American Jewish teenagers go to high school and, outside of the yeshivish and hasidic communities, almost all of them continue on to college. But some of them spend a gap year in Israel along this middle-class, high-school-to-college educational continuum. In what ways does the year in Israel unsettle this continuum? This study explores this question drawing on students’ own narratives about their experiences, as reported to the researcher in the middle of their gap year, aiming not at empirical generalization but at analytical generalization, i.e., illuminating some of the issues and tensions within that experience. The study first outlines four qualifications that temper the claim of disruption: (1) we should be cautious about unintended implications of the term “disruption”; (2) students themselves emphasized continuity over change; (3) some of the personal growth that students experienced, such as increased independence, is expected and developmentally appropriate for emerging adults; and (4) the study found little evidence, within the sample, of students of adopting extreme religious changes. The study then takes some initial steps toward a theoretical framework for the gap year by identifying four ways in which the gap year does seem to unsettle some students’ perspectives. First, some students reported a change in their sense of belonging within Israeli society. Second, some reported a shift in their political views. Third, participants described a critical perspective on the high-pressure, achievement-driven academic culture of American schooling. Finally, some students seemed to be reconsidering middle-class norms around career and life trajectories. While these disruptions may not lead to dramatic detours from the established educational path—the evidence within this study does not suggest that they do—they do seem to provide some students with new frameworks for thinking about their education and aspirations. The study thus provides an important set of questions for parents and educators as they support students before, during and after their gap year in Israel.

The purpose of Jewish education is language acquisition in its broad and metaphorical sense. More precisely, Jewish education should create the conditions for the development of the capacity to produce language. Or more colloquially, Jewish education should help students become speakers of Jewish language. This article defends this idea, considering both affordances of the idea as well as limitations. In its conclusion, the article considers why learning a language is valuable in the first place: language enables its speakers to do the things they want to do in the world.

With this book Jon Levisohn argues that current history education is set up in a way that sees students of history at one end of a continuum with the academic experts in the field of history at the other, and where the goal of history education is to help students to think like historians. Building on a critical engagement with Carl Hempel, Hayden White, and David Carr, as well as contemporary work in virtue epistemology, Levisohn proposes a new theory of historiography which serves as a set of guidelines for the teaching and learning of history. According to the theory, the work of historiography is best characterized as a negotiation among narratives, weaving together received narratives with new information and ideas in order to construct a new narrative. This negotiation happens with a particular orientation towards negative evidence or ‘flexible disconfirmationism’, and is assessed according to the openness, sensitivity, responsibility, creativity, boldness and humility, i.e. the virtues of historical interpretation. The book rethinks the work of history education, offering new ways of thinking about the goals of the teaching of history, namely, in terms of the cultivation of the interpretive virtues.

In their new study, Benji Davis and Hanan Alexander propose a conceptual taxonomy of six types of Israel education. But it is not at all clear that the different types of Israel education are associated with different pedagogies, or indeed, whether they are significantly distinct from each other. Davis and Alexander also propose their own version of Israel education that they call “Mature Zionism,” in which they engage with some important questions about the “liberal-religious Jewishness” that, in their view, characterizes American Jews. But this chacterization may be challenged, and more importantly, the proposed distinction between the six prevalent types of Israel education and the seventh does not hold up.

For those of us immersed in Jewish education and Jewish communal life more generally, the phrase “Jewish texts” (or sometimes “Jewish text,” where the singular collective noun signifies a category ...

T he title of this volume declares its aspiration: to advance the learning agenda in Jewish education.What does that mean?Why does something called "the learning agenda" need to be advanced?And how might that happen?Over the past thirty years, we have seen the growth of familiar forms of Jewish education and the development of new ones.In the former category, we can name day schools, camps, academic Jewish studies, and Israel trips, as well as innovative new forms of supplementary Jewish education and renewed interest in early childhood education.In the latter, we can point to Jewish service learning, Jewish environmental and food programming, Jewish heritage tourism to other countries, online Jewish learning and Jewish gaming, and more.In every sector, talented and creative educators are developing new materials and new pedagogies.Yet, amid the creativity and growth, we believe that contemporary American Jewish education is not as strong as it could be.And we believe that at least part of the reason for this is that American Jewish education suffers from a lack of clarity about our desired learning outcomes, inconsistent focus on and assessment of those outcomes, and insufficient understanding of the experiences of learners.For example, supplementary school educators have been known to say that their programs should be more like camp.This is undoubtedly an important development, but their focus tends to be on the atmosphere and activities, the things that make camp "fun" rather than clarifying appropriate learning outcomes or documenting impact.The field of Israel education, according to several studies, bounces between uncritical celebrations of Israel

This article examines the ways that Jewish studies teachers think about their teaching. It analyzes data from a three month teacher study group in which teachers read educational research articles as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching. The data suggest that Jewish studies teachers take one of two approaches in talking about their teaching: Half the teachers focused on the process of teaching, the specific modalities and teaching moves they employed, while the other half focused on the goals of teaching, the specific outcomes they wanted to see in their students. We also found that those teachers who were more focused on outcomes (rather than process) saw personal identity as an essential ingredient in effective Jewish education. This article raises questions about the efficacy of transferring professional development models from general education to Jewish education, without special attention to the specific cultural context of Jewish studies.

We use the language of “subjects” in education all the time. We talk about the subject of math, or English, or indeed rabbinic literature. In higher education, we typically talk about “disciplines,” but we mostly mean the same thing. We have departments of history, composed of people who call themselves historians, who practice something that we call the discipline of history. But what do we mean when we talk about a subject or a discipline? What holds a discipline together? What makes a subject a subject? What is any particular subject about? We might be tempted to say that an academic discipline shares a particular methodology. But as we get closer to any particular discipline—chemistry or sociology or philosophy—and notice the multiple procedures of inquiry in use, any initial confidence in that formulation evaporates. In fact, getting clear about what constitutes a subject or a discipline is quite difficult. Instead, “subjects should be taken to represent ... centers of intellectual capacity and interest radiating outward without assignable limit.”2 Subjects and disciplines are also fields of teaching, not just fields of inquiry. And when we turn to the teaching of a subject, we likewise find deep internal diversity. The teaching of history, for example, is carried out very differently in different contexts. Sam Wineburg and Suzanne

No articulation of `historical thinking' has been as influential as Sam Wineburg's position, according to which historical thinking is, fundamentally, the recognition of the ways in which the past is different than the present. Wineburg argues, further, that achieving that state is `unnatural.' This paper critiques both of these claims, arguing instead that we should replace a generic conception of historical thinking with one that is much more rooted in the specific practice of the discipline. It is surely necessary for students to learn this practice, but it is not unnatural. Instead, learning to think historically is learning to speak the language of the discipline that we call history.'

We frequently encounter the claim that a particular Jewish educational experience will be "transformative" for the participants. The language may be hyperbole. But it may also point to educators' aspirations to affect not just knowledge and practice but character and identity. In order to understand this phenomenon-not the phenomenon of the use of the language of transformation, per se, but the phenomenon of aspirational Jewish educational programs - this article develops three case studies (Encounter, the Bronfman Fellowship, and the Wexner Heritage Program). What emerges from these cases is a set of models or theories of transformative change: the Maimonides model, learning a habit such that, over time, habit becomes character; the paradise-and-exile model, becoming a seeker after an ideal that one has glimpsed; and the outsider-to-insider model, moving from a sense of fraudulence to a sense of confidence within a particular domain.

Outcomes of Jewish Education and the Philanthropic Community - page 3 DR. BARRY W. HOLTZ Purposeful and Powerful Outcomes-Driven Jewish Education - page 6 DR. SUSAN KARDOS Judaism . . . A Deeply Nourishing Source of Human Flourishing - page 8 DR. CHIP EDELSBERG Learners Matter Most: The Rest Is Commentary - page 9 DR. DAVID BRYFMAN The Great (Fake) Debate: How Should We Think About the Outcomes of Jewish Education? - page 12 DR. JON A. LEVISOHN AND DR. JEFFREY S. KRESS Fake Debate / Real Conversations - page 15 CHARLOTTE ABRAMSON AND RABBI SHERYL KATZMAN Amassing Religious Capital - page 17 ABI DAUBER STERNE Making a Tea Party - page 18 RABBI AVI KATZ ORLOW Concluding Thoughts: The Goal of Learning Is Learning - page 20 DR. BILL ROBINSON

Michael Rosenak uses the twin metaphors of "language" and "literature," borrowed from Oakeshott and Peters, to argue that the goal of education is initiation into a language. This goal transcends the study of literature in that language. It includes, as well, the development of the capacity both to critique literature and to produce literature of one's own. This article compares his use of the language-literature distinction to that of Oakeshott and Peters, revealing some inconsistencies that are driven by his desire to emphasize both autonomy and pluralism, on the one hand, and to maintain a residual essentialism on the other.

Education and assimilation seem intimatelyconnected; education either supports assimilation or thwarts it. But these paradigms assume a model of cultural vitality that depends on what one scholar aptly terms "tenacious adherence," over time, to an unchanging cultural or religious tradition. Taking the example of the Jewish community and Jewish education and drawing on Jewish history and contemporary sociology of the Jews as well as other scholarship, this article presents the argument that this model is untenable. Instead, the goals of Jewish education ought to be reconceptualized, and the aim should instead be for "responsible assimilation," that is, the cultivation of the capacity to creatively and responsibly assimilate external norms and practices in the service of the growth and vitality of Jewish culture.