Dr. Bitzan is the Chief Operating Officer and Director of Learning Initiatives at TDSO. He brings fifteen years of experience in teaching, curriculum design, and educational leadership to his role on the School’s backend operations and its educational mission. Most recently, he served as the Director of Operations at Associated Hebrew Day Schools in Toronto. Before his tenure there, Dr. Bitzan worked as a consultant and taught for more than a decade as an award-winning professor of Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Dr. Bitzan grew up in Toronto but has spent most of his professional career in the U.S., with short stints in Israel. After completing his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude, Dr. Bitzan earned a Ph.D. in Jewish and European history at Berkeley. He fell in love with teaching as a graduate student instructor and found his calling in igniting passion for study, debate, and writing among first-year students. 

After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Bitzan honed his teaching craft for three years as a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford University’s intensive humanities program and then completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. From 2015-2021, he held a professorship in Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin and spent one year teaching the history of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a visiting professor. 

Observing his children’s Jewish educational journeys in the U.S., Israel, and in Canada, he decided to pivot full-time to work in Jewish education, while also gaining experience in business as a marketing research consultant working in Toronto.