The Jewish Theological Seminary has named Rabbi Mike Uram as its subsequent chancellor, elevating a Jewish educator greatest recognized for his time as government director of the College of Pennsylvania Hillel to steer Conservative Judaism’s flagship college and rabbinical college.
Uram, 49, will succeed Shuly Rubin Schwartz, who’s stepping down on the finish of the 2025-26 educational yr and can turn into chancellor emerita.
Ordained at JTS in 2005, Uram at the moment serves as the primary chief Jewish studying officer on the Jewish Federations of North America. He beforehand spent greater than 16 years on the Penn Hillel, the place he rose from campus rabbi to government director and constructed a nationwide fame for his concepts on encouraging younger Jews to participate in Jewish life. He left Hillel in 2020 to steer Pardes North America, a department of the egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem whose alumni usually go on to enroll in rabbinical faculties.
In a press release to the JTS group, Alan Levine, who chairs its board of trustees, described Uram as “the appropriate individual to assist JTS meet this essential second.”
“He brings to our establishment a rabbinic voice, a connection to a brand new era of present and rising Jewish leaders, and deep expertise serving the broader Jewish group that we have to have interaction as a part of the important middle,” wrote Levine.
His choice marks a notable departure for JTS, which traditionally has been led by students or lecturers. Uram, who doesn’t have a PhD, didn’t develop up within the Conservative motion and has not served in a long-term congregational pulpit, known as it a “daring transfer to rent somebody who’s exterior of the molds.”
However in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Company this week, Uram described his novel background as his power. He pointed to his experiences in larger training, fundraising at each Hillel and JFNA, and in settings the place he gained an understanding of “the dynamics of the bigger Jewish ecosystem exterior of Jewish denominations.”
Arnold Eisen, Shuly Rubin Schwartz and Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Mike Uram’s predecessors as chancellors of the Jewish Theological Seminary, attend a farewell occasion in Schwartz’s honor in Manhattan, April 27, 2026. (Ellen Dubin Images)
He additionally spoke of his signature initiative at Penn, the “Jewish Renaissance Mission,” which aimed to succeed in college students who may not in any other case stroll right into a Hillel constructing.
“Within the means of constructing that, we greater than tripled Penn Hillel’s funds by new fundraising, and we greater than doubled the variety of college students that we have been participating annually,” stated Uram. Uram drew on his expertise at Penn in his 2016 guide, “Subsequent Era Judaism: How Faculty College students and Hillel Can Assist Reinvent Jewish Organizations.”
He has related ambitions for JTS, each in including new donors and lengthening JTA’s attain past its partitions.
“The concept is that we will each proceed to do the issues which have made JTS the main Jewish educational establishment for the previous 140 years, and open up the ability of JTS’s method to check and faith and group and values to a a lot bigger viewers throughout North America,” stated Uram.
At a farewell occasion Monday evening honoring Schwartz, audio system praised her efforts to enhance the “pipeline” for incoming clergy, whose ranks had dipped in recent times. The outcomes have been promising: 2025 has seen 23 coming into rabbinical and cantorial college students, in comparison with 16 in 2024.
Uram additionally praised these efforts, whereas emphasizing that JTS is greater than a rabbinical and cantorial college.
“Individuals do consider JTS as only a seminary, however it has been constructed into one thing far more than that for a very long time,” he stated, pointing to its undergraduate applications and graduate faculties in Jewish training, thought, rabbinic literature and philosophy. Beneath Schwartz, JTS launched new educational applications, together with levels in artistic writing, religious care and government management, and expanded on-line studying.
He described the establishment as “a deep R&D division for advancing Jewish information and accelerating that information out into the world.”
That expansive imaginative and prescient is supposed to reinvigorate a centrist motion whose membership has flattened whereas Orthodoxy and Reform, denominations to its proper and left, have been rising. A lot of outstanding JTS rabbinic alumni have additionally chosen to determine synagogues and academic establishments that don’t fly the Conservative banner.
Partially in response to this contraction, the seminary bought roughly $96 million in Manhattan actual property in 2016 to assist fund a significant campus redevelopment, a undertaking that in the end changed its historic library constructing with a smaller facility and shifted giant parts of its famed Judaica assortment to off-site storage. In 2021, JTS quietly deaccessioned and bought uncommon manuscripts and books from its library.
Uram is assured that regardless of structural pressures dealing with JTS and the Conservative motion, the establishment can protect its scholarly stature and ethical authority whereas increasing its viewers, rebuilding management pipelines and persuading a brand new era {that a} legacy establishment can nonetheless function a central tackle for Jewish studying and life.
For years, he stated, the motion has been “caught in attempting to determine how a lot it needs to carry onto and the way it needs to vary.” Now, he argued, the query the motion needs to be asking is “not about how can we restore the nice previous days, however what’s the Jewish future that we wish to construct?”
He sees Conservative Judaism’s centrism as a counterweight, even an antidote, to a broader social and political pattern towards polarization.
“It’s not shocking that it has misplaced market share, as a result of we’ve been dwelling in a time the place the center has dropped out,” stated Uram, who grew up attending a Reform synagogue in suburban Cleveland.
“We’re dwelling on this second of unimaginable political polarization. Individuals are transferring extra into these echo chambers,” he added. What is required, he stated, is what he calls “the muscular center” — an area that “has to reject simplicity in favor of complexity.”
He additionally believes JTS can reply to a Jewish group deeply affected by the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel and its aftermath, which, he stated, “compelled many Jewish of us to reexamine their assumptions about their very own Jewish identities.”
In that surroundings, he stated, “there’s an enormous starvation to deepen a relationship with Judaism” and “to conquer imposter syndrome and Jewish insecurity.”
A examine area on the Jewish Theological Seminary in higher Manhattan. (JTA picture)
He argued that JTS is uniquely positioned to reply by providing “deep and genuine” Jewish studying that continues to be broadly accessible.
Though his tenure at Penn Hillel predated the post-Oct. 7 turmoil on faculty campuses, he earned reward — and a “Ahead 50” designation from the Jewish newspaper — for encouraging quiet, student-led responses to the rising campus motion to boycott Israel. His method stood in distinction to the extra aggressive authorized challenges and “title and disgrace” ways deployed by exterior campus teams.
As chancellor, Uram stated, he’ll clarify that engagement with Israel will stay central to JTS’s mission and its coaching of clergy. Requested if he would draw any purple traces for present or potential college students, Uram stated {that a} Jewish training — for the rabbinate, academia or the Jewish classroom — could be incomplete with out understanding what has turn into the world’s largest Jewish group and the primary expression of Jewish self-determination within the Land of Israel in millennia.
“Any scholar who’s coming to JTS has the chance and actually the duty to have interaction deeply within the broadest set of expressions of all issues Jewish,” he stated. “I can’t think about a state of affairs the place a JTS training wouldn’t embody severe engagement with all issues associated to Israel.”
Requested what message his hiring sends to the broader Jewish world, Uram referred to his monitor report.
“I feel the assertion that JTS is making is that it’s in an extremely sturdy place, and that it’s the appropriate time to rent somebody whose background is as an innovator who was a artistic and profitable fundraiser,” he stated, “and somebody who has actual expertise main a Jewish nonprofit in constructing a productive tradition and navigating political difficulties.”
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