Master of Arts in Liberal Arts, Focus in Philosophy, St. John's College
Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics, St. John's College
Bachelor of Arts, Interdisciplinary Music Studies, Berklee College of Music
Manasseh David Israel joins Namahana School as a Kumu, returning to the North Shore where he grew up to teach the next generation of keiki. Born and raised on Kauaʻi, he attended Kilauea School and then Hanalei School, graduating in 2000 as that year's May Day king.
Manasseh earned a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Music Studies from Berklee College of Music in Boston and a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts, with a focus in philosophy, from St. John's College in Santa Fe. He completed a second graduate degree at St. John's, a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics, and has studied Classical Hebrew there alongside earlier language study in Modern Hebrew at the Polis Institute in Jerusalem and Ancient Greek through a SALVI seminar in Houston.
For the past decade, Manasseh has taught music and the humanities as a private tutor, in person and online, working with middle and high school students on guitar, ukulele, music theory, and songwriting, as well as history, ethics, writing, and poetry. He favors active discussion and questioning in the style of the seminar and the Oxford tutorial over a lecture-based approach. He has also worked in publishing, editing A Symphony of Thought by Eric Christian von Fricken and serving as editorial assistant on Constantine and the Divine Mind by Kegan A. Chandler.
Manasseh looks forward to settling with his family on Kauaʻi and raising his daughters near the ocean he grew up on, teaching keiki at Namahana School.
