The role of education in Jewish continuity: a response to Jonathan Sacks

Contrasting explanations of Jewish survival form the backdrop to this article. For Jonathan Sacks (1994 Sacks, J. 1994. Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?, Ilford: Vallentine Mitchell.  [Google Scholar]) the crucial factor has been the role played by Jewish education; indeed, he claims that the demographic threat currently facing Anglo‐Jewry is largely the result of the community having neglected the Jewish education of its children over the past 200 years. He advocates reinstating this communal responsibility as the sovereign Jewish value in order to deal with the threat. In my view, the influence that Sacks attributes to education and particularly to Jewish schools is overstated. It stems from a misreading of modern Anglo‐Jewish history and from a failure to take fully into account the ways in which Jewish schools impact on their pupils’ ethnic and religious identity. These considerations apart, I contend that prioritising education will not necessarily strengthen the commitment to Jewish continuity that is the sine qua non of survival.     

Using Film to Increase Counselor Empathic Experiences

The early stages of empathy in counseling—emotional reaction, role-taking, and cognitive suspension—have all been largely ignored in the counselor education/psychological literature. This article describes these stages from the perspective of the aesthetic/film literatures. Emotional reaction is an internal, unobservable state of being. Role-taking involves cognitive understanding and entering the perceptual world of another. Cognitive suspension means letting go of personal beliefs and values. The film literature describes how audience emotional states are created by directors, writers, actors, and editors. This article explains how counselor educators and supervisors can use this information to help counselors increase their empathic experiences.     

The role of educators of the deaf in the early identification of hearing loss

About 16,000 babies each year will be identified with hearing loss by age 3 months once universal newborn hearing screening becomes a reality. Identification of hearing loss in infancy, followed by appropriate intervention by age 6 months, can result in normal language development, regardless of degree of hearing loss. As the average age of identification of hearing loss moves downward toward 2 months, children with hearing loss will enter the educational system earlier and with language skills commensurate with those of their hearing peers. In order to provide appropriate services to children with hearing loss and their families, early interventionists will need to forge links to health care providers involved in universal newborn hearing screening programs, to have specialized training in deafness and hearing loss, and to have expertise in providing services to very young children and to children with hearing loss in the broad range from mild to profound.