, Dave served as Chief Development Officer of the American Technion Society and Director of Development for the University of Michigan Health System. Dave holds a Bachelor of Business Administration with Distinction from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. He attended Phillips Academy and Yale University, and served as a lone soldier in the Israel Defense Forces as a Sergeant in the Armor Corps.
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![Tamara Tweel]()
Tamara Mann Tweel
Tamara Mann Tweel is a Senior Program Director at The Teagle Foundation, where she is focused on efforts to strengthen the civic dimension of undergraduate education. Previously, she served as the Founder and Director of Civic Spirit. She serves on the Advisory Council of the Princeton University Office of Religious Life, the Board of the Jack Miller Center, and the Board of Advisors of the Moynihan Center at City College. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, an M.A. in theology from the Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. in political philosophy and art history from Duke University.
Why Abarbanel?
Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel knew the world and served the Jewish people.
Born in Lisbon in 1437, Abarbanel was at once a statesman and a scholar, a financier and a biblical commentator. He advised kings and princes while remaining deeply engaged in the life and learning of the Jewish people. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, he left with them, eventually rebuilding his life in Italy.
We named the Institute for Abarbanel because he represents a kind of Jewish life we hope our students will make their own: deeply rooted without being insular, at home in the Jewish tradition while curious about the wider world.
Abarbanel did not have the luxury of choosing between Jewish life and the complexity of the world around him. Neither will our students. They will encounter people whose convictions differ from their own, institutions they must learn to navigate, ideas that challenge what they believe, and circumstances for which no inherited answer is entirely sufficient.
Education should prepare them for that encounter. We want Abarbanel Scholars to know their tradition well enough to draw strength from it, to know the world well enough to move confidently within it, and to possess the judgment to meet complexity without retreating from it.
That is what it means, for us, to embrace complexity.
