Education Get to Know: Kate Nachman, Director of Year Course

My Young Judaea pedigree goes back to age 13, when my older sister tricked me into attending a YJ club meeting in Nashua, NH. I was hooked from the start and became active in my club, my region, camp and eventually Israel. After loving my Year Course experience despite a war in the middle of it, I knew I had to get back. Junior year abroad at Hebrew University and then my year as a Year Course madricha solidified my conviction that #ycneverends and I have been on a path towards never leaving ever since.

After making Aliya to Israel, I ran the theatre program at Merkaz Hamagshimim for 9 years, worked at Hebrew College in Boston for 3 and a half years, and found my way back to Year Course in 2009 where I have been happily working my way up to director ever since. As Director of Year Course, I get to navigate the intersection between education and administration of the program and see our students through a 9-month journey of personal growth, grappling with identity, and Israel adventure. My favorite part of the job is that it is always changing. Local, national and international weather, politics, culture and more (of multiple countries), can divert us from our regularly scheduled program and make for exciting challenges of how we stay dynamic and able to react to the world around us without missing out on the things we’ve already planned. It is never boring!

I hope our students are learning how to balance our history with our future. I hope they are allowing the “boring stuff that happened a long time ago” to be relevant as a lens through which they understand who and how they want to contribute to the world around them.