Explore the vast range of titles available.

Families play a critical role in shaping children's orientation to Judaism, and decisions about Jewish education are made within the family unit. However, in most studies of Jewish education, individual students or parents serve as the unit of analysis, with families being omitted or relegated to the background. In this paper, I foreground the family through an ethnographic study to illustrate the complex negotiations that occur between family members about involvement in Hebrew school post b'nai mitzvah. By illustrating the dynamic interplay between family members, I show the internal and external struggles that family members experience as they negotiate their Jewish commitments, and the potential unintended consequences that might arise from such negotiations. I describe how negotiations about Jewish education can have potentially deleterious effects on family members' relationships, and how parenting philosophy and parenting style may shape negotiations about Hebrew school. My central goal in this paper is to advance a methodological argument about the value of taking a family systems perspective and using an ethnographic approach to understand families' decisions about Hebrew school and Jewish commitments more broadly.

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

The focus on Jewish continuity has shifted in the last two decades, from concern with anti-semitism to anxiety over the threat of assimilation and, in particular, intermarriage. Scholars concur that the intermarriage rate has risen to about 50 percent but disagree about the significance of the phenomenon. Those in the outreach camp hold that little can be done to lower the rate of intermarriage and, instead, want the community to promote efforts to integrate non-Jewish spouses into the Jewish community. Those in the inreach camp, in contrast, hold that little can be done to increase the propensity of intermarried parents to raise Jewish children and instead promote efforts to encourage inmarriage and conversion. This paper examines the impact of Taglit-Birthright Israel (Taglit), a program that sends Diaspora Jewish young adults on fully subsidized educational tours of Israel, on intermarriage, conversion, and attitudes toward raising children as Jews. Drawing on several surveys of Taglit applicants, including participants and control groups of applicants who did not participate, the study isolates Taglit's impact and compares Taglit's influence to other educational interventions and background characteristics. Taglit has substantial impact on participants' propensity to marry a Jew, increasing the odds ratio of a non-Orthodox participant being married to a Jew several fold. In addition, the program strongly increases participants' regard for the value of raising Jewish children. The study concludes that both the intermarriage rate and the motivation of intermarried parents to raise Jewish children are highly tractable. The study points to the possibility of establishing common ground between advocates of inreach and outreach on the vital importance of Jewish education to the goal of Jewish demographic vitality.

How do Jewish day schools affect the lives of parents and children? 'Back to School' suggests that Jewish day schools act as a locus of Jewish identity akin to the Jewish streets or neighbourhoods that existed in many major North American towns in the first half of the 20th century.

Inhalt: Building community within and around schools. can Jewish days schools measure up? / Ellen B. Goldring -- From control to collaboration. mapping school communities across diverse contexts / Claire Smrekar -- Compassionate conservatism. on schools, community, and democracy / Deborah Meier -- A response to Deborah Meier / Joshua Elkin -- Community as a means and an end in Jewish education / Jon A. Levisohn -- Do Jewish schools make a difference in the former Soviet Union? / Zvi Gitelman -- Jewish pupils' perspectives on religious education and the expectations of a religious community. the Jewish High School in Berlin / Christine Müller -- Mutual relations between shelihim and local teachers at Jewish schools in the former Soviet Union / Ira Dashevsky and Uriel Ta'ir -- Community school versus school as community. the case of Bet El community in Buenos Aires / Yossi J. Goldstein -- Beyond the community. Jewish day school education in Britain / Helena Miller -- Attitudes, behaviours, values, and school choice. a comparison of French Jewish families / Erik H. Cohen -- The school ghetto in France / Ami Bouganim -- Relationships between schools and parents in haredi popular literature in the United States / Yoel Finkelman -- The impact of community on curriculum decision-making in a North American Jewish day school / Eli Kohn -- Ideological commitment in the supervision of Jewish studies teachers. representing community / Michal Muszkat-Barkan and Asher Shkedi -- Schooling for change in the religious world. an educational experiment in a religious junior high school in Israel / Elana Maryles Sztokman -- Home-made Jewish culture at the intersection of family life and school / Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor -- Teacher perspectives on behaviour problems. background influences on behavioural referral criteria and definitions of rebellious behaviour / Scott J. Goldberg, Binyamin Krohn, and Michael Turetsky -- Shabbatonim as experiential education in the North American community day high school / Jeffrey S. Kress and Joseph Reimer -- Teaching leadership through town meeting / Jay Dewey -- Building community in a pluralist high school / Susan L. Shevitz and Rahel Wasserfall.

Illuminates the role that private schools for Jewish girls played in Russian Jewish society and documents their influence on contemporary political discourse and educational innovation. Though over one hundred private schools for Jewish girls thrived in the areas of Jewish settlement in the Russian empire between 1831 and 1881, their story has been largely overlooked in the scholarship of Jewish educational history. In Her Hands: The Education of Girls in Tsarist Russia restores these schools to their rightful place of prominence in training thousands of Jewish girls in secular and Judaic subjects and also paving the way for the modern schools that followed them. Through extensive archival research, author Eliyana R. Adler examines the schools' curriculum, teachers, financing, students, and educational innovation and demonstrates how each of these aspects evolved over time. The first section of this volume follows the emergence and development of the new private schools for Jewish girls in the mid-1800s, beginning with the historical circumstances that enabled their creation, and detailing the staffing, financing, and academics in the schools. Adler dispels the myth that all education in Russia was reserved for boys by showing that a dedicated group of educators and administrators worked to provide new opportunities for a diverse group of Jewish girls. In the second section, Adler looks at the interactions between these new educational institutions and their communities, including how the schools responded to changes taking place around them and how they in turn influenced their environment. Adler consults several major archives, including those of the former Russian Ministry of Education, along with contemporary periodicals, educational materials, and personal memoirs to provide a remarkably complete picture of education for Jewish girls in Russia in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In telling the story of Russia's private schools for Jewish girls, Adler argues that these schools were crucibles of educational experimentation that merit serious examination. Scholars of Jewish history, educational history, and women's studies will enjoy this pathbreaking study.

As a recently established field of Jewish thought, Jewish political philosophy has made increasingly frequent appearances in recently edited histories of Jewish philosophy. Following the pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among others, Jewish political philosophy gained its proper place alongside ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy. This volume is another manifestation of this welcomed development. Consisting of selected papers published in English over the last thirty years, Wisdom's Little Sister concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, from Sa'adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth century. These were the formative periods in the development of Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars, versed in the canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic), encountered Greek political philosophy as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes. In combining Greek, Jewish and Muslim thought, these scholars are the originators of what we now know as Jewish political philosophy.

Although recent scholarship has examined gender issues in Judaism with regard to texts, rituals, and the rabbinate, there has been no full-length examination of the education of Jewish children in day schools. Drawing on studies in education, social science, and psychology, as well as personal interviews, the authors show how traditional (mainly Orthodox) day school education continues to re-inscribe gender inequities and socialize students into unhealthy gender identities and relationships. They address pedagogy, school practices, curricula, and textbooks, as along with single-sex versus coed schooling, dress codes, sex education, Jewish rituals, and gender hierarchies in educational leadership. Drawing a stark picture of the many ways both girls and boys are molded into gender identities, the authors offer concrete resources and suggestions for transforming educational practice.

This chapter turns to Wise’s attempts to set up a synod. Early in 1855, Wise had begun to renew his agitation for a conference. Wise wanted a general ‘get-together’ without regard to theology. He enumerates some of the questions which lay before American Jewry: Zion College, which had been started in Cincinnati; the orphan asylum which had been started in New Orleans; whether or not to have Jewish parochial schools; ‘our standing complaint about the serious want of textbooks for Hebrew schools’. ‘The grand problem-to be solved at present is this’, said Wise, ‘how to unite all these endeavours into one focus’. Here, indeed, the chapter reveals a mind working on a grand design for American Jewry. It is a conference on practical issues, not on ideologies, that Wise is advocating. The note is definitely union, not reform.