Section archive - Trends in Jewish Education

This paper is part of a larger study that set out to explore the pedagogical tools used by religious teachers in order to convey – through dance – traditional messages which cultivate a sense of communal belonging and shape the identity of the student, thereby bridging the tension between dance and the way it is perceived by traditional religious Judaism. I will analyze one class in which the teacher used visual art to weave choreographic principles into the learning of tradition and how the visual text serves as a cultural message around which the teacher structures a dance piece, simultaneously creating and conveying dance content knowledge and knowledge of the tradition.

This study investigated the tension that exists between promoting an educational agenda and practising an educational approach which emphasises autonomy within the framework of religious education. Our main thesis is that every educational deed contains a dialectical tension between endorsing an educational agenda and the promotion of autonomy. Moreover, this tension is not restricted to religious education. The intensity of such a conflict varies in accordance with the flexibility (or inflexibility) of the dogma, the conceptual cohesion of the educational agenda and the perceived importance of granting autonomy to students. The more cohesive and inflexible the educational agenda is, the greater the danger that autonomy will be discarded.

Today, post-communist Europe is experiencing a museum boom as countries try to consolidate a collective identity in museums that tell their nation’s story in a way that was not possible under communism. Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials offer not only histories of Jewish communities in a given town or country, but also a perspective on the place of those communities within a larger national history and a country’s self-understanding. For decades, in the public sphere, the subject of Jewish history and memory was largely off-limits in the Eastern bloc. In the last 25 years, however, since the fall of communism, there has been a revival of public Jewish culture and institutions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the former Soviet Union (FSU). New museums, memorials, and education centers are an important part of this trend. This special issue is dedicated to this phenomenon, first charting a map of new Jewish museums throughout post-communist Europe, and then attempting to draw some analytical conclusions about the place and meaning of such museums.

The editors of the Journal of Jewish Education are interested in receiving papers that address and consider the phenomenon of Special Needs and Inclusion in Jewish Education. The field of Jewish special education is relatively new, and rapidly growing. Children have special educational needs if they have a learning challenge that calls for a special educational provision to be made for them.