July 12, 2018

EARLIER THIS MONTH, STUDENTS from Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) International MBA Program descended on the Santa Monica offices of Philosophie, a digital innovation firm, to present their high-tech ventures to a panel of experts. 

Under the banner “Demo Day,” the event was the culmination of their three-week IDEAS (Israel, Digital, Entertainment, Arts and Sciences) Immersion program.

Over the past 10 years, TAU — the largest Jewish University in the world — has become a powerhouse when it comes to creating startups and venture capital-backed entrepreneurs. 

“Pitchbook has ranked us the last eight years in the top 10 schools globally,” IDEAS Immersion Founder David Dorfman told the Journal at Demo Day.

The group of 10 TAU students, which included participants from Israel, Turkey, Switzerland, South Africa and North America, spent four days in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and the rest of their time in Silicon Beach. 

While Silicon Valley has been incubating startups for around 40 years, “I think there’s more opportunity for a startup [in Los Angeles] in that it’s a little less expensive to run your company here than it is in San Francisco,” Dorfman said. “And because L.A. County and the Southland territories have 28 million people, there’s a big market [for testing] ideas.”

Designed to engage and encourage a new generation of innovators, Immersion  started out as a conference in Southern California in 2015. Within two years, the organization realized it could create something more substantive for participants. 

Students from TAU’s MBA program who apply for Immersion “go through interviews to make sure their ideas are doable and we can actually work with them,” said Inbal Sason, manager of  TAU’s student affairs at the international Sofaer Global MBA program. “My favorite part is getting to know the students and working with them,” she said, “because they transform so much throughout the year.”

Of the 46 students in the program, where the average age is late 20s, 10 students representing five early-stage (pre-investment and pre-revenue) projects were selected for the IDEAS program. 

“We bring them here and we do tons of workshops that deal with legal issues, marketing issues, design issues and financial issues,” Dorfman said. “[These are] all the issues that startups face and that a lot of the times can wind up setting them back months, if not years, if they don’t navigate them correctly.” 

The Immersion program, Dorfman added, is an opportunity to give back to the students, create a strong alumni network and enable them to avoid some of the pitfalls that a typical entrepreneur, especially one coming from Israel, isn’t always aware of.

“We bring the students [to California] and do workshops that deal with all the issues that startups face that can wind up setting them back months, if not years, if they don’t navigate them correctly.” — David Dorfman

At Demo Day, three of five student teams pitched the panel of founders and venture capitalists, including Eran Gilad of Scopus Ventures, Behzad Kianmahd and Daniel Nazarian of TAU Ventures, and Ben McMaster of Philosophie. 

Itay Lotan and Oren Blank presented their project called BrightPaths, designed to help prevent employee turnover through a system that helps companies collate employees’ skills, competencies and goals, then maps out development possibilities with the organization.

PlantOptics, an integrated greenhouse control system that utilizes image processing and machine learning algorithms to increase yield for greenhouse cultivators, was presented by Alex Joseph from New York and Elif Kara from Turkey.

Viibe, presented by Ron Biton and Shiran Shmerling, is a dating app that enables matched users to select from a collection of curated activities.

The two companies that did not present were GoldBuzz, created by Richard Kampel and Maya Lazarovich, and WeStream, created by Avi Forcheimer and Tamar Purdize. GoldBuzz’s mission  is to alleviate the loneliness that millennials feel in the workplace, while WeStream is a single online platform for content production.

“There’s probably a reason why the majority of entrepreneurs these days are 40  years old,” Lazarovich said. “There’s a lot of learning and experience that goes into these great ideas that turn into strong, healthy businesses.”

Lazarovich said he was grateful for the opportunity provided by Immersion. “We were given a lot of tools to figure out how to get to that [next] level,” he said, “but that also comes with the understanding that right now we might not be in that place and that’s OK.”

“Creating a business is three steps,” Kampel added. “Identifying a problem, creating a value proposition around that problem and then building a sustainable model to support it. And we’ve correctly identified a problem but not fully how to address or how to create a viable, sustainable model.”

Armed with knowledge from their Immersion experience, they will go back to Israel and continue to work on their project, which, Dorfman said, is the point of the Immersion experience. 

“Our mission is not to have the students move to the United States. It’s more to give them an idea that they can do it and keep part of it in Israel and also set it up in North America.”

In May, West Los Angeles resident Darya Aminia learned she had landed the CEO job she’d applied for. But Aminia isn’t a seasoned executive. She’s a 15-year-old high school sophomore. And the CEO gig was for the recent Israeli American Council’s (IAC) Eitanim summer hackathon — a five-day residential program that took place last month at American Jewish University (AJU). 

The third-annual hackathon brought together 169 Jewish- and Israeli-American middle and high school students from across the country. This year, for the first time, a handful of students also came from Israel. 

The students were divided into 17 teams and tasked with “developing a groundbreaking solution to introduce Israel and its Jewish heritage to people visiting Israel during their inflight experience.”

On June 29, the students, together with their two dozen volunteer mentors and a small group of family and friends, participated in what was billed as Demo Day at AJU’s Gindi Auditorium.  The seven final teams (semifinals were held earlier in the day), presented their products to the audience and judges: Danna Balas Caldwell, president of Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt; Yonatan Winetraub, co-founder of SpaceIL; David Gonen, co-founder of Curious Minds; and IAC CEO and Eitanim founder Shoham Nicolet. In addition to the hackathon, IAC Eitanim operates programs in over a dozen states throughout the school year.

Each of the seven groups had four minutes for its presentation, which included professional quality videos, charts, graphs and budget forecasts. Some groups created product demos, including a rough version of a virtual reality tour of the Western Wall.

The proposal for “In A Bite” began with a takedown of traditional airline food. Instead, it promised delicious dishes like couscous that reflected Israel’s diversity. Each item would come with a brief, printed description for a more immersive experience.

The students were divided into 17 teams and tasked with “developing a groundbreaking solution to introduce Israel and its Jewish heritage to people visiting Israel.”

But the winning product was “180°.” Based on the concept of tikkun olam, 180°, which was conceived as a nonprofit, aimed to connect travelers to causes and organizations in Israel that resonated with them. They could then opt to make charitable donations or volunteer.

Even though Aminia’s team’s virtual reality simulated bus tour of Israel called “Israelity” did not win the big prize, the experience “definitely motivated me to be a better leader,” she said. The biggest challenge was “keeping everyone on task, she said. “That was very difficult for my group,” she admitted, in large part because her group became so close over the course of the week. 

However, that’s one of the goals of IAC Eitanim. While connecting these Jewish tweens and teens to Israel and their Jewish identity is important, Nicolet said, “Friendship is the best gift you can get out of Eitanim.” 

Nicolet, who grew up in Israel, demonstrated that value by sharing three photographs with the attendees before the finalists’ presentations. The first was of him in a program in seventh grade, with his own small group of friends. Nicolet credited that hands-on, project-based learning program with changing his life and teaching him “to innovate and work hard to meet deadlines.” Those experiences, he said, served as the model for IAC Eitanim.

The second photo from 1999 showed a group of Israeli soldiers, including Nicolet, alongside Maj. Eitan Belachsan, who was killed while fighting Hezbollah mere days after the photo was taken, and whom the Eitanim program is named after. 

The final photograph was of 20 individuals, including Nicolet, who were pivotal in founding the IAC 11 years ago. “It is all about the team,” Nicolet said. “Great things are done in teams.”

It’s summertime and the school bells are no longer ringing, but more than 400 students from Title I schools continue to board school buses. 

All over Los Angeles, kindergartners through eighth-graders hop out of those buses onto the grounds of several Jewish institutions, and they’re all greeted with enthusiastic cheers. They’re served breakfast, followed by a “Reading Rally” featuring cheers, chants, a read-aloud session and a visit by a community guest. 

Welcome to a typical morning in the Wise Readers to Leaders (WRTL) Summer Literacy and Enrichment Program.

From June 25 through Aug. 3, children accepted into the free WRTL summer program hone their academic skills. Founded in 2012 as a Stephen Wise Temple Outreach Program by the organization’s CEO, Andrea Sonnenberg, and Rabbi Ron Stern in collaboration with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), WRTL works to close the achievement gap facing lower-income kids.

American Jewish University, Stephen Wise Temple, Milken Community Schools and Wilshire Boulevard Temple serve as campuses for the program. “We figured there’s all these incredible Jewish institutions around town that are sitting empty over the summer, why not make use of them?” Sonnenberg told the Journal.

The program is designed to prevent the academic “summer slide.”

“[The kids] — who predominantly are Latino and who can’t normally afford access to these types of camps — work hard all year long on their literacy,” Sonnenberg said, “and then come summer, they lose much more than the two months. It takes them the whole year to get themselves back to the level they were at.”

When WRTL began in 2012, it was called Wise Freedom School Partners, had only eight children in attendance and used the CDF’s curriculum. Today, it’s an independent organization with a literacy curriculum designed by a team of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers. 

“We wanted our curriculum to be cross-cultural,” Sonnenberg said. “One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we’re able to [build] bonds between the Latino and the Jewish community in Los Angeles.” 

To this end, many of the books read in the program are by Latino authors and about Latino families. 

“We wanted our curriculum to be cross-cultural. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we’re able to [build] bonds between the Latino and the Jewish community in Los Angeles.” — Andrea Sonnenberg 

“It’s important that they see aspects of their own lives or characteristics of themselves within the story,” Middle School Site Coordinator Nicole Soriano said. However, there are also books about Jewish and other cultures. “We want the kids to be exposed to everything,” Sonnenberg said.

Each day at the summer camp, the children — called scholars —  improve their literacy skills through a variety of programs, including “Drop Everything and Read” time, which gives the scholars 15 minutes to read on their own from any book in their classroom library. Each week they are allowed to take home and keep one book. 

“It’s really important to have books in the home,” Sonnenberg explained. “There’s a strict correlation between the number of books in the home and academic success.”

The scholars are provided with lunch and time for recess, after which their afternoon is filled with various activities. Some afternoons they learn science from a special curriculum designed by DJ Kast, one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” honorees on its annual list of change-makers. They also learn things such as coding, journalism, music and sports. “It’s a broader education than just literacy,” Sonnenberg said. “We’re helping the whole child.” 

Because physical education and music classes are not provided by Title I schools, WRTL ensures that the scholars are exposed to these activities. Weekly field trips to places such as the Skirball Cultural Center and Underwood Farms are also used to broaden the scholars’ education.

To help with these daily activities, more than 150 Jewish teenagers volunteer throughout the summer as “Junior Literacy Leaders.” “[Having the teenage volunteers] spend time with and make connections with the scholars is incredibly important,” Sonnenberg said.

Junior Literacy Leader Aaron Tizabgar said he felt that connection while on a program field trip to the park. “I spent the whole three hours playing soccer and it was amazing to see how happy I made the kids,” he said. “I would look around and see a group of 30 little kids smiling and laughing and having an incredible time. It made me really proud of what I was doing.”

The concept of tikkun olam inspires the organization, and every teenage volunteer must explain what tikkun olam means to them on their application. 

“What I consider to be one of the core obligations of Jews is to make a difference,” Stern said. “We live in a world where the overwhelming tendency is toward selfishness and self-absorption, and what I try to show these kids is that Judaism doesn’t advocate that position.”

Indeed, WRTL’s motto is “Healing the world, one scholar at a time.” 

“I’m very proud of the connection that we’ve been able to make with the Latino community,” Sonnenberg said, “to bring these two communities together and sort of realize that we’re all really the same and that we can work together and heal the world.” 

Yet WRTL’s work does not end with the summer program. Thanks to partnerships with the Los Angeles, Stanley Mosk, Fulbright and Garden Grove Elementary schools, along with 17 public middle schools, WRTL hosts year-round parent workshops on topics such as child development, education, finances, drug prevention and immigration. A choir currently is being established with the scholars to perform year-round at synagogues and churches, and the Remote Reading and Leading programs enable scholars to keep in touch with volunteers throughout the year.

“My vision really is to license the curriculum in Jewish institutions all over the country,” Sonnenberg said, “where there are underserved neighboring communities, and using our curriculum to help more kids.” 

Nicole Levi is a senior at Palisades High School and a Jewish Journal summer intern. 

Back in 2011, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods Patrick O. Brown started to  experiment with ingredients to make a meat-free burger, including potato and wheat protein, coconut oil and heme, which gives meat its taste and aroma but can also be found in plants. 

Now his tasty creation, the Impossible Burger, is being sold at more than 1,400 eateries, including Fatburger, White Castle, Umami Burger and Crossroads Kitchen. 

Backed by Bill Gates, Impossible Foods is nearing $400 million in funding, and in May the Impossible Burger received a kosher pareve certification from the Orthodox Union. The May launch at Crossroads Kitchen was significant enough for IKAR Senior Rabbi Sharon Brous to use it as a jumping off point for a sermon about growing up vegetarian and why Jews keep kosher. 

While its rollout has been slow across the kosher world — only one local kosher joint, Wunder Eats, is selling it — Los Angeles Jews have been eating it at other restaurants across town. 

“I have had many veggie burgers in my 27 years as a vegetarian and most were ‘granola’ tasting,” said Pico-Robertson resident Noah Bleich. When he discovered the $9 Impossible Burger at Fatburger, Bleich said, “It’s the closest thing to eating burgers I have had since becoming a vegetarian.”

The burger with fries is $16 at Crossroads, $13 at Wunder Eats and $16 at Umami, where it comes with two patties. In kosher restaurants, a typical meat burger ranges anywhere from $7 to $30 with add-ons like beef pastrami and a side of fries.  

Meat-eater Nicole Aimee Schreiber, who paid $16 at Umami, said it was “totally reasonable” and “incredible. It doesn’t taste like real meat but it tastes amazing.”

According to Brown, the company went kosher so that everyone could try it. “Getting kosher certification is an important milestone,” he said. “We want the Impossible Burger to be ubiquitous, and that means it must be affordable and accessible to everyone, including people who have food restrictions for religious reasons.”

To receive kosher certification, a  rabbinic field representative toured Impossible Foods’ 67,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Oakland, which puts out 500,000 pounds of plant-based meat every month. “The rabbi confirmed that all ingredients, processes and equipment used to make the Impossible Burger are compliant with kosher law, derived from the Torah’s books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,” Brown said.

A 3-ounce Impossible Burger has 200 calories and contains 10 grams of saturated fat, 430 milligrams of sodium and 20 grams of protein. A real meat patty that is 80 percent lean ground chuck will typically have 271 calories, 25 grams of protein and 18 grams of total fat.

“All ingredients, processes and equipment used to make the Impossible Burger are compliant with kosher law, derived from the Torah’s books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.” — Patrick O. Brown 

There are no hormones, cholesterol or artificial flavors in the Impossible Burger, while real burgers usually have all three. The Impossible Burger has roughly 75 percent less water, generates about 87 percent fewer greenhouse gases and requires about 95 percent less land than ground beef from cows. Brown said he hopes Impossible Foods will replace meat from animals by 2035. 

“The Impossible Burger is absurdly delicious, and not just ‘for a meat replacement,’ ” L.A. vegan and storyteller Sarah Klegman said. “[It’s got] that perfectly grilled outside and soft, flavorful, delicious inside. I’ve had a real burger, and a real cheeseburger and the Impossible Burger measures up without a doubt.”