Bruriah rising senior Avigail Goldberger was one of the students selected to attend the Tikvah Summer Institute for high school students at Yale University. The program was designed as a two-week seminar to discuss different world-event topics (both current and past issues) in order to create an educated Jewish population ready to confront these issues in an intelligent manner.

Avigail spoke about her experiences on the Tikvah Summer Institute: “I felt that I was challenged to consider major world issues from a much broader perspective … the courses intertwined both Judaic and secular points of view to create an expansive (and not contradictory) image.”

Avigail took two seminars as part of the program. “In the technology seminar, we explored different innovations/scientific fields and learned how to view them from a Jewish perspective. We also discussed the impact that technology has on society from a philosophical and psychological point of view. In the “war and statesmanship” seminar, we looked at a character analysis of Dovid Hamelech as a leader to explore Jewish leadership themes and paralleled that against an exploration of Pericles, a secular leader during the era of the Peloponnesian Wars.”

By Leah Gottheim