Ideas and Ideals of Jewish Education: Initiating a Conversation on Visions of Jewish Education

Barry Holtz' (2003) presentation of a map of orientations for the teaching of Bible provides a certain kind of focus for research, enabling us to ask deeper and richer question about those orientations. This article investigates the teaching of one teacher, in two different settings— more specifically, how that teacher introduces Bible in those settings— as a way of generating insight into the particular features of what Holtz calls the “contextual orientation.” Building on the sketch that Holtz offers, it explores the internal variation within that orientation, and hence begins to reveal some of the pedagogic possibilities.