15 minute read
Education
This Expanding Jewish University Is Doing Some Unusual Things
By Stewart Ain
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Pharmacy student Adina Kagan in the lab at the Touro College of Pharmacy. (William Taufic for Touro University)
When New York granted university status last February to what had been known until this year as Touro College, it signaled a milestone for what has become America’s largest Jewish-sponsored educational institution.
Touro University, now celebrating its 50th year, has grown far beyond its roots as a small college established by Dr. Bernard Lander in 1971 to give religious Jews a place to obtain a college degree without compromising their Jewish principles while more broadly serving humanity, with a special focus on those who have been historically underserved.
Today, Touro boasts 19,000 students across 36 schools spanning five U.S. states and four countries. Previously recognized as a university in California and Nevada before New York’s Board of Regents granted it university status, Touro offers everything from about half a dozen medical schools to a Jewish theological seminary and yeshiva constructed out of Jerusalem limestone.
Here are a few other things about this unique Jewish institution of higher learning that you might find surprising.
Touro is preparing to open a new medical school in Montana
Montanans long have lamented the lack of any medical schools in their state, which has the nation’s third-highest suicide rate, nintholdest population, and ranks in the bottom 10 when it comes to healthcare quality, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, US Census Bureau and healthcare rankings sources. Eleven of the state’s 56 counties don’t have doctors, and nearly every county has a shortage of healthcare professionals, according to the Montana Department of Labor and Industry.
Touro has plans to step into this vacuum with the establishment of a College of Osteopathic Medicine in Great Falls, a city of some 60,000 people. The school plans to accept 125 students to start and grow quickly to 500 students, with preference given for in-state residents.
With studies showing that 39 percent of physicians practice in the state where they completed medical school, the new school is expected to help address Montana’s physician shortage. It would also further Touro’s commitment to educating a diverse student population: Montana has a high proportion of native American residents, and medical personnel at Tribal health facilities are in dire scarcity.
Touro already runs colleges of osteopathic medicine in the Las Vegas area, the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the city of Middletown in upstate New York, and Vallejo, California, not far from San Francisco. Touro’s MD program is at New York Medical College, the leafy Westchester County campus school that Touro acquired from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in 2011. Today that campus includes programs in medicine, dentistry, physical therapy, speech pathology, public health, nursing, biostatistics, medical ethics and graduate-level biomedical sciences. Touro also runs several nursing and physician assistant programs around the country.
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Uriel Waldman, a second-year year dental student, in the Simulation Lab at the Touro College of Dental Medicine. (William Taufic for Touro University)
Most of Touro’s students are not Jewish, but its programs reflect the university’s rich Jewish character
In New York, Touro long has been known as a place where Orthodox students could obtain a college degree without compromising their religious observance. But nationwide Touro actually has more nonJewish students than Jews. It’s a sign of Touro’s dual mission of serving not just the Jewish community, but the wider world.
Nevertheless, Touro’s program and curricula reflect the university’s Jewish character. Every Touro campus offers kosher food, classes are suspended for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and professional training often includes Jewish elements.
For example, at New York Medical College, religion is part and parcel of the study of medical ethics. Students learn about the role religion plays in medical decisionmaking, and classes recently took a field trip to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan where they discussed, among other things, the ethics of having an anesthesiologist participate in Israel’s capture of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960.
The medical school is perhaps the only one in country in which students are required to take a course in the history of medicine that includes a segment on bioethics after the Holocaust. The school also has an endowed chair in that area of study.
Touro is relocating its central campus to Times Square in Manhattan
For many years, Touro’s headquarters were on 23rd Street in
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Continued from Page 13 Manhattan, with larger campuses in Queens and Brooklyn. Soon, the school will have its central campus located in the heart of New York: Times Square.
Consolidated on eight floors of one of New York’s iconic skyscrapers at 3 Times Square, the 300,000 square feet of space, to be renamed the Cross River campus, will house Touro’s College of Pharmacy, the New York School of Career and Applied Studies, and graduate schools in business, education, Jewish studies, social work and technology. The space will be configured to accommodate not only classrooms but state-of-the-art science and technology labs, event spaces, offices, a library, student lounges and cafes.
The building, which was originally designed as the North American headquarters for Reuters Group, will have a separate entrance and lobby for the university. More than 2,000 staff and students are expected to work and attend class there daily. The university expects to move into the new space next January.
Touro’s other locations outside of New York State include campuses in Nevada, Illinois, New Mexico and California, and overseas in Jerusalem, Berlin and Moscow.
In announcing its new Times Square campus under a 30-year lease, the university reaffirmed both its commitment to New York and the importance of in-person learning after having to transition during the pandemic to online and hybrid education. Touro actually introduced its first online doctoral program in 1998, making it the first-ever regionally accredited online doctoral program open to students worldwide. That program was particularly attractive to members of the U.S. armed services, who sought to advance their education while stationed abroad.
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LAW_full Size_2019_print.pdf 1 11/11/19 11:38 AMBetween Severn and Hessmer Avenue An architectural rendering of the future home of Touro University at Times Square, in New York. (Touro)
Touro has a special focus on the underserved
Touro’s dual mission to strengthen Jewish heritage while serving humanity generally, with a special focus on the historically underserved, is the idea behind not just the opening of the medical school in Montana, but also campuses in New York that serve largely Hispanic and African-American populations.
In the areas around its osteopathic medical schools near Las Vegas and San Francisco, Touro sends mobile medical units to provide free health screenings to the elderly, homeless and other underserved populations.
Touro was the brainchild of a sociologist rabbi who led the school into his 90s and is now run by a doctor who has helped make it into a health-science powerhouse
For decades, Touro was synonymous with the man who founded the university and turned it from a dream into an international institution: Bernard Lander, who designed Touro in a manner he hoped would enable observant Jews to go to college without enduring the secularizing influences of a large university campus. Students at Touro could schedule their classes around not just their religious obligations, but days spent in yeshiva. Many of Touro’s students still combine their academic studies (in the evenings) with yeshiva learning (during the daytime). A men’s college in Boro Park, Brooklyn, for example, caters largely to Hasidic students.
Shortly before Lander’s death in 2010 at the age of 94, Touro brought in Dr. Alan Kadish as senior provost and COO. A prominent cardiologist, teacher and administrator originally from New York who had taught at University of Michigan and had a 19-year tenure at Northwestern University, Kadish soon succeeded Lander as president and set to work orchestrating a significant strategic expansion while upholding Touro’s special Jewish character.
Today Touro has grown to encompass 36 programs — undergraduate as well as graduate and professional schools, including a dental school, six medical schools and a biomedical research institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Touro offers programs in accounting, psychology, occupational and physical therapy, pharmacy, nursing, education, Jewish studies, business, technology, and more.
When Touro opened its dental school at New York Medical College in 2016, it became the state’s first new dental school in nearly 50 years. The third dental college in
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Can Young People Save The World? This Jewish Teen Environmental Activist Thinks So
By Renee Ghert-Zand
Amelia Fortgang remembers her grandmother taking her to a peace march when she was just 3 years old. The pair held aloft a sign her grandmother made reading, “War causes global warming.”
Amelia’s other grandmother was an elementary school art teacher. Decades ago, she planted a redwood tree with her students.
“The students asked her what the point of planting it was when it wouldn’t grow quickly enough for them to enjoy,” Amelia said. “She told them that they were planting it for future generations.”
Fifty years later, Amelia is that future generation. When she went to the same elementary school years later, she saw the redwood tree — now full grown and very tall — every day.
The activism and environmentalism her grandmothers modeled is part of what animates Amelia, now 18, as she takes her own place as an activist in the fight over climate change.
She is the founder of the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit, an entirely youth-led activist network that offers in-depth environmental justice workshops and mobilizes local Bay Area high schoolers to create and implement climate action plans (CAPs) in their communities and schools.
Amelia, who will attend Yale University this fall to study environmental science and political science, recently received a 2022 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award in recognition of her work with the Summit. The $36,000 award is given annually to 15 extraordinary teenagers who exemplify the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world. The recipients can choose to use the funds toward their education or further their project, or both.
As massive forest fires became more frequent in Northern California and schools began canceling classes due to poor air quality, Amelia felt she had to do something.
“When the sky over San Francisco turned bright orange, it was absolutely terrifying,” she recalled.
Inspired by her grandmothers’ and other family members’ participation in The Kitchen, a progressive and innovative San Francisco Jewish community, Amelia decided to put her passion for social justice and environmentalism into action. First, she became the leader of her high school’s environmental club. Then she decided to launch the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit.
Even as the pandemic halted inperson meetings, Amelia began rallying fellow students to the cause online. Together, they decided to plan an online summit for the summer of 2020.
The summit featured 16 workshops and engaged 300 youth from 14 states and 88 schools. Participants were challenged to devise climate action plans to implement in their schools and report back on their progress.
“The first summit was a huge success, so we decided to keep it going with monthly workshops,” Amelia said.
To date, the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit has hosted three annual one-day summits and 55 workshops — some led by students and others by experts from partnering organizations. Workshop topics have included sustainable architecture, connections between San Francisco housing and environmental justice, Bay Area air quality inequity, coral bleaching, fast fashion, and local waste management policy.
The group also helped stage an environmental career expo, organized hands-on San Francisco Bay restoration work opportunities and, most notably, has helped implement 15 successful local climate action plans. These include the installation of air quality sensors in public schools in San Bruno, California; fundraising for school solar panels; creation of a community garden; organization of a clothing swap, and the introduction of TerraCycle bins for hard-to-recycle materials usually rejected by municipal recycling programs.
The Bay Area Youth Climate Summit advisory council now has 25 members from 15 schools.
And years after going with her grandmother to that first march, Amelia again has taken to the streets of San Francisco to protest and share her voice
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YOUNG PEOPLE
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Under her leadership, the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit coorganized the September 24, 2021 Youth Global Climate Strike in San Francisco, which saw hundreds of students leave school to demonstrate alongside indigenous community leaders and survivors of wildfires across California. Demonstrations were held in cities across the globe that day ahead of a United Nations climate conference held that November in Glasgow, Scotland.
Amelia’s group also has been involved in federal and local political advocacy, advocating for the Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act, more climate-related funding, and halting the expansion of an oil pipeline running from Alberta to Wisconsin.
With a heavy academic load, Amelia found her volunteer work a huge time commitment — up to 15 hours a week during the school year and as much as 40 per week in the summers.
“Of course, it has been worth it,” she said.
Despite feeling frustrated that the burning issue of climate change too often is relegated to the back burner when extreme weather is not in the headlines, Amelia says she feels optimistic that so many young people are working on climate change issues.
“Climate change is the most critical and pressing issue today because it magnifies the world’s existing inequities and threatens the future of all aspects of society,” Amelia explained. “Whether people are paying attention or not, it is still happening, and it’s still a crisis.”
This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, which celebrate tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” Each year, the Helen Diller Family Foundation recognizes up to 15 extraordinary Jewish teenagers from across the United States with an award of $36,000 each to honor their initiatives to help change the world. Nominate a young leader today or teens can apply directly by January 5, 2023. This story was produced by JTA's native content team.
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the New York City region, it offers technically advanced training in digital dentistry. Underscoring the urgent need for more dental schools, Touro’s program currently attracts about 3,000 applications for its 110 slots, according to Touro officials. Touro Dental Health, the clinical teaching practice located at Touro’s dental school, recently launched a teledentistry service to serve patients online with urgent dental needs.
“Our decisions on where and when to expand are strategic. We’re focusing on where there’s real synergy,” Kadish said. “In the last two years, we’ve launched major projects and programs in incredibly short periods of time,” he added. “We’re able to launch a new medical school or physician’s assistant program, for example, because we have the expertise and experience, and because people at Touro are always ready to join forces to offer the insight and input needed to make things happen. Our staff, faculty and administration are extremely dedicated to the mission.”
This story was sponsored by the Touro College and University System, which supports Jewish continuity and community while serving a diverse population of over 19,000 students across 30 schools. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.
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