Section archive - Informal Education

As Moishe House’s Jewish Education Retreats Manager, I recently had the opportunity to participate in a focus group of sorts with the Moishe House Jewish Education Team. Our team began the weekend with a clear task at hand: quantify the unquantifiable by creating a rubric for what constitutes Jewish education at Moishe House Jewish learning events—the Jewish Learning Tree. Why? To give some clarity and examples of Jewish learning programs for our Moishe House residents, Moishe House Without Walls hosts, Peer-Led Retreat facilitators and others who often have questions about how to infuse their programs with Jewish content.

We present a rationale and method for taking an idiographic approach to study the role religion plays in adolescent development. We theorize that adolescents harness qualitatively different aspects of religion to address idiosyncratic developmental needs. Therefore, analyzing religion's role in adolescent development necessitates a case‐by‐case holistic analysis. We introduce a systematic method using narratives to identify the personal ways that individuals attribute meaning in general and regarding religion in particular.

This paper considers how the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum is experienced by teenage visitors on organized visits with the Holocaust Educational Trust (UK). The findings presented are based on semi-structured interviews with twelve 17 year olds, exploring their emotional engagement with the sites and how they perceive and understand this emotional interaction. The findings suggest that young people experience their visit in a variety of ways, and that this is an incomplete and ongoing process in their learning. The paper raises a number of considerations for educators taking educational visits to the museum, to support pupils in their learning.

This study uses the case of Holocaust Day in Israel to examine the premise that national days impact national identity and collective memory. Specifically, the study examines whether a very unique type of national day—Holocaust Day—impacts national identification, nationalism, and collective memory in the form of Israeli Jews' perceptions of the “lessons” of the Holocaust. This study uses panel survey design data on national identity and perceptions of the Holocaust's lessons from the same sample of Israeli Jews (N = 665) collected two months prior to Holocaust Day and again during and after Holocaust Day.