Section archive - Education & Administration

COVID-19 has transformed Jewish education more than any other event in recent memory. The pandemic has changed access to Jewish education, the tools we use during Jewish education, and the settings in which Jewish education takes place. The Mandel Center, in partnership with the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, will support a set of original empirical studies of synchronous Jewish text study during the pandemic across settings and life stages.

The first-ever National Jewish Educator Census (the Census) run by CASJE at George Washington University, is currently conducting a count of the number of Jewish educators across multiple sectors of American Jewish life, as well as other information that will help Jewish education attract new educators, return educators to the field, and best prepare for a post-COVID-19 world.

This qualitative study explores school principals’ perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes during a generally-outlined pedagogical reform, i.e. a broad-policy reform allowing educators to exercise their discretion in meeting its pedagogical goals, aiming to inquire what makes such processes critical to schools’ collective efficacy within reform implementation.

After nearly two months of intense social distancing, we are all finding ourselves longing for things to return to normal — and recognizing that it might be a long while before that happens. But is a return to business as usual really what we should aim for? The extended disruption gives us a chance to take stock of how we’ve operated up to now, consider alternatives and even build a better vision for the future. We’re already seeing that happen across the Jewish world. Jews of all denominations have tapped digital tools to deliver the Torah and connection that had been largely analog. The heartbeats of Jewish life — weddings, funerals, bar and bat mitzvahs, studying Torah, cooking together, telling jokes and daily minyanim — have been reimagined to match the circumstances. And communities are stepping up to support their neediest members in new ways. But those have mostly been quick fixes, responsive and scattershot rather than carefully considered and coordinated. What if we had a shared vision for the Jewish future, so we could do more than just fumble our way there?