Within Orthodox Jewish early childhood programs, gender roles of the Shabbat Party promote heteronormative gender expectations that contend with values about children, teaching, and Judaism. Interviews with 15 educators suggested tensions between gender flexible attitudes and beliefs that gender unfolds naturally. Pretend play was considered a…

The authors taught students in an Executive Master's program in Jewish education how to recognize and manage Enduring Dilemmas, situations in which two prized Jewish values stand in tension with one another and cannot be enacted simultaneously. They explore how these educators draw on the leadership practice of Managing Enduring Dilemmas in their…

Abram S. Isaacs (1852-1920), editor, intellectual, university professor, and rabbi, was a moral educator dedicated to making American Jews more knowledgeable and more virtuous. His role model was his father, who founded and taught in the Jewish day school that young Abram attended. While embracing the blessings of American life, Isaacs was deeply…

This research compares teachers' perceptions of principals' authentic-leadership dimensions, between collectivistic and individualistic cultures in the Israeli-Jewish (non-Arab) elementary schools. Culture will predict authentic-leadership dimensions with an individualistic tendency toward authenticity. 482 Israeli elementary school teachers (30%…

The purpose of this paper is to problematize the place of religious authority in politics and education. Specifically, this essay highlights the role of religious authority in establishing a moral order that values compliance and conformity at the expense of liberty and critique. In doing so, the essay reflects on Israeli politics and Islamic…

Over the course of the 2015-2016 academic year, 12th-grade students at a Jewish high school in Canada participated in a research study that assessed how they integrated morally complex narratives in Israel's past into their own relationship with the country. This article presents material based on how students reacted to learning that some Jewish…

Michel de Montaigne's "L'art de Conférer" offers a moral groundwork for students' learning of "havruta," a traditional Jewish form of studying in pairs, based on collaborative critical text-based learning, that can be applied to students everywhere. The article attends to the nature of "havruta" learning and to…

The significance of the analytical models in traditional Islamic studies is that they contribute in sharpening the intellectual capacity of the students of Islamic studies. Research literature in Islamic studies has descriptive side predominantly; the information is gathered and compiled and rarely analyzed properly. This weakness is because of…

This article mingles stories and concepts of young Jewish Israeli children about God, with reflections on the roles of faith, memory, imagination, and cognitive development in children's Religious Education. The stories are meant to illustrate, among other things, the purity and innocence of young children's faith, which is largely untroubled by…

As liberal democracies include increasingly diverse and multifaceted populations, the longstanding debate about the role of the state in religious education and the place of religion in public life seems imperative now more than ever. The maintenance of religious schools and the planning of religious education curricula raise a profound challenge.…

This article addresses teachers' understanding of spiritual development in public and religious schools in Boston and Chicago. It examines how teachers define spiritual development in different educational contexts and looks at the way they relate spirituality to a number of factors including community, identity, and character. The data from the…

For this study of sexual education in Israeli Modern Orthodox high schools, we interviewed teachers at the crossroads of conflicting values. Caught between a commitment to promote traditional practices and values, and a sense of obligation to serve as caregivers to students whose lived realities often do not fit neatly within the framework of…

This article examines the question of whether one ought to hold religious experience as a Jewish educational goal and, more fundamentally, to ask what this might mean. The objective is to begin to probe what an education toward (Jewish) religious experience would entail and what some of the theoretical, moral and practical obstacles might be. The…

The challenge of teaching classic religious texts with flawed moral messages from a contemporary point of view is examined in the case of the Beautiful Captive of War (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). A moral dilemma is generated by contradictory ethical stands within the Jewish tradition, between which students have to choose. This dilemma is explored in…

This article explores how the role of educational leadership can significantly enhance adult Jewish learning experiences through an in-depth examination of the position of site director at the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School, a two-year program of adult Jewish learning operating at more than sixty sites across North America. Applying the…