14 | SEPTEMBER 12 • 2019 

DIANA SCHOENBRUN

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DETROIT BEGINNINGS
Three decades ago, Adam was 
a child growing up in Jewish 
Detroit. He’
d get immersed in 
“We Didn’
t Start the Fire” by 
Billy Joel, be featured in the 
April 17, 1989, issue of the 
Detroit Free Press about his pas-
sion for Nintendo, and attend 
Camp Tamarack and Camp 
Tanuga, where he says he discov-
ered a love of water skiing and 
tennis, which complemented an 
early passion for reading, soccer 
and trivia.
Just two decades ago, Adam 
graduated from West Bloomfield 
High School, where he dove 
competitively all four years and 
was ranked 47th nationally. He 
was team captain, an academic 
All-American and a scholarship 
winner at the 1999 Michigan 
Jewish Sports Foundation dinner. 
He graduated from Harvard 
University, and then received 
his Ph.D. from the University 
of Michigan in three years. He 
and Allison married at Tam-O-
Shanter when he was in graduate 
school. 
When Facebook COO Sheryl 
Sandberg went to Israel last 
month, she made an early visit 
to meet Israeli President Reuven 
Rivlin, still mourning the loss 
of his wife two months before. 
Sandberg gave him Option 
B, a book she co-wrote about 

building resilience in the face of 
adversity after she had to face the 
sudden loss of her own husband. 
The co-author was Adam 
Grant, who Sandberg has 
referred to as “one of the most 
important influences in my life.” 
Adam, 38, has already amassed 
millions of fans who listen to his 
podcasts (WorkLife). Millions 
have read his bestselling books 
and heard him speak at govern-
ment, corporate and nonprofit 
events around the world. 
His first two books, Give and 
T
ake: Why Helping Others Drives 
Our Success and Originals: How 
Non-Conformists Move the World, 
quickly rocketed to top slots on 
the New York Times bestsellers list 
and have been translated to 35 or 
so languages. 
He has had academic ten-
ure for a decade, when, at 
29, he became the youngest 
professor ever to be tenured 
at the Wharton School at the 

University of Pennsylvania. He 
often teaches 300 students across 
four sections each semester — 
and they have rated him one of 
Wharton’
s top educators going 
back years.
Allison earned three degrees 
from the school of nursing at 
the University of Michigan — a 
bachelor’
s in nursing, a master’
s 
as a psychiatric-mental health 
nurse practitioner, and a master’
s 
in nursing business and health 
care administration. She gradu-
ated with a perfect GPA and is a 
member of the Sigma Theta Tau 
International Honors Society. 
The Grants both grew up as 
members of local synagogues, 
with extended families today at 
Temple Kol Ami and Temple 
Shir Shalom, both in West 
Bloomfield. They had their b’
nai 
mitzvahs in the Detroit area in 
the early 1990s. In later years, 
Allison became very active in the 
BBYO Michigan region (Ahavah 

chapter), where she served a lead-
ership role as regional N’
siah.
For the pair, participation in 
social action and community 
service was emphasized through 
BBYO and their temples. 
They started instilling these 
same values in their children at 
a very young age. The first thing 
they did was to encourage gener-
osity around the holiday season. 
At Chanukah, instead of just 
receiving gifts, the Grant kids 
picked out presents for under-
privileged children and delivered 
them to local hospitals and 
shelters. As they grew, they were 
actively involved in choosing 
items to donate to local temples 
and charities. 
Now that they’
re older, they 
focus less on gift giving and 
more on the ways they can give 
daily with their time, knowl-
edge, skills and compassion. To 
“catch them doing good” and 
remind them to be grateful for 
the kindness of others, they 
have a weekly dinner table tra-
dition of asking them who they 
helped this week — and who 
helped them.

LIFE IN PHILADELPHIA
When asked about the con-
trasts between the Philadelphia 
and Detroit Jewish communi-
ties, they start with a big dif-
ference: Detroit has more delis 

“We believe the responsibility of 
parents is to encourage kids to 
take pride in excellence, but also 
nurture virtues like generosity, 
curiosity and integrity.”

Jews in the D

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