Saul Kaiserman RJE

Saul Kaiserman, RJE (he/him/הוא/هو) is a doctoral candidate in Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His dissertation “Being. Called. Rabbi. Educator: Making a Living in Sacred Work” explores the implications when Jewish professionals experience their work as a “calling.” He has been honored as a “Visionary Leader in Jewish Life and Learning” by Hazon (now called Adamah), a “Distinguished Jewish Educator” by the Association of Reform Jewish Educators, and most recently, in 2023, he received the Wechsler Award for Emerging Scholars from the Network for Research in Jewish Education. Saul is the music director at Tamid: The Downtown Synagogue in New York City, a mentor for the Educational Leadership Program of the Mandel Institute for Nonprofit Leadership, and a sought-after teacher, spiritual leader, consultant and coach. He is the emeritus founding director of lifelong learning at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, where he served for fifteen years until July 2022. From 2015-2019 he served on the faculty at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). He serves on the board of the Association of Reform Jewish Educators, for whom he facilitates the Leading with Neurodiversity affinity group. For six years, he served on the board of the Jewish Education Project. He is a former vice-president of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center and was a founding staff member of the TEVA Learning Center for Jewish Environmental Education, on whose advisory board he served for ten years. Saul has previously worked as a documentary filmmaker and musician, in such diverse locales as New York City, Jerusalem, Cape Town, and Phnom Penh. In July of 2020, Saul was an “all-star songleader” for the Union for Reform Judaism’s Campfire on Tour summer concert series. He is a native New Yorker and lives in Manhattan with his wife, Liz Freirich, and their two teenagers. Videos of Saul’s performances and teaching are on his YouTube Channel.