Marc Lindner, who will be the principal of the CESJDS high school next year, visited the Upper School today, beginning to acquaint himself with the faculty and staff before he starts his job here next July. Lindner currently lives in California, where he is the Middle School Director of the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School, a medium sized K-8 community day school located outside of Los Angeles.

At Heschel, Lindner is in charge of the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, each of which has roughly 50 students, so his move to the Upper School will mark an increase in responsibilities for him. Before his job at Heschel, he was the Middle School Principal at the Jacob Pressman Academy in Los Angeles, where he worked with current Head of School Mitchel Malkus.
Though Lindner has been involved in Jewish education for many years, he has not taken the most direct path to get there. After going to a public high school, where he played football and lacrosse, he majored in Business and Psychology at Ithaca College. He planned to become a professor of psychology, but decided to go into finance instead when he realized that going into academia would likely force him and his family to move around a lot. Only after six years in finance did Lindner enter the field of Jewish education, when he decided to become a teacher at a Jewish school in California.

“It wasn’t direct preparation for coming to Jewish education, but it has definitely proven to me as very, very valuable as I have gone through my various steps,” Lindner said of the portions of his career that were not directly related to Jewish education.

As high school principal, Lindner will be serving in a position that for a number of years has not been filled regularly, though that does not seem to bother him too much.

“I see it as an exciting opportunity because my intention is to be here for quite a while,” Lindner said.

But he does have one concern. He hopes that students will not mind too much that he is a New York Giants fan.