Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars

Are you looking for interesting, innovative, and inexpensive ways to improve your skill set as a teacher or educator? Do you use (or are you thinking about using) Torah Aura materials in your school? Are you bummed because you’re missing the professional development opportunities that used to be offered by CAJE?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then we’ve got a great solution for you:

Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars.

Using the latest and greatest technology, the team at Torah Aura Productions is excited to bring you a series of six online workshops designed to help you become a more skilled professional who makes the most of the materials you use in your school. These webinars are absolutely free and are available to you while you sit at your computer in the privacy of your home or office.

Here are the first six Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars that we’re offering in the coming weeks:

Teacher’s Clinic for Using the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
Tuesday, July 21 at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Do you use Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer materials in your school? In this webinar, we’ll first examine the philosophy behind Torah Aura’s Hebrew/prayer materials (S’fatai Tiftah, Journeys Through the Siddur, and/or Pirkei T’fillah). Then, we’ll transition into a practical discussion of how to make the materials work in the classroom. By the end of the webinar, participants will have a firm grasp on…

• the philosophy behind the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
• the goals of teaching Hebrew and prayer
• the pieces that make up a chapter of the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
• how to use the accompanying teacher’s guides and home resources
• how to plan a lesson
• how to make Hebrew/prayer learning experiential and exciting, and
• how to pace the curriculum over the course of a semester or year.

Real Siddur Teaching: A Guide for Educators
Tuesday, August 4 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

This is a session about the philosophy of teaching Hebrew and Prayer in the supplementary school. We’ll examine goals, objectives, and some ideas for successful implementation of a Hebrew/Prayer curriculum. By the end of the webinar, participants will have a firm grasp on how to make a Hebrew/Prayer curriculum work in their schools, including the five elements that build towards the goal of enabling students to be meaningful pray-ers.

Everything You Need to Know About Using Teacher’s Guides
Wednesday, August 12 at 4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Lots of principals buy teacher’s guides for their teachers, but these hefty volumes often end up (at best) being quickly skimmed in the few minutes before class or (at worst) a permanent fixture in the teacher’s car trunk. In this webinar, we’ll talk about how Torah Aura teacher’s guides are designed, and help teachers make the most out of them. Attendees should have a teacher’s guide handy as they participate in the webinar.

Making Israel Come Alive: Using Artzeinu in the Classroom
Thursday, August 13 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Teaching Israel in a supplementary school setting presents a number of challenges. How can we teach appreciation and love of Israel to students who haven’t visited? How can we present the real Israel while at the same time trying to inculcate the values of Zionism? How do we address all the richness and diversity of Israel given our limited time and resources?

This webinar will address all these challenges and more, and will introduce teachers to using Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter to teach Israel from an historical, cultural, Biblical, religious, and reality-based perspective.

The Magical Lifecycle Curriculum: Using The Circle of Jewish Life
Tuesday, August 25 at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

What happens when you want to talk about brit milah (or brit bat!) or death? How can we teach about the Jewish lifecycle in a way that’s engaging, sensitive, and empowering?

In this webinar we’ll discuss why the Jewish lifecycle can be a challenging part of your curriculum, and we’ll explore ways to use The Circle of Jewish Life to turn lifecycle learning into a series of magical experiences for your students.

This webinar will be useful to teachers and educators currently using The Circle of Jewish Life, as well as to anyone interested in “jazzing up” their lifecycle curriculum.

All About Eizehu Gibor: An Introduction to a New Way to Teach Jewish Heroes
Thursday, August 27 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values is a new heroes book for fifth and sixth graders. It’s revolutionary in the way it integrates the traditional pantheon of Jewish heroes with a set of new heroes for a new generation. It’s also unique in the diversity of it’s heroes, and in the way it integrates living a life of Jewish values with the lives of heroes. This webinar will introduce you to Eizehu Gibor, and will highlight some of the elements that make it a unique curricular tool.

“Hineini”

by David Singer

David Singer, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University, is the author of our new Israel book, Yisrael Sheli. He recently went on a trip with American Jewish World Service to Senegal, Africa. This is an account from that trip.

Standing on a rooftop, I looked around, and felt anywhere but home. As far as the eye could see was a morass of concrete and dirt. The thick humid air smelt of smoke. The sounds of donkeys, and horses, and a muezzin filled the air.

I was surrounded by twenty four colleagues – fellow rabbinical students from throughout the United States – as we prayed the morning service from atop a building in downtown Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

For two weeks, our delegation joined the American Jewish World Service to work with its grantee, Tostan, aiding in community-led development in rural villages facing extreme poverty throughout Africa.

No prior experience could have prepared me for what I saw in Senegal: children with flies in their eyes; distended bellies; open sores; bare feet; hunger; sickness; a land parched by drought. At first glance, the place seemed like hell. How could God allow such a place to exist?

Why Textbooks Are Important

The re-thinkers and re-visionists and re-imaginers are coming for your textbooks.

That’s right. They want to remove the textbooks from your classrooms. And the blackboards, too. And maybe even the teachers. They’re coming for your textbooks because they’re well-meaning Jewish leaders, and they want to put a spark back in the classrooms in your school. They want learning to be fun and meaningful and worthwhile (and not dull and stale and boring). They look at camps and Israel trips, and appreciate what a good job those folks do at Jewish education. So they decide that schools should be just like camp, and they come to take away the desks and the blackboards (or the whiteboards), and they come to take the textbooks, too.

We think this is a problem, and not just because we’re textbook publishers. Rather, we became textbook publishers because we think this is a problem.

Torah Aura Productions was founded in 1981 by a group of innovative Jewish educators who looked out at the field of Jewish education and found materials that were shallow and dull. We started a company to create new tools for teachers that would be exciting and meaningful. From the beginning, we’ve always believed in re-imagining synagogue schools, but we refuse to take an extremist or aggressive approach to school reform, because we’re afraid to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We got into this business because we didn’t think Jewish children should have to sit stoically at their desks as teachers attempt to mindlessly drill facts and Hebrew reading skills into their heads. We’re dedicated to publishing textbooks of a much higher quality, and we defend textbooks because we believe that well-designed curricular materials have the power to make a real difference in the lives of Jewish students.

Here are eight reasons we believe textbooks are important.

Altneu Non-Shul — The Sunday School for Jewish Studies

by Joel Grishaver

Started around 1970 by some Harvard professors, just about the same time some other Harvard faculty started the Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that morphed into Congregation Eitz Chayim), The Sunday School for Jewish Studies is a non-synagogue, parent cooperative, not for profit, way of providing a Jewish education and accessing a bar/bat mitzvah experience.

The school was featured in a recent article in the Boston Globe. The article described it as (a) a non-Synagogue and (b) cheaper way of providing a bar/bat mitzvah. The article centers on the fact that this “non brick and mortar” (non) institution that charges as little as 1/4 the cost of belonging to (and sending your kids to school at) a “brick and mortar” synagogue.

Here are the things I know.

[1] Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that I do know about) was started as a chance to provide an innovative, better, experimental Jewish education for a number of positively identified but “syno-phobic” Jews. It did a lot of pioneering work with adult education, family education, alternative education and a lot of the other frontier (for its age) areas of Jewish Education. For a lot of years it was guided by Rabbi Cherie Kohler Fox and her husband Dr. Everett Fox. The hallmark of the school was not its cost, but its ability to innovate. Much of that innovation was its ability to create community among a population that was considered fringe. That community ultimately felt the need to evolve into a synagogue.

[2] I had never heard about The Sunday School for Jewish Studies until The Globe article appeared. The little I’ve been able to learn about it on the internet makes it sound little different from the Harvard Hillel Children’s school at its prime. It is devoted to serving its students and its families. It has a social action vision of Judaism. It is open to all kinds of definitions of Jewish family. All this is to be praised!

[3] It is The Globe article that bothers me, not my understanding of The Sunday School. I have nothing against Jews creating independent institutions that meet their own needs. I have nothing against people choosing and creating alternatives to the synagogue. I do wish Jewish life was cheaper. What bothers me is the smug sense that this is a better way of providing a Jewish education because it has less overhead. The article provides no other way of evaluating the quality of the education offered at this school.

The article ends by quoting the father of a Bar Mitzvah, “He read it perfectly. I’d put his training up against any synagogue training,” Note: the standard was “his training” not “his education.” The author has a pretty classic misunderstanding of Jewish education. The school’s job is to “train” students for b’nai mitzvah. If the kid reads well, the school must have succeeded. It’s an economics equation. The school provides a product (”training”) for less money, so it must be a great deal.

[4] The article actually comes as a warning. The congregational school, that long believed that it has a monopoly on non-day school Jewish education, now needs to look over its shoulder. While we thought the major threat would come from “tutoring,” there are other alternatives on the horizon. Simply put, we are not the only way to have a bar/bat mitzvah. God’s creation of this world does allow for the rental of tents, the borrowing of Sifrei Torah and the photocopying of service booklets. If the only thing our schools offer is bar mitzvah training, we have a big problem because (a) we know that this isn’t a sufficient Jewish education, and (b) as this article teaches us, families can get a do-it-yourself b’nai mitzvah somewhere else.

[5] So here’s my final synthesis:

The article teaches us that congregational schools are not the cheapest Jewish education option in many cities. But we need to be the best. The research of Dr. Jack Wertheimer (Schools that Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Schools) puts creating a nurturing Jewish Community, engaging Judaism at a high level, providing opportunities for experiential education, and valuing themselves and their students on the list of elements of high-quality Jewish schools.

As my friend and teacher, Rabbi Phil Warmflash, likes to point out, “The success of the synagogue school has as much to do with the success of the synagogue as the success of the school.”

We Need a Hero: Toward a New Technique for Teaching Heroes in the Jewish Supplementary School

by Josh-Mason Barkin

Old magazines can surprise you.

In 1994, CAJE published an edition of its Jewish Education News dedicated entirely to Jewish heroes. Fifteen years later, flipping through dusty papers on a bookshelf, that issue of JEN inspired us to publish our new book on heroes, Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values.

None of the many articles in that issue explicitly mention it, but there’s a tension throughout the Spring 1994 edition’s pages. On one hand, esteemed thinkers of Jewish education argue that we need to introduce our students to the mythological characters of Jewish history like Samson and Herzl. On the other hand, equally esteemed thinkers argue that we need to teach our students about everyday heroes, normal people who can show us how to live mitzvah-filled Jewish lives.

We teach Jewish values not because we want our students to know the Hebrew names for a bunch of ethical principles. Rather, we teach Jewish values because we want our students to live moral lives informed by the Jewish tradition and their connection to God. Knowing that kavod means respect is useless if you’re not a respectful person.

Recently, educators have been telling us a lot about this struggle to have the Jewish values they teach in the classroom translate into the way students treat each other. Suffice it to say that we hear a lot of frustration in those educators’ voices. We think Eizehu Gibor can help.

How do heroes fit into the equation of values internalization? And why are we publishing a new heroes book this year? Perhaps the best way to explain is to explore the tension between the “big heroes” and the “everyday heroes.”

Helping to Make Schools That Work: A Publisher’s Response to Jack Wertheimer

In the last couple months, you may have noticed Torah Aura Productions using a new mission statement: “Making success in Jewish education an achievable reality.”

We’re really excited about this new articulation of our mission because it so clearly sums up who we are and what we do. We’re in the business of helping Jewish schools succeed.

So it was with great pleasure that we read a new study from Professor Jack Wertheimer entitled Schools That Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Supplemental Schools. It’s an analytical look at Jewish schools that suggests a path towards success. (You can download the entire report by clicking here.)

With the help of a team of top-notch researchers and funded by the Avi Chai Foundation, Professor Wertheimer looks at ten excellent supplemental schools and draws out common elements that contribute to their success.

What is important about this study is that it affirms a truth stated too infrequently: that supplementary schools can succeed. Perhaps more importantly, Wertheimer identifies the elements that help define “success” in schools, offering suggestions for replicating the excellence that he and his team found.

The study presents six “noteworthy characteristics of good schools.” Good schools (1) work on building friendships and community, (2) go beyond teaching facts to allow students to work on meaning, (3) use experiential education, (4) actualize a clear vision, (5) value themselves and their students, and (6) involve not only students but their families. Wertheimer makes it clear that it takes “a combination of traits to forge a strong school.”

Because we’re invested in making success in Jewish education an achievable reality, we take these six characteristics very seriously. Wertheimer’s work has pushed us to ask some meaningful questions about our work. How can we help enable schools to actualize these characteristics in their own authentic way? In what ways do these principles inform the curricular materials we publish? What does it mean to be a publishing company whose mission is to help Jewish educators and teachers achieve success?

Introducing Eizehu Gibor

Heroes are important for two reasons. First, they give students powerful examples of how to live a life richly informed by Jewish vales. Second, they connect students to Jewish peoplehood, allowing them to take pride in the accomplishments of important Jews throughout history.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values is a new way to bring Jewish heroes and the values they stand for into your classroom. It is a values text for our time, about being a person worthy of emulation. It’s about knowing how to do the right thing, how to make a contribution to the world, and how to be a mensch, and how to live up to being created in God’s image.

Designed for fifth and sixth graders, Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values adds new names to the pantheon of Jewish heroes, presents texts from the Jewish tradition as well as the heroes’ own words, and challenges students to think about how they can live up to the examples set by real role-models.

Did you know that Natalie Portman isn’t just a Jewish actress, but also a tzedakah hero? How can Debbie Friedman and Craig Taubman help us to sing praise to God by finding our own voices? What’s Jewish about owning a football team? These questions are at the heart of Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values, and they can be at the heart of your students’ classroom, too.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values will begin shipping in July. But right now you can check out sample chapters and pre-order by clicking here.

Self-Paced, Point & Click: The Jewish Problem with Programmed Instruction

by Joel Lurie Grishaver

Programmed Instruction

There is a growing fantasy in Jewish education that everything will be better if we only take the teacher out of the equation. This is manifesting itself in the claim that low level computer exercises can replace a day a week of Jewish learning. And it is leading to tools like self-checking folders that students work their way through at their own pace. What all of these hold in common is a reliance on an old education technique, programmed instruction, which was used mainly for industrial training and has mainly shown itself to be a failure in general education.

Programmed instruction grew out of the work of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who believed that learning was conditioning. In rewarding students who get the right answer, students become conditioned to repeat that answer. Programmed instruction sends students through a series of frames where they (a) receive information, (b) are asked about that information, and (c) are shown the correct answer. In more sophisticated forms, there is now a “branching” opportunity. If the student got the answer right, they move on to the next frame. If they get it wrong, they are put into a review loop.

The good news seems to be (a) the ability of each student to move at his/her own pace, (b) a high rate of retention (at least in the short term), and (c) the freeing of the class from the imposition of a teaching doing bad “frontal” education. But most of the advocates of programmed instruction, whether in software or folders, seem to forget three things:

1. Levels of Learning

Benjamin Bloom, one of my teachers, wrote a big book with J. Thomas Hastings and George F. Madaus called Handbook on Formative and Summative Evaluation of Student Learning. In it is a taxonomy of educational objectives that describes a series of “levels” of learning. In the cognitive domain there are six: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The problem is simple. Jewish life and real Jewish learning is all about Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation, the higher levels. Programmed Instruction is best for Knowledge, Comprehension and Application, the lower three levels.

There is also a taxonomy of affective objectives: Receiving (or Awareness), Responding, Valuing, Organization, and Characterization by a value or value complex. These affective objectives (usually called “Krathwohl’s Taxonomy”) are all about a process called “internalization,” whereby a student’s affect towards something goes from being aware (that’s the “receiving” part) all the way to the point where their affect has been internalized and consistently guides or controls the person’s behavior. It’s the path between knowing that kavod is a Jewish value and going through life treating people with kavod. Programmed Instruction can get you to Awareness, but it is not great at getting to the rest of the domain. Jewish education should be all about valuing and the rest of that process.

The argument can be made that Programmed Instruction is mainly being used to teach Hebrew language. That Alef Bet is only Alef Bet is partially true. But Alef Bet leads to Ashrei and Ashrei is supposed to build a connection to God. While learning folders with self-checking and computer programs may have a role in mechanical learning, they are incapable of taking it any further. When do you feel close to God? What is the right thing to do in this case? What do you think of when you say the Shema? These are all moments of Jewish learning that are simply not part of a computer’s function.

2. Community

The purpose of Bar and Bat Mitzvah is to acknowledge that a child is now old enough to function as an adult in the ritual life of the Jewish people. Reading Torah is a symbol that a child can now function as a member of the community. A new adult can now be counted in a minyan. Most importantly, this means that a new adult is old enough to go to a shiva house and be counted among those whose responsibility it is to help heal the pain of death. If we are going to turn our schools into B’nai Mitzvah mills, we could do worse than if they included the skills of participating in Jewish communal life and learning compassion and empathy. Those are not things that come from the kind of computer programs we have and are likely to have in the foreseeable future. They are the inverse of things learned when each student is moving at his or her own pace.

Tolerance is one of the things that one learns from being part of a learning community. So is patience, leadership, and being a good listener. The best way to learn how to participate in community life is practice. It is not an accident that Jews pray in community and demand community for most Jewish events. Studying prayer at home on the computer is not the best way to learn about community. Working alone at your own folder, checking your own answers, doesn’t develop leadership skills.

3. Teachers

Finally, the Jewish tradition believes in teachers. It sees teachers as rich (not mechanical) enablers of individualization and personalization. Teachers allow lessons to go off on tangents, listen to student needs, and take advantage of the moment. Teachers can appreciate and celebrate, understand and empathize. A teacher-free classroom can maybe transmit Jewish information, but it is not a Jewish classroom. The modeling of the Jewish classroom as Jewish learning community, the enabling of the community by a person manifesting and applying Jewish values – this is our goal. I know of no one who can claim that their best learning moment took place when completing a self-guided booklet. Not every teacher is ideal, but teachers are our ideal.

Every teaching tool that is effective has its time and purpose. Programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction are tools that have their time and place. But ironically, as we have less time to spend together with our students, now is precisely the time for more student-teacher interaction, not less. As we are trying to teach the skills of communal worship, now is precisely not the time to invite our students to learn Hebrew from computer screens. When we are trying to instruct our students to maximize their humanity and use it to change the world, now is precisely the time to make human interaction a foundational value of Jewish education. The elimination of the human in education is a step backwards.

Steps Forward

At Torah Aura Productions, we are dedicated to producing curricular materials that realize a depth of understanding rather than focusing only on facts and feelings. That means that we also must be active partners with teachers and educators to maximize the Jewish educational impact on their students.

Programmed instruction is perfectly useful if the goal is to develop students who can perform at a one-time event. We’re encouraging a different goal: students who are lifelong Jews. Our mission is to make materials that help teachers and educators to enable their students to become empowered Jewish adults.

We believe in doing what it takes to develop good teachers who can actualize impactful Jewish learning. That may be more difficult than asking teachers to facilitate programmed instruction in booklets or on computer screens, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Human interaction is the key to the Jewish future. And because we believe in humanity, we believe that Jewish schools can succeed at doing something bigger, better and worthwhile.

News2Use: Bibi, Eurovision, Rabbis, Kings

by Adrian A. Durlester

When Will Israel Have A New Government? Just ten days after the elections which gave Tzipi Livni and the Kadima party 28 Knesset seats and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party 27 Knesset seats, Israeli President Shimon Peres broke with tradition and asked Netanyahu to form a government. Historically, the leader of the party with the most seats was asked to form the new government. However, after Prime Mister Olmert announced his intention to resign, Livni was unable to form a new government coalition, thus leading to the elections this February. Now, Netanyahu’s attempts to forge a broad coalition including the centrist Kadima and left-wing Labor parties have failed. Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu said that coalition talks are continuing and that discussing negotiations in public weaken the party’s standing. However, there is now widespread speculation that Netanyahu will announce the formation of a very narrow right-wing government next week. Some in Israel are very concerned about a right-wing government. The parents of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit are hoping that the outgoing Olmert government can secure his release before their time in office is up, and are fearful that a right-wing government will have a more difficult time negotiating for Gilad’s release. Lots of resources on this story on the web, most notably at www.jta.org, www.ynetnews.com, www.haaretz.com, www.jpost.com.

Controversial Arab-Jewish Duo to Sing for Peace at Eurovision – The Israeli public, at least those that were tuned in on Monday, March 2, picked the peace song “Your Eyes” to be sung by the Jewish-Arab duo selected to represent Israel in the Eurovision 2009 song contest in Moscow. Announced just one day after the Israeli incursion into Gaza started last December, the selection of the duo of Israeli artist Noa (Achinoam Nini) and Arab-Israeli artist Mira Awad (the first Arab-Israeli to be selected to represent Israel at the prestigious Eurovision contest) has stirred controversy and criticism from both Arab and Israeli quarters. That criticism has only increased with the selection of the peace song chosen on Monday by fellow Israelis. A group of Arab artists, some Israeli, some Palestinian, sent Awad an open letter calling on her to withdraw from the performance. Israelis have criticized Noa for her openly leftist views. Others claim the duo is watering down the realities and inappropriately trying to present a warm and fuzzy, feel good picture. However, the two artists, friends on and off stage, are determined. Awad says she wants people to realize that Jews and Arabs must find a way to live together. Nini said it was a chance to send a message of peace to the millions who would be watching the duo on stage. The chance to get viewers thinking is enhanced by the fact that, to many, Awad looks Jewish and Noa looks Arab. Israel has an interesting history, especially recently, of sending a very mixed variety of performers and songs to Eurovision. One might even examine Israeli politics through the lens of their Eurovision selections.
Official Israeli Eurovision Site: http://www.iba.org.il/eurovil/
Official History of Israeli Entries: http://www.eurovision.tv/page/history/by-country/country?country=18
An interesting Jewcy blog commentary: http://tinyurl.com/cat3tv

Conservative Rabbis and Leaders to USCJ: Don’t Leave Us Out! – The Conservative movement, once the largest in the U.S., but now eclipsed by Reform Judaism, has been grappling with its future for a number of years. A confluence of changes in leadership has sparked new hope among the movements adherents for future possibilities. JTS has a new chancellor in Arnold Eisen, who is already bringing change and a fresh breeze to the Conservative seminary. Rabbi Julie Schonfeld will become the head of the Rabbinical Assembly this summer. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) will be selecting a replacement for long-time Executive Vice-President Jerome Epstein. About 50 rabbis, cantors, and synagogue leaders are concerned that USCJ has kept their selection process entirely internal, without consulting with rabbis and other leaders. They formed a group Hayom: Coalition for the Transformation of Conservative Judaism, and wrote a joint letter to USCJ expressing their concerns. While JTS invited representatives of the movement’s other organizations to sit on the search committee that tapped Eisen, the United Synagogue kept the process closed-the search committee did not even include a pulpit rabbi. Ray Goldtsein, President of USCJ has now agreed to meet with the representatives of Hayom which includes clergy from some very large and successful congregations. He has conceded that keeping the process closed may have been an error, but said he had sought informal input from the movement’s other arms, including from Eisen. Complete article: http://tinyurl.com/dyayqv

The Tanakh Goes Sci-Fi?: A new tv show premieres this Sunday on NBC. Called “Kings,” the show is the brainchild of Michael Green, one of the writer/producers for “Heroes,” who models the new show’s characters on the biblical David, Saul, Goliath, et al. The show has some very overt religious and political symbolism. The show has had a lot of hype and expectation. Just try Googling it. Will it live up to the hype? Can the biblical stories survive such an updating? Watch a few episodes and send us your opinions. http://www.nbc.com/Kings/

Other Articles of Interest for Use in Your Classes:

Some thought-provoking comments about Purim and Anti-Semitism from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: http://tinyurl.com/d7reto

Jews and Food – Nothing New, Right? Wrong – Try “The Jew and the Carrot” site for a refreshing look at “Jews, food, and contemporary issues.” http://jcarrot.org

Secular Israelis forge new ways to connect with Judaism: http://tinyurl.com/bhgkw2

News2Use is a new feature written by Adrian A. Durlester. To comment or respond, send an email to Adrian at tapbb@yoeitzdrian.com or to the TAPBB at tapbb@torahaura.com.

Speeches at the National Jewish Book Awards

On March 6, the editors of What We Now Know About Jewish Education (Paul Flexner, Roberta Louis Goodman, and Linda Dale Bloomberg) received the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Education and Identity. The awards ceremony was held at the Center for Jewish History in New York. We’re very pleased to present some of the words that Paul, Roberta, and Linda shared with the audience that night.

Paul’s remarks:
This is very exciting. To be recognized by our colleagues and our peers is very special to each of us. It gives us each time to pause and reflect on the endless hours of conversation, of editing and of the final product that resulted.

The comments that we have received over the last few months provide us with much food for thought. They suggest that we are entering (or have entered) a new age when a book is not just a book. Rather, a book serves as an inspiration for the reader to reflect and respond, to enter into a dialogue with others, to add to their knowledge and understanding, and to begin the preparation of the next sequel which may appear as an ongoing collection of digital bytes easily accessed from anywhere and at anytime by the truly curious.

Our exploration of Jewish education over the last 20 years raised significant and critical questions for all of us engaged in the educational process. With each new development, with each new technology, teachers are challenged to incorporate the ‘new’ into their practice; they have to make adjustments; and, they need to constantly reflect on how to connect the ‘new’ with the traditions and history of a 3000+ year old community that is now faced with rapid change. As teachers, and all educators are teachers, we are the ones who build the connections between the tools and the text, between the lives of the students and the traditions of a people.

To accomplish this transition, we chose to dig deeply into every aspect of Jewish education. We could not ignore a critical component simply to save space or to be more concise. And, this is the result of our efforts. For this, we simply say, THANK YOU!

Roberta’s remarks:
My husband always jokes that What We Know about Jewish Education is 350 blank pages, and NOW, the sequel, is 450 of even larger blank pages.

So what is the book about? It should be obvious, it is a love story. It is about the encounter between faith as represented by passion, commitment, and vision and science with its tools of rationality, statistics, predictability, and outcomes. All of this happens among the main characters–researchers, evaluators, practitioners, lay leaders, funders, and learners too-all who put their hope and trust in Torah and God to assure that the Jewish people thrive in a just and caring world.

So why the first volume? Those engaging in Jewish educational research were already organizing as a network, presenting papers prior to the annual CAJE Conference, in 1982 or thereabouts. With the 1990 Jewish population study and the interest in Jewish education as a response to the continuity agenda, Torah Aura Productions, Inc. published the first volume in 1992, to get the voices of academics and practitioners and their knowledge and perspectives from the then “thin” amount of research into the conversation about the future of Jewish education with policy makers and funders.

Why NOW? This sequel reflects the ways in which decisions about Jewish education, in terms of policy making, funding, and programming have come to both initiate and rely upon research and evaluation. The expanded number of chapters in this volume reflects that Jewish education is a topic of import to a broad range of Jewish and non-Jewish academics and others too. Finally, it represents, the ways in which those preparing to or already tarrying in the field, the college/graduate students and practitioners, can turn to research and writings in their own field, rather than always having to apply what the secular world has to say to Jewish education. We accomplish this by exposing the reader to the perspectives of the well established and the upcoming researchers, the latter, who will sooner than later be editing book #3.

Linda’s remarks:
The past decade has seen the emergence of a growing interest in evaluation and research by Jewish educators, policymakers, and philanthropists seeking to ascertain the extent to which various kinds of Jewish educational experiences can serve to impact learning and engender more meaningful engagement in Jewish life. The field of Jewish education has certainly worked hard to address the new realities of contemporary society. While we have much reason to celebrate our achievements, however, multiple challenges continue to confront Jewish education. Not least among these, as pointed out by Steven M. Cohen, is the significant decline in Jewish ethnicity and collective Jewish identity.

As such, Jewish education as a field of practice as well as an object of academic study must remain a matter of critical significance. Research must continue to address issues regarding the learners, the educators, the pedagogy, the educational contexts, as well as the more philosophical questions regarding the very purposes of Jewish education. Moreover, we need to create channels and opportunities to share what we know across contexts and practice areas, and in so doing make what we have learned educative, relevant, and meaningful to others.

This volume offers a forum for expanding the rich emerging conversation regarding an ideal Jewish education for our times and beyond. And the sequel will hopefully contribute to the ongoing discourse by capturing and further expanding upon the fruits of the research and evaluation efforts of the years that lie ahead. It is an honor that What we Now Know about Jewish Education: Perspectives on Research for Practice has received a National Jewish Book Award, particularly in the category “Education and Jewish Identity”. Indeed, a thread that runs through all of the chapters of this extensive volume is the significant impact that Jewish learning has on Jewish identity, and consequently on Jewish engagement, commitment, and continuity. Kol Hakavod to all those who continue to research the possibilities and opportunities that Jewish learning, in all its varied facets, has, in shaping and impacting our future, our Jewish heritage.