Jewish Education

*Editor's Note: This article is a reprint of the Summary of the Report of the Commission for the Study of Jewish Education in the United States, sponsored and published by the American Association for Jewish Education, 1959. For the complete Report of the Study, communicate with the American Association for Jewish Education. For an account of the organization of the Study of Jewish Education in the United States and the procedures followed in conducting the Study, see: Engelman, Uriah Z.: The First National Study of Jewish Education, JEWISH EDUCATION, Vol. XXIX, No. 1.

Part I. The Vision Project: 1. Envisioning Jewish education 2. The project in operation 3. Six visions: an overview Part II: 4. Visions in detail: what must a Jew study and why? Isadore Twersky 5. Jewish studies in Israel from a liberal-secular perspective Menachem Brinker 6. We are as those who dream: an agenda for an ideal Jewish education Moshe Greenberg 7. Reflections on the educated Jew from the perspective of reform Judaism Michael A. Meyer 8. Educated Jews: common elements Michael Rosenak 9. The concept of the educated person: with some applications to Jewish education Israel Scheffler Part III. Visions in Context: 10. The art of translation Seymour Fox 11. Before the gates of the school: an experiment in developing educational vision from practice Daniel Marom Conclusion: the courage to envision.

In this paper, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts on the history of American Jewish education and how it might be reconceived and reconceptualized to transform it into a useful history one that sheds light on issues of significance to contemporary Jev.;sh educators, In surveying this literature, I find myself somewhat in the situation that historian Bernard Bailyn did when he reviewed the history of American education for his influential volume entitled Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportuniti es for Study (1960). What he said then seems to me to apply in great measure to American Jewish education today:

Jonathan B. Krasner’s exhaustive exploration details through comprehensive research and engaging prose the unlikely rise of Samson Benderly, a Palestine-born immigrant who brought his own understanding of American innovation into a traditional Jewish educational framework. A trained physician, Benderly’s vision helped create an educational system both uniquely Jewish and unequivocally American, a distinct and inimitable identity for modern Jews in the United States. Benderly’s vision extended beyond his immediate circle of proteges. As Jewish educational systems evolved through the latter half of the 20th century, Benderly’s ideology of the professional, progressive, and American Jewish school model remained constant, a beacon of pedagogical quality and a preservation of Jewish cultural life. As an educational history, The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education is a comprehensive analysis of archival material from multiple rabbinical colleges and libraries as well as urban historical societies. It achieves its goal of synthesizing voluminous textual sources into a readable narrative that can also serve as a reference for other scholars interested in this uniquely American and totally Jewish educational approach. As ethnography, the text explores the emerging cultural identity of American Jews during what can be considered the Benderly period from 1910,when Benderly founded the first Bureau of Jewish Education in New York City until Benderly’s death in 1944. As an educational history and ethnography, then, the text, under Krasner’s deft prose, allows Benderly to emerge as an unparalleled protagonist. Krasner argues that Benderly’s role in elevating the practice of Jewish education contributed to the overall stabilization of Jewish life in modern, and then postmodern, America. As a biographical portrait of Benderly, the volume lends itself as a study in leadership. His unrelenting and innovative methodology was fueled by his own innate understanding of the power of education to a people in diaspora. Benderly developed modern curricula, invested in professional education for teacher training, and communicated clearly the urgency of his mission, which was to create American Jewish education from whole cloth. It is a model for focused and uncompromising excellence in administrative educational settings. For the scholarly reader, then, the book is a narrative that meets the needs of academics seeking a good model for how to explore other distinct American subgroups and their own cultural trajectories. For the general reader, it is a mirror on the history of a specific educational movement, its outcomes, and its lasting and still-relevant impact. Krasner pays particular attention to the method by which teachers in the Benderly system

1 A New Era of Education 1 The Origins of Informal Jewish Education 2 Defining Informal Education 3 Some Examples of Informal Jewish Education 4 The Defining Characteristics of Informal Jewish Education 7 1. Person-Centered Jewish Education 7 2. The Centrality of Experience 8 3. A Curriculum of Jewish Experiences and Values 9 4. An Interactive Process 10 5. The Group Experience 11 6. The “Culture” of Jewish Education 12 7. An Education That Engages 14 8. Informal Jewish Education’s Holistic Educator 14 What is Unique About Informal Jewish Education 16 1. The Synergy of the Eight Characteristics 16 2. Informal Education and Informal Jewish Education 16 Where Informal Jewish Education Differs 18 1. Informal Jewish Education and Jewish Schools 18 2. Informal Jewish Education and Jewish Communal Service 19 3. Informal Jewish Education and Therapy 20 4. Informal Jewish Education and Life 21 The Sources of Informal Jewish Education 21 In Defense of Informal Jewish Education 22 The Promise and Limitations of Informal Jewish Education 25 Conclusion : Informal Education and Jewish Life in the Postmodern Era......26 Bibliography 28

Why has it been so difficult to define the goals of Jewish informal education? Often informal educators define their work in terms of the goals of Jewish socialization. Those terms have worked to attract funders' support, but also limited the educational creativity of this field. This article argues for a dual defining of goals: socialization and educational. Defining the educational goals leads to considering the works of Cremin, Peters, and Csikszentmihalyi who disentangle the enterprise of education from the broader sweep of socialization. Viewed apart from its socializing functions, informal Jewish education becomes the moment for going deeper and experiencing our Judaism in its full creative potential. A camp music program is offered as an example of how these two goals can operate together, but lead in distinct directions.

This is a paperback edition of a favorite text on the literary creativity and communal involvement in the production of the Tosafist corpus.The Jews of northern France, Germany, and England, known collectively as Ashkenazic Jewry, have commanded the attention of scholars since the beginnings of modern Jewish historiography. Over the past century, historians have produced significant studies about Jewish society in medieval Ashkenaz that have revealed them as a well-organized, creative, and steadfast community. Indeed, the Franco-Russian Jewry withstood a variety of physical, political, and religious attacks in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to produce an impressive corpus of Talmudic and halakhic compositions, known collectively as Tosafot, that revolutionized the study of rabbinic literature.Although the literary creativity of the Tosafists has been documented and analyzed, and the scope and policies of communal government in Ashkenaz have been fixed and compared, no sustained attempt has been made to integrate these crucial dimensions. "Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages" considers these relationships by examining the degree of communal involvement in the educational process, as well as the economic theories and communal structures that affected the process from the most elementary level to the production of the Tosafist corpus. By drawing parallels and highlighting differences to pre-Crusade Ashkenaz, the period following the Black Death, Spanish and Provencal Jewish society, and general medieval society, Ephraim Kanarfogel creates an insightful and compelling portrait of Ashkenazic society.Available in paperback for the first time with a new preface included, "Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages" will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Jewish studies scholars and students of medieval religious literature.

A century ago a group of educators led an effort to transform American Jewish education to enable it to operate successfully in the 20th century. Today, with American Jews living under very different conditions, a similar effort is needed to reinvent Jewish education for the 21st century. Changes and new initiatives already taking place on the educational landscape point the way toward a set of paradigm shifts that will make Jewish education more learner-centered, relationship-infused, and life-relevant. These changes at the level of educational practice need to be accompanied by a redesign of the educational system itself to make it better able to accommodate learners as “prosumers,” helping to create their own educational experiences, and to guide them on lifelong learning journeys. By maximizing the impact of ongoing innovations, by employing “design thinking,” and by forging stronger networks and collective impact initiatives across domains and settings, the Jewish educational system can be reinvented to meet the needs and aspirations of 21st century Jewish learners.

The author summarizes current thinking about signature pedagogies in “learning to profess” and explores the extent to which these ideas apply to Jewish education. Three signature pedagogies for Jewish education are proposed: the d'var Torah, chevruta, and pedagogies of argumentation (machloket).

This is the last in a series of articles exploring the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Major themes and issues that preoccupied the magazine's editors and writers are isolated and analyzed as to how their discourse sheds light on their individual aims, values and philosophical outlooks, as well their collective efforts at educational reform. Particular attention is paid to how Benderly's disciples sought to reinterpret their mentor's vision in a changing American Jewish environment and why this vision was, at best, only partially realized. Jonathan Krasner is Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. 1The author would like to thank Samuel Dinin, Gil Graff, Carol Ingall, Cherie Kohler-Fox, Sara Lee, Alvin Schiff, Susan Shevitz, and Jonathan Woocher for their willingness to share their memories and offer their perspectives on American Jewish education in the twentieth century. He would also like to thank Jonathan Sarna, Carol Ingall, and Michael Zeldin for reading earlier drafts of the articles in this series and providing invaluable comments and suggestions.