Section archive - Adult Education

For many years, I’ve been involved in planning adult education programs for our community in Stamford. When the coronavirus exploded on us earlier this year in March, we were forced (as were all other communities) to immediately make alternate plans for the programming that we had in place. The Shabbat scholar-in-residence weekends we had booked had to be cancelled, of course. However, we thought we might be able to pivot—and continue to offer the regular weeknight shul classes and the onetime weeknight guest scholars online via Zoom (a technology that I had heard about pre-COVID, but admittedly never had used before March).

In the past few weeks, thousands of people around the world, who were only marginally connected to Jewish learning, if at all, have attended online classes. They are homebound, in desperate search for connection, intellectual stimulation and safe activities. We have a whole new population of learners who has joined the ranks of those who already participated regularly in classes. When life goes back to normal and people are allowed to leave their homes, go to work, etc., what will happen to those students? Will they turn around and say “thank you, this was great, but now I can go back to what I did before?” Or will they have experienced something that has deeply touched their souls and from which they can no longer move away? Will these new learners join our in-person classes? Or will they expect online learning options? What offerings will we, educators, need to create for them?

At no point in history have there been more ways of learning Hebrew. Thanks to modern technology, there are many, many options out there, even for those with limited budgets, schedules and mobility — ranging in price from absolutely free to thousands of dollars. In addition to the traditional route of consulting books or signing up for an in-person class through a synagogue, Jewish community center or university — or traveling to Israel where there are myriad in-person courses and programs, you now can choose from an array of online courses, apps and software.

The paired study of the Jewish Talmud in havruta is a traditional, well-established and prestigious form of study. Havruta conversation is a confrontational speech event in which disagreements are not only expected but also appreciated. The aim of this study is to explore for the first time disagreement patterns carried out by women studying in havruta pairs. Twenty one havruta conversations were observed and recorded, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were held individually with the participants.