Maimonides Fund launches in-house institute to turn Sapir Journal ideas into action plans
Maimonides Fund is opening an in-house institute to turn ideas generated by its quarterly Sapir Journal into viable plans of action, tapping Chanan Weissman, a former two-time White House liaison to the American Jewish community, as its director, the organization announced on Wednesday.
According to Maimonides Fund President Mark Charendoff, the impetus for Sapir Institute was feedback from readers of the journal, who wanted to see programs and initiatives inspired by the articles.
“We found that every time we put an issue out, people contacted us and said ‘On this article you raise really good questions, so who’s doing something about this?’ And our response was, ‘We’re a journal, we’re not doing something about this, we just put the idea out there,’” Charendoff told eJewishPhilanthropy on Tuesday. “After a year, we thought maybe there is a vacuum in the market.”
The new institute is scheduled to launch on April 1. For now, Weissman will be the sole member of the team, though it will likely expand with time. “He’ll work closely with Bret Stephens, who’s the editor-in-chief of Sapir and a lot of the vision behind it, and Ariella Saperstein from the Maimonides Fund side,” Charendoff said.