The Israeli state-religious-education system (SRES) held an unfavorable view of Mizrahi religiosity in the 1980s. Text analyses of religious-education heads' writings indicate that they saw Mizrahi religiosity as a primitive relic of the past and as a "low-level religiosity" and regarded Mizrahi students as uncommitted and compromising.…

Following the lead of Israel Education: A Philosophical Analysis, Gringras first explores the idea of complexity in Israel Education, suggesting that inconsistencies are due more to emotional complexity than to the intellectual complexity of the subject matter. Due to these ideological and emotional complexities, Israel has become a wedge issue in…

When Israel, Jewish identity and education are each in a state of profound flux, Israel education for Jews will necessarily be dynamic. In response, an orienting prism is proposed which seeks that Jews inquire appreciatively into Israel with diverse Israelis, whilst using historical thinking. The aim is that there emerge numerous ethical paths to…

This paper reviews the taxonomies and characteristics of Israel education articulated by Benji Davis and Dr. Hanan Alexander while suggesting that their specific educational philosophy, Mature Zionism, ought not be siloed only to educating about Israel but rather extended to Jewish education writ large. Developing a framework of Israel literacy…

The development of non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in Los Angeles in the 1970s to 1990s can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the city's geography, the deterioration of public education, court-ordered busing that began in the 1970s, and strong rabbinic personalities. Yet, as elementary day schools proliferated throughout the…

In this article, the authors describe and discuss applications of the Group-Level Assessment/Understanding (GLA/GLU) process, an innovative participatory action research methodology. The authors first describe the GLA/GLU application in the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI) and the creation of an MTEI interpretive community to deeply…

This study set out to design and implement an approach to Tanakh education that would help students become expert decoders of the Biblical Hebrew text as they became expert interpreters of it. The goal, following existing, research-based best instructional practices from literacy, was to create a curriculum in which language skills and meaning…

Proponents of building a "creative society" through educational innovation are calling for engaging learners in new modes of collaboration, problem solving, and original thinking. How might the enterprise of Jewish education contribute to this evolution in creative thinking and action? This article explores how "the Jewish…

The analysis examines the genesis of the Lippman-Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah's Prize in Applied Jewish Wisdom (AJW) that was first awarded in 2016. The foundation invented both the phrase AJW and the prize to highlight the qualities of Jewish content being employed by promising educators and activists in the "Jewish innovation…

A leader in Jewish education policy for over 30 years, Jonathan Woocher influenced countless practitioners and policy makers. This article examines Woocher's body of written work by investigating three of his pieces published over a span of 20 years. The article exposes four themes: Jewish education is a project of building infrastructure, Jewish…

Outcomes in the inter- and intra-personal realms are central to the goals of Jewish education, yet educators often struggle to address them in a meaningful way. In this article, we describe what we learned from facilitating an online community of practice for congregational school leaders and day school educators seeking to enhance their work in…

A century ago, Israel Friedlaender--scholar, communal activist, and educator--played a key role in such educational institutions as the Teachers Institute of JTS, the Bureau of Jewish Education, the Menorah Society, Young Israel, and Young Judea. A JTS professor and prolific writer, Friedlaender has been described as "the teacher of the…

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…

"Jewish identity," which emerged as an analytical term in the 1950s, appealed to a set of needs that American Jews felt in the postwar period, which accounted for its popularity. Identity was the quintessential conundrum for a community on the threshold of acceptance. The work of Kurt Lewin, Erik Erikson, Will Herberg, Marshall Sklare,…

This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the possibility of Talmudic stories (as well as other narratives and scenes of interactions among two or more characters) to nurture the growth of the moral imagination as it is expressed in two related but distinct ways. At the intersection of work by educators, literary critics, and…