Posen Foundation

The Posen Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that works internationally to support Jewish learning and advance Felix Posen’s belief that a Jewish education is the birthright of every Jewish child and adult. By focusing on the cultural aspects of Jewish history, philosophy, and creativity, the Posen Foundation seeks to offer secular Jews an entrée into Jewish life and learning.

The Posen Foundation works in three main areas: teaching and teacher training; publishing books, textbooks, classroom syllabi, and online resources; and scholarly research. Most its projects are carried out through its office in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The Posen Foundation was started in the early 1980s by philanthropist Felix Posen, whose initial focus was the study of antisemitism. Posen was the main financial supporter of the newly founded Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Soon thereafter, Posen, who was raised Orthodox, became fascinated with the question of what it means to be literate in Jewish history, culture, and ideas as a secular Jew. His reading into Jewish history and ideas—subjects outside the boundary of his religious education—led to concern over the lack of “Jewish literacy” among secular Jews. “These are, after all, the majority of the Jews worldwide,” he had said.

In the 1980s, Posen encountered the concept of Judaism as Culture, which would guide much of his philanthropy during the 1990s and 2000s. Judaism as Culture is an approach to Jewish history, life, and learning that emphasizes Jewish culture, philosophy, and creativity, and includes religion as one aspect of Jewish civilization. It approaches the study of those subjects from a critical, secular point of view.

Although Posen had yet to articulate his approach, as he later would, the principles behind Judaism as Culture would be integral to the Posen Foundation’s future work—though that work would be diverse. During the 1980s, and into the 1990s, the Posen Foundation supported the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (then the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies). In the early 1990s, the Posen Foundation helped create the School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem, an elite, pluralistic school for Israelis, which it supported (along with the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Mandel Foundation) until 1999.

In the early 2000s, the Posen Foundation launched the Posen Project for the Study of Secular Jewish History and Culture, which provided course development grants to more than three-dozen universities in Israel, North America, and Europe. These courses examined the modern, secularizing trends of the post-Enlightenment period of Jewish history, and were taught with various disciplinary approaches, including history, literature, and sociology.

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