Core Investments / Major Grants

brandeis

Brandeis Universitywww.brandeis.edu

In 2007, ACBP announced the creation of the Charles R. Bronfman Visiting Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation at Brandeis University. This competitive academic position is open to creative thinkers of every kind and aims to change the way the Jewish community thinks about itself. The winner of the competition - administered by the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis – will be awarded a two-year visiting professorship at Brandeis, during which time (s)he will be provided with the time and resources needed to research and write a major English-language work based on his or her idea. The Charles R. Bronfman Visiting Chair is inspired, in part, by a similar competition conducted by Sears Roebuck chairman Julius Rosenwald in 1929, offering a ten thousand dollar prize for the winning entry to the question: “how can Judaism best adjust itself to and influence modern life.” The result was Mordechai Kaplan's seminal work, Judaism as a Civilization, which quickly became the most influential Jewish book of its time, spawning new ways of thinking about Jews, Jewish institutions, the Jewish religion, and Jewish life as a whole.

ACBP also supports the Brandeis-Israel Collaborative Research Initiative, a program established in 2012 that seeks to broaden and deepen Brandeis’ longstanding relationship with Israel by providing seed funding for joint research projects between Brandeis faculty and their colleagues at Israeli universities. This initiative encourages and facilitates collaborative projects of scholarly merit and will also strengthen institutional relationships between Brandeis and Israeli universities to stimulate additional forms of cooperation.