Inside the Tikvah Fund: The 7th-Grade-to-College Jewish Leadership Pipeline Reshaping American Jewry

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 Millstone Scholars Program is a national Jewish honors program for seventh and eighth graders in public and secular independent schools, run by the Tikvah Fund, meeting weekly in 30 regional cohorts across the United States. Cohorts are capped at 10 to 15 students. The curriculum runs three trimesters — the foundations of Jewish thought, the founding of modern Israel, the Jewish experience in America — and is taught seminar-style, with students reading primary texts, from Torah and Talmud through Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Menachem Begin.

That is what it is on paper. What it is in practice is more interesting.

Millstone is the middle tier of a full-stack Jewish leadership pipeline that Tikvah has assembled quietly over the last decade — one that begins at seventh grade and runs through college fellowships, built for a specific bet about the next fifty years of American Jewish life.

Four Programs, One Vertically Integrated Pipeline

Tikvah's education stack now runs across four major properties.

Millstone Scholars — 7th and 8th grade. Public and independent school students. 30 cohorts. Year four. Weekly in-person seminars, 75 minutes, over an eight-month academic year. Salary for teaching fellows runs $10,000 to $12,000 per cohort — meaning Tikvah is spending real money on senior educators, not volunteers.

Menachem Begin Scholars Program — 9th and 10th grade. A two-year fellowship. Selective. Foundational texts of Jewish, Zionist, and Western thought. The first seminar centers on the Biblical books of Ruth and Esther, examining political and moral dilemmas of Jews in exile. The second-year seminar advances into Machiavelli, Jabotinsky, and the political thought of Menachem Begin himself — deliberately Right-Zionist in orientation, and open about it.

Tikvah Scholars Program — an 11-day summer institute for high school students. Seminar-style. Foundational texts of Biblical, Zionist, and Western thought. This is the flagship. It has run for over a decade and has produced alumni who now populate the ranks of Jewish institutional life — journalism, policy shops, congressional staff, and increasingly the boards of federations and day schools.

Emet Classical Academy — a K–12 Jewish day school in New York City, launched in 2024. Founded by Rabbi Dr. Ari Unger, who spent two years running Millstone before opening Emet's doors. Emet extends the classical model — primary texts, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and Philadelphia as pedagogical anchors — into a full day-school experience.

Layered underneath: the Kress Project on the Hebrew Bible, which funds Bible curriculum development across every layer of the pipeline; the Tikvah Online Academy, offering electives; and adult learning through the Jewish Parents Forum, podcasts, and newsletters.

The Tikvah Fund itself describes its mission as developing the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Read Millstone through that mission and it stops being a middle-school enrichment program. It is an entry point.

The Middle-School Bet: Why 7th Grade Is the Strategic Center

The strategic logic behind Millstone specifically is worth naming.

Roughly seventy percent of American Jewish children attend public or secular private schools — not Jewish day schools. That population has historically been served by supplementary Hebrew school, which most students exit around bar or bat mitzvah — precisely when serious engagement could begin.

Millstone targets that exit ramp. It picks up 7th and 8th graders — students old enough for real intellectual work, young enough to build a Jewish identity that will survive high school, college, and everything after. It runs them through Herzl and Begin and Rabbi Akiva and Maimonides in the same year they are preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah. It hands them a network of high-performing Jewish peers in their own city.

Then, at 9th grade, Begin Scholars picks up the strongest. Tikvah Scholars picks them up in the summer. Emet catches a subset for full-time day school. By the time these students hit college campuses, they arrive with a decade of primary-text engagement, a peer network, and — the explicit intent — the intellectual confidence to hold their ground.

Post–October 7, with campus antisemitism running at levels not seen in generations and Jewish enrollment at elite universities under pressure, that intellectual confidence is the deliverable. Every major campus civil-liberties organization tracking antisemitism — Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League, the Academic Engagement Network — has published data showing that the strongest predictor of Jewish student resilience is not institutional protection but personal fluency in Jewish text, history, and argument. Tikvah's pipeline is engineered to produce exactly that fluency, delivered before the student sets foot on a college campus.

The Money: Bernstein Estate, Kress Family, and the Center-Right Donor Circle

Tikvah is one of the more significant philanthropic operations in American Jewish life, and one of the least profiled.

Its origins trace to the estate of Zalman C. Bernstein, the founder of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., who directed a substantial share of his fortune toward Jewish intellectual life. Bernstein — who became a baal teshuva in his later years and reoriented his philanthropy around Jewish continuity — structured his estate to fund exactly this kind of long-horizon institutional work. That foundation capital seeded the modern Tikvah — 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 has continued to operate independently.

The Kress family, longtime supporters of Jewish and classical education, underwrite the Kress Project on the Hebrew Bible — the curriculum spine of 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, in a mode that positions Jewish civilization as intellectually continuous with the Western canon.

The Millstone family itself lends its name to the middle-school program.

The board and donor circle around Tikvah has historically included 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 intellectual identity through the Tikvah Ideas platform and his pulpit at Congregation Shearith Israel — the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America.

Read 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.

The Curriculum: Three Trimesters, Primary Texts, Bound Volumes

The three-trimester Millstone core is worth reading in full.

Trimester 1 — The Foundations of Jewish Thought. Torah, Talmud, medieval philosophy. Abraham, King David, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides. Justice, faith, and human dignity as read through the Jewish tradition.

Trimester 2 — The Founding of Modern Israel. Herzl. Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky. Begin. Zionism as a coherent intellectual and political project. The heroic story of modern Israel, taught not as a talking point but as history.

Trimester 3 — The Jewish Experience in America. Jews in American life. And — the more interesting move — how Jewish ideas shaped America itself. The Hebraic sources of American constitutionalism. The Founders' engagement with the Hebrew Bible.

Supplementing the core: the Herzl Colloquia, twice per trimester — sessions with figures drawn from scholarship, law, public policy, and business. The Millstone National Debate, in which cohorts from across the country meet to argue current events. Field trips including the 2023 Rally for Israel in Washington. A writing prize with gold, silver, and bronze categories.

The core reader — The Foundations of Jewish Thought: Millstone Scholars Reader Fall 2024 — is a bound volume, published under Tikvah's imprint and available on Amazon. Students read from a physical book. That is a pedagogical choice, and it maps onto a broader Tikvah editorial position: primary texts, physical objects, and slow reading against an information ecosystem that has moved definitively the other way.

Three Signals for Funders

One: The pipeline model works. Tikvah has demonstrated that vertical integration — 7th grade through post-college — outperforms scattered single-touch programs. Funders looking at Jewish identity outcomes should be studying the pipeline, not just the individual programs inside it.

Two: Primary texts scale. Millstone bets that 12-year-olds can read Maimonides. It turns out they can. That has curriculum implications for every Jewish education funder in the country, and specifically for federations still funding supplementary Hebrew school on curricula designed in the 1970s.

Three: The classical-Zionist frame is a distinct movement. Millstone, Begin Scholars, Tikvah Scholars, and Emet share a coherent editorial position — Jewish civilization as a serious intellectual tradition, Zionism as its modern political expression, America as the site where those ideas can be defended. That frame is now institutionally embodied, funded, and operating at scale. It is also increasingly influential inside the broader national-conservative and classical-education movements, giving Tikvah an ideological reach that extends 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 on Olam

Tikvah is one node in a broader map of diaspora Jewish capital and institution-building that Olam is tracking. See also:

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: Real Estate Empire, Jewish Philanthropic Machine — 60 years of Garden Homes, 50 years of foundations, the Minnesota Vikings, Yeshiva University, Yad Vashem, and the Jewish Agency housing initiative.

FAQ

What is Millstone Scholars? A national Jewish honors program for 7th and 8th grade students attending public and secular independent schools, run by the Tikvah Fund. Weekly in-person seminars, 75 minutes, over an eight-month academic year, in 30 regional cohorts across the United States.

Who runs Millstone Scholars? The Tikvah Fund. The program was founded under Rabbi Dr. Ari Unger, who now heads Emet Classical Academy in New York City, and is currently led by an executive director and assistant director based at Tikvah.

How selective is Millstone? Cohorts are capped at 10 to 15 students. Applications require interviews. The program is explicitly built for intellectually curious students and families who value serious Jewish learning.

How much does it cost? Tuition varies by cohort, with scholarships and local funder subsidies available. The Houston cohort, for example, ran at $180 per student in one recent year, subsidized from a $720 full tuition.

What is the Tikvah Fund? 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 is the middle-school entry point in a full pipeline — Millstone (7–8), Begin Scholars (9–10), Tikvah Scholars summer institute (high school), and Emet Classical Academy (K–12 day school in NYC).

Where can students apply? 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.