Section archive - Trends in Jewish Education

Day schools don’t last forever, but they should. Here’s the typical pattern: Parents send their kids to a day school. The kids graduate. The parents become uninvolved. The kids, well, they grow up. They get married, have kids and, if everything goes as hoped, send their children to day school. This is a flawed model. The huge gap in a family’s active day school engagement is one reason that schools face such serious sustainability issues, and why they serve only a small fraction of the population. The solution to this problem — and perhaps to the problem of Jewish day schools in general — is that the schools need to think bigger.

In the blizzard of articles, reactions, and blog posts about the Pew Research Center study of American Jews, the most unexpected came from the prominent public intellectual Noah Feldman. Writing in Bloomberg, Feldman’s column jumps from the Pew study to some observations about, surprisingly, the Lakewood yeshiva. He explains that Lakewood is a massive ultra-Orthodox educational institution (6500 students embedded in a community of 55,000) focused almost entirely on the study of Talmud and exclusively for male students, that its educational model is “astonishingly egalitarian and democratic,” that it demonstrates that “one kind of authentically Jewish experience is flourishing in America.”

This review will stick with scholarly publications on Jewish religious education of the highest quality that have appeared in the past decade and that are also accessible in their style for all sorts of readers. In other words, although the books in question represent the best in the academic study of Jewish education, they share the virtue of being engaging and useful resources for a wider audience. Furthermore, the review will identify three areas and discuss at least one representative book from each category. Those categories are: History, Identity, and Setting. There is also one book that encompasses all of the previous domains and that presents an in-depth transnational survey of Jewish education

In 2009, Ma'yan's second cohort of Research Training Interns decided to find out how Bat Mitzvah is experienced and understood by girls today. The Research Training Internship (RTI) is grounded in the principles of Participatory Action Research, which means that we conduct research as a collaborative, intergenerational team -- researching with Jewish teen girls instead of on them. Using an online survey and a novel research method (asking participants to write endings to fictional Bat Mitzvah-related scenarios), we gathered data from pre- and post-Bat Mitzvah girls in the Tri-State area.