Shira Hecht-Koller

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Shira Hecht-Koller is an educational entrepreneur, attorney, writer, and mom of four curious people. She brings with her two decades of experience teaching Judaic Studies and designing interdisciplinary curricula in the classroom and in immersive learning environments, to learners of all ages and backgrounds. She is currently studying for semikha at The Shalom Hartman Institute, as a member of the pilot cohort for its Beit Midrash for a new North American Rabbinate. Most recently she was Education Director for the Center for Values in Action and faculty member at M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education. Prior to that she was the co-founder and Education Director of 929 English, an educational start-up and global platform for the study of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. She has taught Talmud and Comparative Law at North Shore Hebrew Academy, where she was Director of Interdisciplinary programming, at SAR High School, and at the Drisha Institute, where she directed the High School Talmud Fellowship Program. Before embarking on a career in Jewish education she practiced corporate Intellectual Property law at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. She teaches, writes and speaks globally on topics of Bible, Jewish law, family life and creativity and her work appears in both scholarly and popular publications. She is the author, together with Hanoch Piven of Dream Big, Laugh Often: And More Great Advice from the Bible (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), a PJ Library selection, translated into several languages and sent globally to over 30,000 homes. It was recently published in Hebrew as איך שורדים מבול ועוד עצות שימושיות מהתנ"ך, (Schocken, 2024). Her photography illustrates The Jewish Journey Haggadah, written by Rabbanit Adena Berkowitz (Gefen, 2019). She was a Paradigm Fellow at the Paideia Institute of Jewish Studies in Stockholm, a Fellow in M²'s Jewish Pedagogies Fellowship and sits on the advisory board of Grow Torah. She holds a JD, order of the coif, from Cardozo School of Law where she was an Editor of Cardozo Law Review, is a graduate of the Bruriah Scholars Talmud program at Midreshet Lindenbaum, and has studied at Michlala Jerusalem College. She has her BA in Biology and Judaic Studies, summa cum laude, from Yeshiva University. She is an avid tennis fan and loves hiking and exploring the world with her partner Aaron and children Dalya, Shachar, Amitai and Aiden, with whom she has lived in Jerusalem, and Cambridge, UK. She and the clan currently live in NYC with closets full of art supplies and a lot of books.