Saul Kaiserman is the Director of Lifelong Learning for Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York and the editor of the weblog New Jewish Education. He is an innovative leader in youth, travel, music and media education and has lectured and performed internationally for over 20 years.
Mr. Kaiserman serves on the faculty of the Leadership Institute as a mentor for emerging leaders in Jewish education and on the clinical faculty for the New York School of Education at Hebrew Union College (HUC-JIR). He is a regular presenter at the conferences of Limmud NY: Jewish Learning Without Limits, where in 2013 he was an invited presenter for the Community of Educators.
From 2005-2007, Mr. Kaiserman was a Mandel Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, Israel, where his area of focus was on leadership and educational change in congregational settings. He has previously served as Director of Education of Central Synagogue in Manhattan and of the Free Synagogue of Westchester in Mount Vernon, New York. Earlier career highlights include serving as the Director of Education of the Free Synagogue of Westchester in Mount Vernon, New York and the Program Director and Head Songleader for JCC Camp Sabra in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.
Mr. Kaiserman is a frequent contributor to Sh’ma: An Online Journal of Jewish Responsibility, in which his most recent article, “Do-It-Together Jewish Education,” appeared in the February 2010 issue. Other published writings include “A New Kind of Diversity: Jewish Education in a Pluralistic Society," which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Jewish Education News, “Synagogue Schools and Congregational Agendas,” which appeared in the January 2007 issue of Sh’ma, and “Rethinking the Jewish Cultural Renaissance,” co-authored with Stephen Hazan Arnoff, which appeared in its November 2006 issue.
In 2008, Mr. Kaiserman was an invited presenter responding to the Sosland Research Center’s Educators in Jewish Schools Study. In 2007, he chaired the session on the “Relationship between Education and Building Intentional Communities” for the eleventh Quadrennial Conference of the World Council of Jewish Communal Service (WCJCS). In 2006, Mr. Kaiserman presented the paper “The Classroom as the ‘Hub’ of School Community” for the Melton Centre conference “Reframing Jewish Day School Education Worldwide” at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Mr. Kaiserman serves on the education advisory board of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation and the academic advisory committee of the Ivry Prozdor High School at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). He is a former vice-president of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center and was a founding staff member of the TEVA Learning Center for Jewish Environmental Education, on whose advisory board he served for ten years. He has previously served on the education advisory board of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, the student admissions committee for Hebrew Union College (HUC-JIR), the professional development task force of the National Association of Temple Educators (NATE), and the steering committees for Hazon and Kol Zimrah: Meaningful Prayer through Music.
Mr. Kaiserman holds a Master of Arts in Jewish Education from the Davidson School of Education of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He received the title of R.J.E. (Reform Jewish Educator) from the Reform Movement in 2003. He is a native New Yorker and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife, Elizabeth Freirich, and their daughters, Jory and Zeva.