This episode of The Grand Conversation: "Supporting Sephardic Students in Our Schools" features an important conversation between Rabbi Shmuel Hain and Ms. Denise Samstein, Judaic Studies faculty member and Director of Sephardic Engagement at SAR High School. Questions discussed include: What is the experience of Sephardic families and students in schools where they are a minority? What more can we do to include Sephardic history, culture and halakha in our school life?

This episode of The Grand Conversation is devoted to the subject of Building Jewish Confidence. In the podcast, Rabbi Shmuel Hain is in conversation with Ms. Adina Shoulson, Chair of SAR High School’s History Department and Dr. Caryn Keller, History faculty at SAR HS. Ms. Shoulson and Dr. Keller were the coordinators of Am V’Ometz: Building Jewish Confidence Conference. This conference, along with a number of curricular and co-curricular activities at SAR HS and ongoing projects at Machon Siach are designed to instill and reinforce students’ confidence in their Jewish identity.

This special episode of the Grand Conversation is devoted to the subject of teaching Jewish sexual ethics at SAR high school and in the broader modern orthodox community. Rabbi Hain speaks with Ms. Shuli Taubes, the author of This Too is Torah, SAR High School's tenth grade beit midrash program on Jewish sexual ethics, values and practice.

American Jews have benefited greatly from access to higher education and the professional pathways it opened to them. Today, here is a great deal of concern about the culture and climate for Jews and Zionists on campus. But our students are still striving for acceptance into competitive universities, and we still see our students struggling with the endless demands of the college admissions process, one that seems to get more daunting with every year. Even as we reconsider whether our community should remain bought in to this system, is there any way to rethink how we define, demonstrate, and reward merit? Is it possible to enjoy the benefits of striving for excellence without all of the costs that our current system imposes? Professor Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School, author of The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, speaks with Rabbi Tully Harcsztark and Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the nature of problem, how we got here, and what we might do about it. * This was recorded prior to October 7th, 2023.

In this episode of the Grand Conversation, Rabbi Shmuel Hain discusses SAR High School's Vaad program with Rabbanit Lisa Schlaff and Ms. Shira Schiowitz. Vaad enhances the spiritual growth and meaning making of our faculty and students by devoting one period a week to their inner world. Listen to find out how SAR HS teachers and students develop the skills and dispositions to support one another in their religious and emotional journeys. SAR High School's Vaad program was developed in partnership with Lifnai V'lifnim, an organization dedicated to deepening connections and transforming relationships with oneself, with others, with community and with Torah and God.

On this special episode of the Grand Conversation, Rabbi Shmuel Hain hosts a discussion with Rabbi Jonathan Kroll and Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the upcoming presidential election. In this polarized moment, how has SAR High School tried to foster an environment where all members of our community, staff and students, can engage in political discussion with civility and respect?Transcript Notes: Election Education: A Presidential election provides an opportunity for our students to explore important issues that affect the future of our country. While the political theater is often full of divisiveness we believe that our students can engage issues civilly and with deep respect for each other. A committee of staff members is coordinating educational programming for our students over the course of the next few months. During in-service we shared this draft of an affirmative set of principles that guide the way we as a community approach the election.

SAR educators, Dr. Rivka Schwartz, Ms. Sarah Medved, and Ms. Rebecca Glassberg, who have experimented with different forms of ungrading--removing teachers' grading power in the classroom and making students responsible for their own learning--talk about their experiences, what brought them to ungrading, and the anticipated and unanticipated outcomes.  

David Sable and Aaron Mitchell join Rabbi Harcsztark to discuss The Confidence Project, a Machon Siach initiative to connect SAR students and faculty with their peers in three Bronx high schools. This follows on the relationship that SAR Academy has developed with Atmosphere Academy in Riverdale. As we began to bring SAR students together with students from Comp Sci High, The Theater and Arts Production Company School (TAPCo) and the Fannie Lou Hamer School, our teachers worked with Aaron Mitchell and David Sable to prepare our students for conversations across cultural differences. David and Aaron share their professional experiences and guidance as Rabbi Harcsztark shares his vision for this project.    

American Jews and Higher Education:This series will explore the experience of American Jews in higher education, and consider some of the challenges raised in recent years by shifting campus culture and changes in law and policies around admissions, discrimination, and free speech on campus. As a school committed to the "grand conversation between Torah and the world", the majority of whose graduates continue on to secular college, how are we thinking about some of these issues, and what work do we need to do to prepare our graduates to engage them?Episode 1: Past is PrologueIn this episode, Rabbi Shmuel Hain interviews Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the history of Jews' experiences on American college campuses, from the arrival of waves of Eastern European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, through decades of exclusions and quotas through greater acceptance on campuses after World War II. How was higher education once seen as an essential component of American Jews' "making it"? And how has shifting campus culture, and shifting cultural and educational norms, in the last part of the 20th and early 21st century, affected that acceptance, and Jewish students' comfort on campuses?

In this episode, Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz speaks with two individuals who understand how to gather and use data to offer insight into schools' successes and areas for improvement. Her first guest is Rabbi Joseph Beyda, principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School, who discusses his use of data to take the measure of his school community and assess the effectiveness of its programs. Her second guest is Jake Trumbo, project coordinator at Bach Harrison, who oversaw the three administrations of the survey gathering data about substance use among Modern Orthodox adolescents. He discusses the process of surveying, and what it looked like from his side.This is the second episode in our new series: Substance Use among Modern Orthodox Adolescents: Identifying Problems, Implementing Solutions.

For the past six years, Machon Siach has been working to understand the scope of the substance use problem among Modern Orthodox adolescents, and to identify and implement evidence-based interventions to address that problem. This eventually led to the implementation of the Guiding Good Choices parenting program for all 9th grade parents. In this work, we have been guided by Dalene Beaulieu, an expert from the University of Washington's Social Development Research Group. Listen as we explore what we learned from her, and what she learned about our community, over these years. This is the first episode in our new series: Substance Use among Modern Orthodox Adolescents: Identifying Problems, Implementing Solutions.

In this episode, Rabbi Harcsztark and Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz discuss Dr. Kattan Gribetz's book and research on ​Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism. Key questions include: What do we learn from how the rabbis conceptualized time and how can we translate some of these insights and values to our high school students? How do we deepen our understanding of gendered time including the differences between men and women in Jewish law rooted in the conceptualization of time? What is the relationship between the academic study of Talmud and the religious engagement of Talmud Torah?

This episode features an eye-opening discussion between Rabbi Tully Harcsztark and Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth- the director of Mosaica, an Israeli NGO focusing on insider religious mediation.What exactly does the work of insider religious mediation look like during a war?Is there ongoing dialogue between religious leaders in Muslim and Jewish communities in the Middle East at this terrible time?What should we as high school educators be teaching our students about the role of religion in this seemingly intractable conflict?

This special episode of the Grand Conversation, recorded at the end of October, is devoted to important, complex, and ongoing issues being discussed in our community in this Post-October 7th world: How can we meaningfully connect with and support our alumni on college campuses, and how are we helping parents and current SAR HS students navigate the college guidance process?Our guest host is Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz, Associate Principal of SAR HS and Director of Research and Program Development at Machon Siach. Our two guests are leaders of SAR High School’s College Counseling team, Mr. Michael Courtney, Director of College Counseling at SAR HS and Ms. Michelle Biller-Levy, Associate Director of College Counseling at SAR HS and Director of Post-Graduate Initiatives, at Machon Siach.

This special episode of the Grand Conversation emerged from the meaningful UJA mission to Israel that our Founding Principal Rabbi Tully Harcsztark was fortunate to join. On that mission, Rabbi Harcsztark ran into Effie Shoham- Shteiner in Jerusalem, an historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History. He is an associate professor at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er-Shevah. Since October 7th, Effie has not been pursuing his academic interests. Instead, he has been volunteering around-the-clock on behalf of the citizens of Medinat Yisrael, especially those from the south who were most directly impacted by the October 7th attack. We are honored to share with you Rabbi Harcsztark in conversation with Effie about the work he has been doing since October 7th.

This special series of the Grand Conversation is devoted to the topic of Gemara Education. Our guest host is Rabbi Tully Harcsztark, Founding Principal of SAR HS and Dean of Machon Siach. In this first episode of the series, Rabbi Harcsztark and Dr. Elana Stein Hain have a timely discussion on whether and how to teach the talmudic sugya of redeeming captives in the aftermath of the Hamas terror attacks and taking of some 200 Israeli hostages. They also discuss Dr. Stein Hain's research (and soon-to-be-published book Circumventing the Law) on legal loopholes in rabbinic literature and how to teach this subject to high school students and adults.

In this episode of The Grand Conversation, Rabbi Tully Harcsztark Rebecca Wolf, and Yossi Ben-Harush discuss several important questions about Israel Education at S.A.R. High School, including: How has our approach to teaching Modern Israel evolved over the years? How do we navigate critical discussions of Israel current events in our history classrooms? How do we educate our students to participate in difficult discussions about Israel as insiders? What role does advocacy play in Israel education?

In this episode of The Grand Conversation, Rabbanit Lisa Schlaff joins Rabbi Shmuel Hain to discuss the goals of high school gemara education, recent trends in gemara education in post high school yeshivot and midrashot, and how teaching Torah Shebe'al Peh at S.A.R. High School has changed since the school's founding twenty years ago.

In this episode of The Grand Conversation, Dr. Jeffrey Rubenstein and Rabbi Tully Harcstark join Rabbi Shmuel Hain to discuss methods and tools which are valuable in teaching gemara to high school students, including both academic and conceptual/lomdus approaches.

In this episode of The Grand Conversation, Ms. Chana Krasnjanski joins Rabbi Shmuel Hain to reflect on the importance of authenticity and spirituality in the classroom. They discuss the distinction between personal and private information as well as the potential differences and parallels between the secular studies classroom and the Judaic studies classroom.