Scholarship and Biography
Jon A. Levisohn is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought. Since 2014, he has served as the director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education. From 2021-2024, he served as chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
At Brandeis, he also chairs the Seminar on Contemporary Jewish Life (CJL) and the Jewish Education Working Group (JEWG). He also serves on the CESP Faculty Advisory Committee (since 2023), the NEJS Advisory Committee (since 2024), and the Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities (since 2024). He served as a co-editor of the Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education at Brandeis University Press (2020-2025). His leadership roles at Brandeis have also included chairing several strategic committees.
His publications include five books and edited volumes, and almost 80 articles, essays and book chapters for scholarly and popular publications. As a philosopher of education, much of his scholarly writing examines the foundational ideas and assumptions about the purposes of Jewish education. He is currently working on a book project titled Jewish Literacy (Rutgers U. P.), which is an effort to re-define that concept in a way that is both more conceptually coherent and also more useful for practitioners. A second project is developing materials for American Jewish civic education. A third project is studying the phenomenon of the American Jewish gap year in Israel.
Levisohn has held fellowships at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Hebrew University, Repair the World, the Mandel Leadership Institute, the Jacobson Foundation, M2, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and A More Perfect Union: the Jewish Partnership for Democracy.
He has received support from foundations and organizations including the AVI CHAI Foundation, CASJE, CJP, the Gottesman Fund, the Israel Institute, the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, the Mandell L. & Madeleine H. Berman Foundation, Targum Shlishi, and the Wabash Center for Theology and Religion, as well as the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.
He has chaired or co-chaired 8 academic conferences, overseen over a dozen scholarly initiatives, advised almost 40 theses and dissertations, and consulted to, taught in and volunteered for over 20 Jewish educational organizations.
An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship Program, Levisohn has served and continues to serve in leadership roles for the WGF alumni community. He has also served or current serves on advisory or governance roles for CASJE, Encounter, JCDS, OneTable, Atra and NRJE, and in leadership roles in two synagogue communities.