Winter 2026 l Civic Spirit + SAR Academy (Riverdale, NY)
Director’s Message: Elevating the Spirit of Students’ Civic Commitment
Dr. David Farbman, Project Director, The DEEP Consortium
As American Jews, many of us sense our civic life is fractured. Social media noise and the urge to label opponents as illegitimate have drained compassion and nuance from public life. While we’re frustrated by this divisiveness, educators face an even harder task: teaching the next generation to rise above it, to respect others and communicate with empathy, even as the world rewards outrage and all-or-nothing thinking.
SAR Academy in Riverdale, NY has taken this challenge seriously, partnering with Civic Spirit in recent years to help students become thoughtful citizens. By providing Civic Spirit’s training to key faculty, SAR is building its educators’ ability to shape students’ values and civic identities. This professional learning catalyzes teachers to introduce new curriculum and projects, and foster a culture of empathy and compassion.
Civic Spirit has also helped teachers connect democratic values with Jewish tradition and Torah. At SAR, students shape their American identities alongside their Jewish ones, leaving school with a clear sense of responsible citizenship. SAR and Civic Spirit show how day schools can help build a healthier, more unified future for our country.
What is Civic Spirit?
Civic Spirit’s mission is to provide training in civic education to enhance democratic fluency, cultivate civic skills, and foster civic belonging in faith-based day schools. Over the past eight years, Civic Spirit has built a robust national network of more than 1,100 educators and administrators in 27 states, representing over 200 faith-based schools and reaching approximately 60,000 students.
With the growing disconnect between young adults and civic engagement within our country, Civic Spirit works to bridge that gap for the sake of our future society. Civic Spirit has worked closely with educators and administrators in Jewish, Catholic, and Christian day schools to develop and implement civic education initiatives. The organization utilizes a non-partisan approach in its civic education training with both educational leaders and students. Professional development programming includes a range of workshops, currently focusing on America at its 250th milestone, that can be tailored to the needs of individual school communities.
By providing professional development for educators, facilitating dynamic student programs, and assembling a diverse network of faith-based schools, Civic Spirit prepares the next generation with the necessary information, skills, and sensibility to actively participate in the civic life of their community and our shared democracy.
Civic Spirit in the Middle School: A Tapestry of Voices, Values, and Growing Citizens
By Rebecca Ostro Nagata, Middle School Principal, SAR Academy
In middle school, we ask our students to do something extraordinarily complex: to develop their identities while simultaneously learning to see the world beyond themselves. At SAR, our partnership with Civic Spirit has become an essential means for us, as faculty, to build our own skills that will help students balance this internal exploration and self-discovery alongside the development of a sophisticated external perspective. It has shaped our curriculum, strengthened our communal values, and—perhaps most meaningfully—opened space for students and teachers to learn from one another.
Why Civics Matters Now
In a moment when public discourse feels increasingly fraught, middle school can and must be a place where young people practice the skills of citizenship with honesty, courage, and empathy. As one student, Zohar, shared, “Our current world politics are very present, and therefore we need to educate ourselves about what is happening.”
Her words capture precisely why civic education cannot wait until high school or beyond. Students are already engaging with the world. They are hearing the news. They are absorbing the tensions. And they are asking sophisticated questions long before adults sometimes expect them to.
Building Civic Literacy and Civic Character
Our partnership began with the belief that teaching civics is not only about content—it is about cultivating civic character. Yes, students study how the branches of government work, but they also learn how they as future voters and citizens of the world work: how they listen, how they speak, and how they carry themselves in community.
As one student shared, “I am able to be a part of a dialogue with people from different viewpoints and learn how to navigate difficult conversations.”
These skills matter just as much as any test of government structures. They are the foundation of democratic life.
Teacher Voices: What Civic Spirit Looks Like in Our Classrooms
Our teachers have echoed these themes with equal passion.
Elana Lerner, who teaches our foundational civics lessons and creates content on each election, shares:
“It’s essential to teach young students the foundations of how our government works. It helps them realize the importance of being civically engaged and continue to build on their learning as they get older—learning to read current events and engage in conversations with people around them. When I make lessons on elections for the students, I want to simplify the context of a complex political system and then help them feel like they have agency and are empowered to be involved. Activism can start before you’re able to vote.”
She adds that with each lesson—whether structured curriculum or current events discussions—the hope is the same: that students feel inspired to become civically engaged adults.
Elayna Koevary, an 8th grade humanities teacher, writes:
“Middle school civics pulls back the curtain on how our world is shaped. It shows students that history, politics, and the systems around them aren’t random—they’re the result of real people making deliberate choices. When students see how decisions are made and who is pulling the levers, the process becomes less mysterious and more empowering. Civics helps them understand why things are the way they are and gives them the tools, confidence, and sense of agency to change the status quo.”
These educator voices remind us that civic education is not an “extra.” It is woven into the very fabric of how we teach responsibility, identity, ethical thinking, and community membership.
What It Means to be a Jewish Citizen
Ayala Raice, SAR Academy, Middle School Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Over the past several years, my work with Civic Spirit has become one of the most meaningful professional experiences of my career. In many ways, it has reshaped not only how I teach civics and history, but also how I see the goals of education itself. I have been able to derive these benefits because the leadership of SAR has encouraged my learning journey throughout, trusting my voice, encouraging my curiosity, and consistently supporting the partnership with Civic Spirit at every stage of its development. From the outset, our school leaders viewed Civic Spirit as more than a self-contained program; they treated it as a shared vision. And I, as the school’s lead in this initiative, was able to help bring this vision to life.
This vision entailed helping us to expand our civics curriculum far beyond a single unit. Today, it lives in our classrooms, advisory programs, and co-curricular experiences, most notably our Civics Club, where students researched and produced a podcast series on issues they care deeply about. (See more in box.) Watching our students articulate their questions, frustrations, and hopes for the world reminded me that civics education is not abstract; it is deeply personal. It shapes identity.
But what makes our partnership with Civic Spirit truly transformative is its grounding in shared values, and its exploration of what it means to be both Jewish and American. Civic Spirit emphasizes that these identities are deeply intertwined. Civic Spirit has helped us articulate something we always believed: that the core values of Judaism are democratic values.
The belief that every person is created b’tzelem Elokim (in God’s image) mirrors the democratic commitment to human dignity. The Jewish focus on communal responsibility echoes our civic duty to contribute, repair, and uplift. Our tradition’s insistence on moral agency, debate, and the pursuit of justice naturally connects to the responsibilities of citizenship. Civic Spirit has not introduced novel ideals to our school; rather, it has affirmed, elevated, and sharpened the ones already at the center of our mission.
Most powerfully, the partnership has encouraged us to see every civic action through a Jewish lens. Voting, advocating, building relationships across differences—these are not only acts of citizenship but acts of avodah, of sacred responsibility. In helping our students understand their role as Americans, Civic Spirit has helped us deepen their sense of purpose as Jews. Each time they studied or discussed issues around civic responsibility teachers (and, in turn, students) connected these values back to Judaism.
All of this advancement in our civics curriculum does not mean there are no challenges remaining. In particular, we continue to grapple with two significant issues. First, middle schoolers, especially when discussing more difficult topics, often struggle with understanding nuance. They tend to adopt a more extreme perspective and think in black and white to make sense of the world, so, as teachers, we are constantly trying to figure out how to introduce and encourage nuance and complexity. How can we help our students to consider conflicting and overlapping perspectives, whether about American policy, leadership, or issues in relation to Israel?
And of course, another challenge is helping our students to gain agency and purpose, especially with new political realities taking shape. Taking civic action, at such a young age, seems simultaneously appealing and overwhelming. They yearn for independence and autonomy and would love to make a difference in the world, but they cannot readily conceptualize what that really looks like. Part of our work, and our challenge, is to bridge that gap for these kids and let them know what they can do and how their voices can be heard, even from their small corner in the world.
To enable the reshaping of the curriculum to take place, our administration created space for our faculty to explore this partnership fully, sending me to professional development sessions (both in-person and online), inviting Civic Spirit coaches into our building, and empowering our teachers to workshop lessons and pedagogy with Civic Spirit experts. Further, the regular one-on-one coaching sessions I have with Civic Spirit staff have allowed me to take a leadership role in implementation. That kind of institutional trust is rare, and it has allowed the partnership to take root in authentic, long-lasting ways.
Working with Civic Spirit and implementing the curricular enhancements have pushed me to think more boldly about how we teach identity, community, and responsibility. It has reminded me that civic education must be both rigorous and personal, rooted in texts, relationships, and lived experience. And it has shown me that when schools invest authentically in their educators, they create the conditions for partnerships that can transform students and teachers alike.
The Daily Practice of Civics at SAR
While the philosophical impact of Civic Spirit on our school culture has been profound, its influence on our day-to-day practice has been just as significant. Through our partnership, we implemented four new major strands of civic learning, each one giving students a concrete and meaningful way to engage with democratic values.
1. Teaching the Presidential Election Through a Values Lens
Across both our advisory curriculum and our social studies classes, we reframed the presidential election as an opportunity to explore leadership, responsibility, and values. Rather than focusing on candidates or partisan matters, students examined the qualities they believe matter most in leaders through Jewish texts, American civic ideals, and conversations about moral decision-making. This approach helped them understand that political choices are always grounded in deeper beliefs about character, community, and justice.
2. Launching the Civic Spirit Club
We created a weekly Civic Spirit Club–a voluntary extracurricular that meets once per week–that guided students through a five-session journey from identity to action:
- Session 1: Exploring students’ own identities and the values they share.
- Session 2: Examining communal values through poetry, founding documents, and discussion.
- Session 3: Unpacking what power is, who holds it, and how it is used.
- Session 4: Analyzing core elements of a democracy and identifying the issues they care most about.
- Session 5: Selecting issues and planning civic action projects.
This concise arc provided students with a strong civic vocabulary and a deeper understanding of identity, responsibility, and belonging.
3. Producing the Student Podcast, Reality Check
The club’s final planning session led directly to the creation of Reality Check, a student-produced podcast that gave voice to issues our middle schoolers felt most passionate about. Students researched, interviewed, scripted, and recorded episodes on topics including:
- The death penalty
- Antisemitism and social media
- Climate change
- Animal rights
The process was rigorous, student-led, and deeply empowering, offering students a public platform to articulate their concerns and hopes for the world.
4. Civic Spirit Day at the Southern Federal Courthouse
To ground their learning in real-world experience, we brought students to the Southern Federal Courthouse, where they joined over 100 peers from diverse schools. They observed courtroom proceedings, met legal professionals, and saw firsthand how the judicial branch functions. For many, it was their first time witnessing the mechanics of justice up close, transforming civics from an academic subject into a lived experience.
Growing the Next Generation of Leaders
By Audi Hecht, Senior Director of Education and Innovation, Civic Spirit
What is civics, and why is it so essential to education today? These questions have animated the relationship between Civic Spirit and the SAR community since our partnership began in 2018, when Civic Spirit first entered the educational landscape. SAR was included among the inaugural cohort of seven Jewish and six Catholic schools from the New York area at that time.
The partnership began through the work of the original Civic Spirit fellow, Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz, SAR High School’s Associate Principal, and has since thrived through the contributions of many dedicated educators across the SAR community. Our fellows have included Ayala Raice, Curriculum Coordinator at SAR Academy, along with Daniel Paul, SAR High School Civic Spirit Fellow in its fifth cohort, who led the impressive work of the High School Civic Spirit Club, and now with current fellow Lisa Bambino. Together, these fellows have, in turn, inspired excellent work among their colleagues.
When Ayala and I first spoke, she shared her interest in bringing more civics into existing curricula. As we explored different possibilities, it became clear that the 2024 election season offered a powerful entry point for civics integration through the lenses of values and leadership. These themes provide rich opportunities for developing what we call “values fluency” among younger students, who may readily recognize values in action, even if they are still learning to navigate the complexities of how these values are expressed by elected leaders and in public discourse. We also used the context of the election to open space for thoughtful conversations about leadership grounded in principles, history, and primary sources.
Our aim was to bridge Jewish and American civic traditions while helping students consider the qualities that have characterized exemplary leaders over time. To do this, we sought to equip educators not only with clear language and conceptual anchors but also with substantive pathways that connect abstract civic ideas to students’ personal lives and emerging identities. Our PD session fused selected texts from Tanach alongside sources from American history. For example, we considered Angelina Grimké’s “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” which includes an invocation of Megillat Esther to convey the urgency of abolitionism to her fellow white Southern women. In fact, she opens her essay with Mordechai’s directive to Esther—“who knows whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Grimké drew inspiration from Tanach to advance her moral calling and to help abolish slavery. Students then reflected on which leadership qualities mattered most to them and why.
This exercise provided a model for how teachers can invite students to consider leadership beyond the personas presented by media and social media to cultivate a deeper understanding of the qualities that truly matter, such as humility, integrity, responsibility, and service to others.
At the core of this work is the task of identifying where civic attributes find expression and resonance across multiple disciplines, from the humanities to Judaic Studies, and exploring ways to make them come alive for students. The goal is to engage their hearts and minds while inspiring action that makes a difference.
What has been especially striking to me is working with a school that is already so civically vibrant. Simply peruse SAR’s website, read its mission, or walk through its halls, and you will see an institution steeped in civic education. The school implements annual themes and invites an impressive array of speakers and local elected representatives to engage its students.
For example, SAR chose its overall learning themes this year—Jewish confidence and You Shall Choose Life, with a focus on choice and responsibility—to highlight the civic themes of identity, civic responsibility, and agency. Building on previous themes, Panim el Panim (the divine essence and dignity of each person) and the power of words, SAR continues to prioritize fostering moral and civic development and examining how these themes inform ethical decision-making, civic engagement, and offer a wholesome framework for navigating today’s challenges.
Despite being so well-positioned as exemplars of civic education, SAR continues to seek growth. They intentionally partner with organizations like Civic Spirit to enrich their student and faculty community with an expanded, nuanced, and deeply rooted approach to raising the next generation of citizen leaders, leaders who are enthused, empathetic, and eager to contribute to the greater world.
In this respect, SAR models what high-quality professional development looks like. It is not something reserved for novices or deployed only in response to challenges, but rather is an expression of institutional health and intellectual vitality. Considering that we worked in partnership with seasoned educators who were already committed to civics education, our coaching and consultations can be regarded as a form of academic fitness: we are aiming to reinforce their dedication and help to ensure more consistency and purposeful focus. I’m proud that our professional development supported SAR faculty and leaders as they worked to establish the Civic Spirit Club, enhance schoolwide programming, and run conferences that invite civil discourse training and solidify Jewish-American identity formation.
Civic Spirit looks forward to continuing our partnership with SAR and learning from these fine educators how we might continue to elevate the learning experience around civics education both for teachers and for students.
The Urgency Driving Civic Spirit
Naomi Eisenberger, Founder and Executive Director, Good People Fund, and Julie Fisher, Associate Executive Director, Good People Fund
When the Good People Fund first met Civic Spirit Executive Director Rabbi Charles Savenor in 2023, we were immediately drawn to the organization’s mission. At a time when civic responsibility, civility, and shared humanity were rapidly deteriorating, their work felt urgently needed. Fast-forward to America in 2025, and the challenges to our civic fabric seem only to have accelerated. This is precisely the moment when Civic Spirit’s leadership, clarity, and commitment are essential. Their work lights the path toward educating young people about shared society and civic responsibility.
At the Good People Fund, we believe a healthy, vibrant society depends on individuals who feel responsible for one another and for the common good. Civic Spirit cultivates exactly that—one classroom, one educator, one student at a time.
As funders, we are drawn to people and projects that combine vision with practicality. Civic Spirit exemplifies this balance. They equip Jewish day schools and other faith-based schools with concrete tools, rich content, and a supportive community, ensuring that civic education is a core expression of values: dignity, responsibility, pluralism, and shared belonging—all values we hold deeply at the Good People Fund.
In a country now marked by polarization, disconnection, and cynicism, Civic Spirit offers something countercultural: hopeful, rigorous, relational civic learning. Their approach empowers educators to invite students into meaningful dialogue, wrestle with complexity, and understand that their voices and actions matter.
Civic Spirit’s work has a powerful multiplier effect. When educators are supported and inspired, they, in turn, inspire dozens or hundreds of students. When young people learn to listen across differences, serve their communities, and embrace both rights and responsibilities, society grows stronger.
For us, funding Civic Spirit is more than a grant — it is an investment in the next generation of citizens, leaders, and neighbors, and in a future rooted in human dignity.
Resources
To get a glimpse of Civic Spirit’s work, check out these resources used with students and teachers during the course of discussions:
We Want to Hear From You
We hope you find The DEEP Dive useful and meaningful. We welcome your feedback about how we might build upon this foray into professional learning for future issues! Email me at [email protected].