Editorial board page for “Jewish Education”, Volume 53, Number 1

Abstract

This is a scanned image of the original Editorial Board page(s) for this issue     

Editorial board page for “Jewish Education”, Volume 56, Number 4

Abstract

This is a scanned image of the original Editorial Board page(s) for this issue     

Editorial board page for “Jewish Education”, Volume 52, Number 3

Abstract

This is a scanned image of the original Editorial Board page(s) for this issue     

A Survey of “One-Day-A-Week” Jewish Education in Philadelphia,Pa.

In light of recent developments in the Modern Orthodox community's approach to homosexuality, this article presents a classroom discussion on homosexuality that took place at a Modern Orthodox high school. An examination of the discussion's heteroglossia, or multiplicity of languages existing in tension, along with attention to the discussion's turn-taking structures, reveals the teacher's high degree of control over what students could express. This controlling pedagogy consistently suppresses expressions of empathy in favor of legalistic assertions. This article questions whether the specific issue of homosexuality demands a different approach.     

The “Job” of Jewish Education: Making Mensches at Camp and Beyond

ABSTRACT

This article argues that contemporary resources drawing from 19th-century Mussar wisdom and Positive Psychology in the context of Jewish camp are a great vehicle for communicating our virtues and teaching “21st Century Innovation and Learning Skills.” Based on practitioner research, this article draws on over a decade of working with Jewish camps across North America. Several common areas are identified: discernment of priority virtues, understanding the relationship between values and virtues, a common language, importance of developing resources, and cultivating communities of trust.     

EXCERPTS: “The Role of Art in My Life and in Jewish Education”

For Jewish education, as for the Jewish People, the overriding lesson of the Iraqi War is the inadequacy of secular political and social movements as the sole arbiters of “relevance.” Both liberal and conservative ideologies failed in their assessment of the duration of the war and its consequences. Both displayed a moral obtuseness and selectivity from which sensitive people must recoil. From this point on, we Jews need to return to a more venerable, more sacred standard: our collective reading of the will of God, as embodied in the Torah, the Talmudic tradition, and subsequent Jewish encapsulations.     

Weaving the Arts into Jewish Education: Integration at the Blossom School,an Arts‐Based Jewish Day School

The Baltimore Hebrew College

I came to the U.S. from my home town Jerusalem in 1929, when I was 16 years of age. My father had emigrated from Eretz Israel in 1921 because of the severe economic conditions that prevailed after World War I. Gradually, he brought over all the members of his family. He hoped that he and his sons would save enough money in the New World to establish a vital profitable enterprise in Eretz Israel, and the family could then return to its native land. In New York, we lived at first in Brownsville, at that time the most dynamic center of Brooklyn Jewry. A year later, I moved to Baltimore where my father was employed.     

Teaching Approaches of Beginning Teachers for Jewish Studies in Israeli Mamlachti Schools: A Case Study of a Jewish Education Teachers’ Training Program for Outstanding Students

This article presents findings from a longitudinal qualitative study that examined teaching approaches of neophyte teachers in Israel during their 4-year exclusive teachers’ training program for teaching Jewish subjects and first two years of teaching. The program wanted to promote change in secular pupils’ attitudes toward Jewish subjects. We found a high incidence of teaching using positivistic approaches of knowledge transmission and the teachers adopted a particular teaching approach early into their training program that they continue to employ. Can teaching oriented in the transmission of central cultural value knowledge, with pupils as passive receptacles, create a meaningful encounter?     

“Make the Education of the Youths Our Own Education”: Plato's Laches,a Dialogue for Educators

Through an exegesis of the dramatic elements of Plato's Laches, Brandon Buck and Rachel Longa argue that it is an especially valuable text to read with practicing and preservice teachers. Buck and Longa show how the dialogue illustrates three essential aspects of what education means and involves. First, they show how the dialogue foregrounds the often-obscured role of philosophical inquiry in addressing educational questions. Second, they show how the depiction of aporia in the Laches underscores the importance of uncertainty for the persistence of humanistic conversation, and thus for substantial engagement with core educational questions. Finally, they interpret Socrates to suggest that participation in humanistic conversation is not merely an incidental aspect of education as a profession, but rather precisely what it means to be an educator. In sum, Buck and Longa argue that the Laches illustrates the core idea that in order to educate at all, we must be deeply involved in the very questions that characterize humanistic conversation.