Everyone seems to agree that Israel education is complex. But all too often, the concept of "complexity" becomes a euphemism for the existence of unpleasant truths about Israel that challenge students' preconceived notions. I propose that instead of focusing on cultivating attachment to Israel, Israel educators should offer students an…

The article summarizes a study that examined the perspective of kindergarten children on Holocaust Remembrance Day as expressed in the discourse events of children with kindergarten teachers and early childhood education students during Holocaust Day in state kindergartens in Israel in a variety of localities. The article focuses on the…

Although the yeshiva is the housekeeper of the Jewish tradition of learning, it has undergone dramatic changes along history. We describe these changes in historical, sociogenetic, and microgenetic analyses, and particularly focus on the chavruta--dyadic learning around Talmudic texts during successive meetings, and the chabure--a gathering of…

Students in "community" (nondenominational) Jewish high schools represent a diversity of denominational affiliations, including those who affiliate with more than one denomination and those that affiliate with none. These schools strive to create communities in which students with varying Jewish beliefs and practices are, at the very…

A recent article in this journal, "Teaching about Catholic--Jewish relations: some guidelines to assist the work of teachers in Catholic schools," by Clare Jardine (Volume 7, no 1, 46-60), includes a page on "A new approach to New Testament studies." There the author points out that "The situations described in the Gospels…

Members of the Jewish Enlightenment movement and Jewish financial entrepreneurs undertook an active, conscious project to effect significant transformations in the Jewish habitus in German-speaking areas during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A symbiotic relationship allowed these groups to disseminate a new vision of Jewish society…

Missing from the growing literature on Jewish camps is Lukinsky's (1968) pioneering study of the curriculum to teach responsibility that he designed for the 1966 Ramah American Seminar. Reviewing this work I discovered that Lukinsky--under Schwab's (1971) influence--creates a rare balance between his own perspectives as an educational practitioner…

As the author reads through Dr. Woocher's article, she was inspired and excited by his call to reassess goals and by the possibilities he describes. At the same time, she felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues and the breadth of potential solutions educators face as Jewish communities in 5773. Woocher points straight to the heart of…

A century ago a group of educators led an effort to transform American Jewish education to enable it to operate successfully in the 20th century. Today, with American Jews living under very different conditions, a similar effort is needed to reinvent Jewish education for the 21st century. Changes and new initiatives already taking place on the…

Jonathan Woocher's "Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century" presents a vision for a reimagined system of Jewish education. The educational landscape is changing, Woocher says, both because of a myriad of contextual factors (economic, geopolitical, technological, sociological) and because of the very need for Jewish educational decision…

The study explored the understanding and implementation of inclusive education in an independent Jewish community school; a school with a community ethos of care and belonging, whose context is, by definition, exclusionary on the grounds of a particular social category--religion. However, this exclusionary agenda positioned the school as inclusive…

This study deals with the way in which kindergarten teachers in state religious kindergartens in Israel tell the Torah stories to children. It examines the influence of the teachers' identity, being part of the religious Zionist society, on the way in which she tells the stories. These kindergarten teachers function at a crossroads of identities.…

This article is a contribution to the discussion of learning processes in religious education (RE) classrooms. Sociocultural theories of learning, understood here as tool-mediated processes, are used in an analysis of three RE classroom conversations. The analysis focuses on the language tools that are used in conversations; how the tools mediate;…

In what ways do Jewish and Muslim faith schools in Britain play a role in promoting and contributing to community cohesion? What 21st-century skills around intercultural understanding do they foster? This book examines the nuances of faith in school settings and draws on a case study of Jewish and Muslim faith schools. The authors show how these…

We are sometimes told that practitioners have a hard time with theory. But those who are committed to nurturing a certain kind of intellectual capacity among Jewish educational practitioners--the capacity to identify and critically engage with vision in Jewish education, a capacity that we can call a "philosophical disposition"--must accept the…