Section archive - Israel Education

Beginning in the fall of 2013, twenty exceptional Chicago teens embarked on an exciting fifteen-month journey along with their peers from JUF's Partnership 2Gether region in Israel—Kiryat Gat, Lachish, and Shafir. Diller empowers participants to be active, effective leaders with a strong Jewish identity and a respect for pluralism.

In 2005, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) initiated a program to place visiting Israeli professors (VIPs) on university campuses in the United States. The program seeks to expose students at colleges and universities to serious academic study about modern Israel through the placement of Israeli academics in temporary positions, thereby enhancing student understanding of Israel’s culture, government, and society as well as the domestic and international challenges the country faces. This study is based on a survey of over 200 students who took courses from an AICE visiting Israeli professor in spring 2011.

School-to-school collaboration has emerged as a key paradigm for fostering personal and institutional connections between Israeli and Diaspora youth, educators, and schools. Using the findings of a multi-year case study of a high school level twinning initiative, this article describes the challenges to this form of transnational collaboration and takes the first steps to articulating a theory of intervention of Israeli-Diaspora school twinning at the organizational level. The article suggests two processes, collaborative capacity and cultural competence, critical to development of positive and productive relationships in school partnerships. Institutional twinning is suggested as the goal of these interventions at the organizational level.

This past year, my colleagues at YU CJF and I spent a lot of time reflecting on the successes and challenges that Yeshiva University’s Counterpoint Israel program has had since its establishment eight years ago. We commissioned Dr. Ezra Kopelowitz and his team at Research Success Technologies to conduct an intensive study of Counterpoint Israel between June 2012 and January 2013.