Thank you to the board, faculty and staff, supporters, and all the families of Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy.

Most importantly, mazal tov to the Class of 2026.

Graduates, today is one of those rare moments in life when everyone in the room is focused on you. Enjoy it. Enjoy the nachat your parents are experiencing for your success. Please indulge them when they want that extra, cheesy photo with your siblings and grandparents.

This is a special moment for you and for them, capping a lifetime of memories and formative experiences at Barrack and at your previous schools.

Before I go any further, let’s tackle the subject that has been the make or break of commencement speeches in 2026.

Everyone’s talking about AI.

In fact, I suspect there is an AI system somewhere right now generating a graduation speech about AI.

Let me reassure you: I am not going to spend the next ten minutes predicting which jobs AI will replace, whether robots will become your managers, or whether ChatGPT will someday be giving this speech instead of me.

Instead, I’ll echo what Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, said at a recent commencement address. “You all have AI,” Wozniak said. “You all have AI.” That is “actual intelligence.”

As you graduate from Barrack, you have a powerful combination: your intelligence, intellectual and emotional, combined with the power of a profound Jewish and secular education.

If you want to know how Jews have survived for thousands of years and contributed so much to the world around us, it is because we place education at the heart of our “operating system.”

I just marked ten years as the founding CEO of Prizmah, the network that serves Jewish day schools across North America.

It has been one of the great privileges of my life to work with extraordinary educators and leaders in hundreds of Jewish day schools.

In this role, I am reminded every day that our teachers and this community do far more than prepare students for college.

They prepare students for life.

I know this because they did it for me.

Outside of my family, my Jewish day school education was probably the most formative experience of my life.

I left school remembering lessons from Torah and from study of Talmud, such as Pirkei Avot, that guide me decades later, underpin my values, and determine what I strive to achieve.

I left with........

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