The Israel-Hamas crisis that started in October of 2023 has led to an increase in hate acts targeted at Jewish and Arab students. In response, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter reminding educational leaders of their responsibilities to address this behavior. This paper offers examples of the kind of conduct educational leaders are…

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and…

Travel to Israel has been a central feature of Jewish and Zionist education yet it is time for this educational travel to be examined in the context of current cultural trends of travel and transnational experiences. The Jewish educational community has not yet internalized the impact of global trends on the field of travel to Israel from a…

We frequently encounter the claim that a particular Jewish educational experience will be "transformative" for the participants. The language may be hyperbole. But it may also point to educators' aspirations to affect not just knowledge and practice but character and identity. In order to understand this phenomenon--not the phenomenon of…

In this article we analyze moviemaking as a unique pedagogy that is used in a preservice semester in Israel program for the preparation of Israel educators: Students create their own short films about an aspect of Israeli society and/or their relationship with it. We analyze the students' movies, together with students' reflective papers about the…

The violent and protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, and Jewish Americans play a significant role in influencing related US foreign policy as well as in promoting positive interactions with Palestinians globally. Diaspora populations have played an important role in international peace processes and American Jews are actively…

This research explores the impact of a year studying in Israel on Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) rabbinical students' emotional connection toward and knowledge about the State of Israel and the Jewish People. We want to better understand the students' beliefs, ideas, and behaviors that emerge from their experience…

This study was based on the theory that adolescents view scenes of violent ethnic conflicts in the mass media through the lens of their own ethnicity, and that the resulting social-cognitive reactions influence their negative stereotypes about similar ethnic groups in their own country. We interviewed 89 Jewish and 180 Arab American high school…

What are North American Jewish day schools doing when they engage in Israel education, what shapes their practices, and to what ends? In this article, we report on a multi-method study inspired by these questions. Our account is organized around an analytical model that helps distinguish between what we call the vehicles, intensifiers, and…

The Naphtali Herz Imber Jewish Day School proudly proclaimed its commitment to Israel, yet many of its students experienced profound ambivalence toward the Jewish State. Why? The school was committed to a series of contradictory values which surfaced in its approach to Israel education. This article outlines three distinct yet interrelated…

The role of Israel in the identity of North American Jews is of concern and interest to community leaders, philosophers of Jewish education, and most important, practitioners in the field. Although there is an awareness of the need to help emerging Jewish educators grapple with the complex questions surrounding Israel engagement, little research…

My study concerns the teacher knowledge of "mehankhim," teachers in Israeli high schools entrusted to promote students' moral, civic, and social growth. It examines two "mehankhim" from a secular Israeli high school who participated in a long-term professional development program in secular Jewish education, centered by…

This book is an in-depth examination of education and media under occupation. The contributors to this volume engage dialogue to explore these domains and their roles and functioning under occupation while keeping an eye toward resolution, using the on-going conflict between Palestine and Israel as the focus. The uniqueness of this collection is…

The following is a translation of the introduction to "Medabrim Chazon" (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006), the Hebrew translation of "Visions of Jewish Education," edited by Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, and Daniel Marom (Cambridge, 2003). "Visions of Jewish Education" is an effort by leading scholars to improve the quality…