Miriam Heller Stern
I appreciated the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the conflict without being told what I should think or what I should do about it. Instead, I was given a diverse community of colleagues with whom I could debrief and figure out for myself how to incorporate what I had encountered into my leadership.
Dr. Miriam Heller Stern joined Encounter’s inaugural Intensive Leadership Seminar in June 2016 and returned as a program facilitator in August 2017. Of her experience, she tells us, “My most profound interactions on Encounter were with fellow educators: the librarian in a small village, a high school English teacher, an instructor at Hebrew University. These were fellow women who believe that teaching, learning and empathy must be tools that are engaged to uplift society, within and beyond the classroom. Their stories of everyday life and their struggles revealed real voices and faces behind the public political discourse that I had not seen or heard. Understanding the human element of the conflict expanded my peripheral vision in a land that I love and hold dear.”
Miriam is National Director of the School of Education of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, based in Los Angeles. She is passionate about empowering Jewish educational leaders to engage in their work intentionally, skillfully and creatively. Dr. Stern earned her Ph.D. in education policy and practice and her MA in history from Stanford University as a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Her current research and writing focuses on teaching, learning and leadership that engages the arts and creativity. She founded Dream Lab, a strategic initiative aimed to infuse the field of Jewish education with creativity through professional development, thought leadership and talent cultivation. Previously, she served as Dean of American Jewish University (AJU)’s Graduate Center for Jewish Education in Los Angeles, where she trained and mentored Jewish educators for a decade. She has taught courses on educational vision/philosophy of education, curriculum development, practitioner research, social foundations of education, and the arts in Jewish education. She has published widely in various academic and professional journals and popular media outlets and is a frequent presenter at academic and professional conferences for educators. Together with her husband Jonathan, she proudly channels her interest in creativity into parenting their three elementary and middle-school aged children.