Inside the Tikvah Fund's Jewish Leadership Pipeline

Millstone Scholars. Menachem Begin Scholars. Tikvah Scholars. Emet Classical Academy. A vertically integrated diaspora bet, funded by Zalman Bernstein's estate and the Kress family, on who leads American Jewish life for the next fifty years.

The Tikvah Fund runs a four-stage Jewish leadership pipeline: Millstone Scholars for grades 7 and 8, Begin Scholars for grades 9 and 10, the Tikvah Scholars summer institute for high schoolers, and Emet Classical Academy, a K-12 day school Tikvah opened in New York City in 2024. Millstone alone runs 30 regional cohorts capped at 10 to 15 students each.

That is what it looks like on paper. In practice, Millstone is the middle tier of a pipeline that Tikvah has assembled quietly over the last decade, one that begins at seventh grade and runs through college fellowships, built around a specific bet on the next fifty years of American Jewish life.

What Are the Tikvah Fund's Four Leadership Programs?

The Tikvah Fund runs four linked programs that carry students from seventh grade through college age.

• Millstone Scholars is Tikvah's entry-point program for 7th and 8th graders in public and secular independent schools. It runs 30 cohorts nationally, now in its fourth year, with weekly 75-minute in-person seminars over an eight-month academic year. Teaching fellows earn $10,000 to $12,000 per cohort, real pay for senior educators rather than volunteers. Olam's Millstone Scholars parent guide covers tuition and application timing in detail.
• The Menachem Begin Scholars Program is a selective two-year fellowship for 9th and 10th graders. Year one centers on the Biblical books of Ruth and Esther and the political dilemmas of Jews in exile. Year two moves into Machiavelli, Jabotinsky, and Menachem Begin's own political thought, a deliberately Right-Zionist curriculum that the program does not hide.
• The Tikvah Scholars Program is an 11-day summer institute for high schoolers built around primary texts in Biblical, Zionist, and Western thought. It is Tikvah's flagship and has run for over a decade, producing alumni now working in journalism, policy shops, congressional offices, and federation and day-school boards.
• Emet Classical Academy is a K-12 Jewish day school in New York City that opened in 2024, founded by Rabbi Dr. Ari Unger after he spent two years running Millstone. Emet extends the same classical model, primary texts anchored around Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and Philadelphia, into a full day-school program.

Underneath all four sits the Kress Project on the Hebrew Bible, which funds Bible curriculum development across the pipeline, plus the Tikvah Online Academy for electives and adult learning through the Jewish Parents Forum, podcasts, and newsletters. The Tikvah Fund describes its own mission as developing the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Read against that mission, Millstone stops looking like a middle-school enrichment program and reads instead as an entry point.

Why Does the Tikvah Fund Target Seventh Grade Students?

The Tikvah Fund enters students at seventh grade because that is when most Jewish families in public school lose any weekly Jewish education. Roughly seventy percent of American Jewish children attend public or secular private schools rather than Jewish day schools, and that population has historically been served only by supplementary Hebrew school, which most students leave around bar or bat mitzvah, precisely when serious engagement could begin.

Millstone targets that exit point directly. It takes 7th and 8th graders, old enough for real text-based work, young enough to build a Jewish identity that can survive high school and college, and runs them through Herzl, Begin, Rabbi Akiva, and Maimonides in the same year they prepare for their bar or bat mitzvah. It also hands them a peer network of similarly engaged Jewish students in their own city.

From there, Begin Scholars picks up the strongest 9th and 10th graders, Tikvah Scholars picks them up again each summer, and Emet catches a subset for full-time day school. By the time these students reach college, Tikvah's intent is that they arrive with a decade of primary-text engagement, a peer network, and the intellectual confidence to hold their ground.

Since October 7, 2023, with campus antisemitism elevated and Jewish enrollment at elite universities under pressure, that confidence is the deliverable Tikvah is selling to donors. Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Academic Engagement Network have each pointed to personal fluency in Jewish text and history, not institutional protection alone, as a strong predictor of student resilience on campus. Tikvah's pipeline is built to produce that fluency before a student ever sets foot on a college quad.

Who Funds the Tikvah Fund?

The Tikvah Fund traces its funding to the estate of Zalman C. Bernstein and continuing support from the Kress family, alongside a center-right Jewish donor circle.

Bernstein, founder of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., became a baal teshuva later in life and redirected a large share of his fortune toward Jewish intellectual life, structuring his estate to fund exactly this kind of long-horizon institutional work. That capital seeded modern Tikvah: its publications, fellowships, the Tikvah Ideas platform, and the education pipeline. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. was later folded into AllianceBernstein, but the Bernstein estate's Jewish philanthropic infrastructure continues to operate independently.

The Kress family underwrites the Kress Project on the Hebrew Bible, the curriculum spine running through Millstone, Begin Scholars, and Tikvah Scholars. The Kress commitment specifically funds primary-text pedagogy: the Bible read as literature, history, and political thought rather than devotional material, positioning Jewish civilization as intellectually continuous with the Western canon. The Millstone family itself lends its name to the middle-school program.

Tikvah's board and donor circle has long drawn some of the most active names in center-right American Jewish philanthropy. Elliott Abrams has served as a senior fellow. Eric Cohen leads the institution as CEO. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik anchors its public identity through the Tikvah Ideas platform and his pulpit at Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan and the oldest Jewish congregation in North America.

Taken together, this is not a scattered set of programs. It is a coordinated, multi-generational capital allocation aimed at one outcome: a self-renewing class of American Jewish leaders trained on primary texts, oriented toward Israel, and equipped to compete inside American elite institutions.

What Does the Millstone Scholars Curriculum Cover?

Millstone Scholars teaches three trimesters: the foundations of Jewish thought, the founding of modern Israel, and the Jewish experience in America.

• Trimester one covers the foundations of Jewish thought through Torah, Talmud, and medieval philosophy, centered on Abraham, King David, Rabbi Akiva, and Maimonides, and framed around justice, faith, and human dignity.
• Trimester two covers the founding of modern Israel through Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Begin, taught as a coherent intellectual and political project rather than a talking point.
• Trimester three covers the Jewish experience in America, including the Hebraic sources of American constitutionalism and the founders' own engagement with the Hebrew Bible.

Supplementing the core curriculum, the Herzl Colloquia bring in scholars, lawyers, policymakers, and business figures twice per trimester. The Millstone National Debate has cohorts from across the country argue current events. Field trips have included the 2023 Rally for Israel in Washington, and a writing prize awards gold, silver, and bronze entries. The core reader, The Foundations of Jewish Thought: Millstone Scholars Reader Fall 2024, is a bound volume published under Tikvah's imprint and sold on Amazon, a deliberate choice that fits Tikvah's broader editorial position: primary texts and slow reading against an information ecosystem that has moved the other way.

What Should Jewish Philanthropy Funders Take From the Tikvah Model?

Tikvah's model offers three takeaways for funders evaluating Jewish identity programs.

1. The pipeline model outperforms scattered single-touch programs. Tikvah has shown that vertical integration, seventh grade through post-college, keeps students engaged longer than one-off enrichment classes, so funders assessing Jewish identity outcomes should study the pipeline as a whole rather than individual programs inside it.
2. Primary texts scale further than assumed. Millstone bets that 12-year-olds can read Maimonides, and the program's fourth year suggests they can, a finding with curriculum implications for federations still running supplementary Hebrew school on material designed in the 1970s.
3. The classical-Zionist frame is now a distinct, funded movement. Millstone, Begin Scholars, Tikvah Scholars, and Emet share one editorial position: Jewish civilization as a serious intellectual tradition, Zionism as its modern political expression, and America as the place to defend both. That frame is also gaining traction inside the broader national-conservative and classical-education movements, giving Tikvah reach beyond the Jewish philanthropic map.

For diaspora philanthropists, particularly Israeli-connected donors thinking about long-horizon American Jewish continuity, the Tikvah pipeline is one of the most concrete bets currently on the table.

Related Coverage on Olam

The Tikvah Fund is one node in a broader map of diaspora Jewish capital and institution-building that Olam tracks.

Inside the Herzl Institute: The Jerusalem Think Tank Exporting the New Right: Yoram Hazony's Jerusalem-based institute has become the intellectual engine of national conservatism, with deep institutional overlap with the Tikvah orbit.

Bernie Marcus's $2 Billion Bet: What Happens to the Marcus Foundation Now: the Home Depot co-founder died with an $11 billion fortune and a 20-year foundation spend-down mandate, the biggest open question in Jewish philanthropy.

The Wilf Family: Vikings Owners, Real Estate, and Jewish Philanthropy: 60 years of Garden Homes, 50 years of foundations, the Minnesota Vikings, Yeshiva University, Yad Vashem, and the Jewish Agency housing initiative.

Millstone Scholars NYC: A Parent's Guide to Cost and Curriculum: tuition, application timing, and what the weekly seminar actually covers for families applying this year.

Inside UT Austin's Ackerman Program and Tikvah's Rosenthal-Levy Scholars: how Tikvah's Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program extends the pipeline into a fully funded undergraduate track at the University of Texas at Austin.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Tikvah Fund

What is Millstone Scholars?

Millstone Scholars is a national Jewish honors program for 7th and 8th grade students in public and secular independent schools, run by the Tikvah Fund. It meets weekly for 75-minute in-person seminars over an eight-month academic year, in 30 regional cohorts across the United States.

Who runs Millstone Scholars?

The Tikvah Fund runs Millstone Scholars. Rabbi Dr. Ari Unger founded the program before leaving to head Emet Classical Academy in New York City, and Millstone is now led by an executive director and assistant director based at Tikvah.

How selective is Millstone?

Millstone cohorts are capped at 10 to 15 students, and applications require an interview. The program is built for intellectually curious students and families who want serious Jewish learning outside a day-school setting.

How much does Millstone Scholars cost?

Tuition varies by cohort, with scholarships and local funder subsidies available in some locations. The Houston cohort, for example, ran at $180 per student in one recent year, subsidized from a $720 full tuition. Olam's Millstone Scholars parent guide has current NYC pricing.

What is the Tikvah Fund?

The Tikvah Fund is a philanthropic foundation and Jewish think tank founded through the estate of Zalman C. Bernstein. It runs publications, fellowships, and educational programs across the United States, Israel, and internationally, dedicated to the intellectual, religious, and political leadership of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

How does Millstone connect to Emet Classical Academy and Tikvah Scholars?

Millstone Scholars is the middle-school entry point into a full pipeline: Millstone for grades 7 and 8, Begin Scholars for grades 9 and 10, the Tikvah Scholars summer institute for high schoolers, and Emet Classical Academy as a K-12 day school in New York City.

Where can students apply to the Tikvah Fund's programs?

Applications for each academic year open in the spring at tikvah.org/millstone, with cohorts in Houston, New York, Mid-Westchester, and roughly 27 other metropolitan areas as of the 2025-2026 academic year.