The Jewish Theological Seminary has named Rabbi Mike Uram as its next chancellor, elevating a Jewish educator best known for his time as executive director of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel.
JTS has historically has been led by scholars or academics. Uram, who does not have a PhD, did not grow up in the Conservative movement and has not served long-term in a congregational pulpit, called it a “bold move to hire someone who is outside of the molds.”
To lead Conservative Judaism’s flagship university and rabbinical school, Uram, 49, will succeed Shuly Rubin Schwartz, who is stepping down at the end of the current academic year and will become chancellor emerita.
Ordained at JTS in 2005, Uram is the first chief Jewish learning officer JFNA.
He previously spent 16 years at the Penn Hillel. He left Hillel in 2020 to lead Pardes North America, a branch of the egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem.
JTS Chair Alan Levine said Uram is “the right person to help JTS meet this important moment.
“He brings to our institution a rabbinic voice, a connection to a new generation of current and emerging Jewish leaders, and deep experience serving the broader Jewish community that we need to engage as part of the vital center.”
Uram says his background has given him an understanding of “the dynamics of the larger Jewish ecosystem outside of Jewish denominations.”
His “Jewish Renaissance Project” at Penn aimed to reach students who might not otherwise walk into a Hillel building.
“We more than tripled Penn Hillel’s budget through new fundraising, and we more than doubled the number of students that we were engaging each year,” said Uram.
Uram drew on his experience at Penn in his 2016 book, Next Generation Judaism: How College Students and Hillel Can Help Reinvent Jewish Organizations.
He has similar ambitions for JTS, both in adding new donors and extending JTS’ reach beyond its walls.
“The idea is that we can both continue to do the things that have made JTS the leading Jewish academic institution for the past 140 years, and open up the power of JTS’ approach to study and religion and community and values to a much larger audience across North America,” said Uram.
Over the years, incoming rabbinic applicants to JTS have dropped, although they rose in 2025 from 16 to 23.
Uram says that JTS is more than a rabbinical and cantorial school, pointing to its undergraduate programs and graduate schools in Jewish education, thought, rabbinic literature and philosophy.
Under Schwartz, JTS launched new academic programs, including degrees in creative writing, spiritual care and executive leadership, and expanded online learning.
Uram hopes reinvigorate a religious movement whose membership has flattened while Orthodoxy and Reform have been growing. Also, a number of JTS rabbinic alumni have also chosen to establish synagogues and educational institutions that do not fly the Conservative banner.
Partially in response to this contraction, the seminary sold roughly $96 million in Manhattan real estate in 2016 to help fund a major campus redevelopment, a project that ultimately replaced its historic library building with a smaller facility and shifted large portions of its famed Judaica collection to off-site storage.
In 2017, JTS quietly deaccessioned and sold rare manuscripts and books from its library.
Uram is confident that despite structural pressures facing JTS and the Conservative movement, the institution can preserve its scholarly stature and moral authority while expanding its audience, rebuilding leadership pipelines and persuading a new generation that JTS can still be a central address for Jewish learning and life.
For years, he said, the movement has been “stuck in trying to figure out how much it wants to hold onto and how it wants to change.” Now, he says, the question the movement should be asking is “not about how do we restore the good old days, but what is the Jewish future that we want to build?”
“It’s not surprising that it has lost market share, because we’ve been living in a time where the middle has dropped out,” said Uram, who grew up attending a Reform synagogue in suburban Cleveland.
“We’re living in this moment of incredible political polarization. People are moving more into these echo chambers.” What is needed, he said, is what he calls “the muscular middle” — a space that “has to reject simplicity in favor of complexity.”
He also believes JTS can respond to a Jewish community deeply affected by the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and its aftermath, which, he said, “forced many Jewish folks to reexamine their assumptions about their own Jewish identities.”
Although his tenure at Penn Hillel predated the post-Oct. 7 turmoil on college campuses, he earned praise for encouraging quiet, student-led responses to the growing campus movement to boycott Israel.
As chancellor, Uram said, he will make clear that engagement with Israel will remain central to JTS’ mission and its training of clergy.
Asked if he would draw any red lines for current or prospective students, Uram said that a Jewish education — for the rabbinate, academia or the Jewish classroom — would be incomplete without understanding what has become the world’s largest Jewish community and the first expression of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel in millennia.
“Any student who’s coming to JTS has the opportunity and really the obligation to engage deeply in the broadest set of expressions of all things Jewish,” he said.
“I can’t imagine a scenario where a JTS education would not include serious engagement with all things related to Israel.”
Asked for the message that his hiring sends to the broader Jewish world, Uram said:
“It’s the right time to hire someone whose background is as an innovator who was a creative and successful fundraiser, and someone who has real experience leading a Jewish nonprofit in building a productive culture and navigating political difficulties.”
