The Bronfman Fellowship
The Bronfman Fellowship is a non-profit educational program for young Jews in Israel and North America.
It was founded in 1987 by philanthropist Edgar M. Bronfman, and is partially funded through his foundation, The Samuel Bronfman Foundation. It was formerly known as The Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel.
The Bronfman Fellowship selects 26 outstanding North American teenagers and 20 Israeli teenagers for a rigorous academic year of seminars including a free, five-week trip to Israel between the summer of Fellows’ junior and senior years of high school. The program educates and inspires exceptional young Jews from diverse backgrounds to grow into leaders grounded in their Jewish identity and committed to social change.
Its network of over 1,000 alumni include writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, and Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket; journalists Anya Kamenetz; Adam Davidson, NPR business correspondent and NYT Magazine Columnist, and Jonathan Tepperman, Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs; and influential Jewish leaders such as Idit Klein, Executive Director of Keshet; Angela Warnick Buchdahl, senior rabbi at Manhattan's Central Synagogue; Rabbi Dan Smokler, of the NYU Bronfman Center and Hillel International; and Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, from The Kavanah Cooperative. Bronfman Fellowship alumni include 8 Rhodes Scholars, 2 Schwarzman Scholars, 4 Supreme Court clerks, 18 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Wexner Fellows and 27 Dorot Fellows.
Their 2011 applicant to fellow ratio was 12:1, whereas Yale’s was 14:1 and Harvard’s 16:1. The Bronfman Fellowship has been listed by Chuck Hughes, former Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, in his book, "What it Really Takes to Get Into the Ivy League and other Highly Selective Colleges" as one of the programs which "act as filters for admissions officers to validate candidates who have been similarly identified by other organizations for talent and promise."
