That’s All: What The Devil Wears Prada 2 Teaches Jewish Institutions

(Spoiler alert: I am about to ruin a few plot points of The Devil Wears Prada 2 for you. If you have not yet seen it, bookmark this, go to the theater, and come back. Miranda would want it that way.)

I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 expecting a nostalgic romp. What I got instead was a meditation on institutional decline, the cost of cutting corners, and the slow-motion crisis of organizations that have lost the thread of their own story — what they stand for internally, and how they say it out loud. In other words: I got Torah.

We learn in Pirkei Avot that there are those who turn the text and turn it again, because everything is in it. I would offer that the text we turn need not always be a leather-bound one in a Beit Midrash. Sometimes the text is a film our communities are already watching, and the work of a teacher, a leader, or a strategist is to ask: what is this story trying to tell us about ourselves?

So here is what Devil 2 is trying to tell the Jewish nonprofit sector. Whether we are ready to hear it is another question.

The September Issue Is Thin

The emotional core of the sequel is not Miranda Priestly's cruelty. It is her grief. Runway, the magazine she built into a cultural institution, is now owned by a conglomerate that views it as a line item. Its September issue — historically the cathedral of the fashion year — is, in her words, so thin you could floss with it. Nigel, her longtime creative partner, observes that even when they manage to mount a beautiful shoot, readers scroll past it in seconds. The artistry is still there. The audience for the artistry has been trained out of paying attention.

If that does not describe the experience of leading a legacy Jewish institution in 2026, I do not know what does.

Synagogues that once anchored neighborhoods are wondering why their High Holiday seats no longer fill themselves. National organizations with eighty-year histories are watching funders ask, with increasing impatience, what they have done lately. Camps, schools, federations, foundations — many of the institutions that built the infrastructure of American Jewish life are in some version of Miranda's chair, looking at a thinner September issue and asking what happened.

The temptation, in that moment, is to do what the conglomerate's new boss does in the film: cut. Trim the features department. Lay off the photographers. Shrink the print run. Move everything to the platform that algorithmically rewards volume over depth.

The Jewish sector is in its own cost-cutting moment. IsraAid recently cut 20% of its headquarters staff as unrestricted dollars dried up. Jewish social service agencies are bracing for federal funding cuts that touch SNAP, Medicaid, and the programs that keep their most vulnerable clients housed and fed. Synagogues are watching membership models that worked for fifty years stop working. And as Atra's 2025 study of the American rabbinate made plain, our clergy are burning out at scale — driven, the research found, by emotional exhaustion, financial stress, and institutional dysfunction. In response, organizations are doing what conglomerates do: cutting where the math is easiest. The communications hire. The strategy retainer. The brand refresh. The line items that look like overhead on a spreadsheet and like the institution's voice everywhere else.

It is a strategy that looks like prudence on a spreadsheet and like surrender everywhere else.

What Miranda Is Actually Mourning

There is a scene where Miranda delivers a soliloquy about living in a world that no longer values beauty. It would be easy to read this as a powerful woman's vanity, the lament of someone whose throne is wobbling. I think it is something else, she is naming a real loss and one our sector ought to take seriously.

Beauty, in the Jewish tradition, is not decoration. Hiddur mitzvah, the principle that we beautify the commandments, teaches that how we do something is part of what we are doing. A seder table set with care is not the same seder as one just thrown together. A bimah dressed for the Yamim Noraim (High Holy Days) is not interchangeable with a folding table. A magazine, mailed to a member's home, printed on stock that feels like something is not the same artifact as a PDF dropped into an inbox at 3:47 p.m. on a Friday.

I am not arguing for nostalgia. I am arguing that the race to the bottom — cheaper, faster, thinner, more — is a theology, and it is not ours. When a Jewish institution decides that its annual report can be an unedited template, that its High Holy Day appeal can be a templated email, that its strategic plan can be a PowerPoint nobody will reread, it is making a quiet claim about what its work is worth. Donors notice. Members notice. The next generation, the one we keep saying we are worried about losing, notices most of all.

Andy Comes Back. That Matters.

Here is the part of the film I keep returning to. Andy Sachs, who twenty years ago fled Miranda's empire because she did not want to become it, comes back. Not as a wide-eyed assistant this time, and not because she has reconciled herself to Miranda's worldview. She comes back because she has lost her job, her options are narrower than they used to be, and Runway is offering her something she did not have access to the first time around: the Features Editor chair. A seat where she can actually shape what the magazine says. She returns not out of nostalgia or surrender, but out of a clear-eyed bet that this time, with this title, she can make the institution mean something different.

The Jewish communal sector is, in real time, losing the professionals it most needs to keep. Leading Edge's Spring 2024 Jewish Workforce Snapshot found that employees under 30 were 89% more likely than their older colleagues to leave their organizations.Atra's recent study put a sharper point on it: only 6% of working American rabbis are under 35, while 26% are over 65, an age profile that, in any other profession, would be considered an emergency. Rabbis are leaving congregational life to launch consulting firms. Senior executives are stepping out of director chairs and into independent practices. The exodus is not from Judaism. It is from the institutions. Many of our most thoughtful colleagues have concluded that they can do better, more meaningful work outside the systems that shaped them, and they may be right.

Here is where the film and our sector part ways. Andy comes back. In our world, the most interesting professionals I know are walking out — and they are not, by and large, being asked to walk back in. The question this puts to legacy institutions is not "how do we celebrate the ones returning," because that is not the moment we are in. The question is harder: what would it take to build a chair worth coming back to? What would it take to offer the people with the sharpest storytelling instincts, the strongest design sensibilities, and the deepest theological literacy something more than the assistant's desk? What would it take to trust them with the features editor's chair — a seat where they can actually define what the institution stands for in public, and shape the strategy that gets it there?

Miranda needs Andy because Miranda cannot, by herself, translate Runway for a world that does not remember why Runway mattered. And Andy needs Miranda because Andy, on her own, cannot conjure eighty years of accumulated authority, taste, and craft. The film's most quietly radical claim is that the work ahead requires both.

The Practical Torah

So what does this mean for the executive director reading this between meetings?

Start here: the diagnosis underneath everything we have just named — the cuts, the exodus, the thinning September issue — is a story problem. Institutions in crisis are almost always institutions that have lost the ability to articulate, clearly and beautifully, why they exist and where they are going. When a synagogue cannot say what it is for, members leave. When a national organization cannot say what it is becoming, funders hesitate. When a federation cannot say what its next chapter will look like, talented professionals walk out the door to build that chapter elsewhere.

This is why the storytelling function inside your organization is not a marketing line item. And this is the part I want to be precise about, because the word storytelling gets flattened too quickly into communications. Storytelling, properly understood, is both: the story your institution tells itself — its strategy, its theory of change, the clarity of its identity — and the story it tells the world. The first is strategic planning. The second is communications and brand. They are not separable. A communications team without a clear strategic story can only produce polished noise. A strategic plan no one can articulate in public is a binder no one will reread. When your institution treats either of these as overhead, you are removing a load-bearing wall.

It means that the people you trust to tell your story, both internally and externally, should understand both the legacy and the present moment. A development associate who can write a clean email is not the same hire as a strategist who can articulate why your eighty-year-old institution still matters in a language a thirty-four-year-old donor will recognize. The first is a tactician. The second is a translator. You need both, and you need to know which is which.

It means that hiddur — the beautification of the work — is not optional. It is the difference between an institution that signals it values itself and one that signals it has given up. Donors fund the former. They tolerate the latter for a while, and then they don't.

And it means, finally, that legacy and relevance are not opposites. They are partners who have not always been on speaking terms. The work of this decade in Jewish institutional life is bringing them back into the same room, and trusting that the September issue, properly imagined, can still be thick enough to mean something.

Miranda Priestly would never put it this way. But the Torah is in the text we are willing to turn.