Search results for: Krasner Jonathan

Twenty-five years after the publication of A Time to Act, by the Commission on Jewish Education of North America (CJENA), we are in a position to evaluate this initiative with historical hindsight. At the time, the commission was heralded as an unprecedented communal undertaking and a signal that after years of perfunctory treatment and neglect by the organized Jewish community, Jewish education was gaining recognition as a vital concern. While accurate, this assessment benefits from contextualization both in the American and the American-Jewish situation of the 1980s and early-1990s. The CJENA and its report mirrored American anxiety during that same period about the state of K-12 education, while initiatives to address systemic weaknesses in Jewish education were concurrent with the spate of reform efforts spawned to address the perceived decline in public education. At the same time, A Time to Act exemplified a more general malaise within the Jewish community about the effects of rapid integration on Jewish ethnic and religious survival.

Over the past two summers, along with our colleague Sharon Avni, we have been studying how Jewish camps use Hebrew (defined broadly). Our goals are to understand how Hebrew at camp reflects and contributes to broader trends in Jewish life, as well as to offer recommendations for incorporating Hebrew into camps and other Jewish educational institutions. We visited about three dozen camps, sifted through documents and artifacts in four archives, and interviewed over 110 camp professionals and 60 campers. Now begins the hard part: analyzing thousands of pages of notes, transcripts, program materials, historical documents and photos and synthesizing our research into a book. In the meantime, we can share a few preliminary findings.

This article documents the Journal of Jewish Education’s acquisition by the Network for Research in Jewish Education, in 2004, and evaluates the contribution of the re-launched Journal to the field of Jewish education. I explore how the Journal contributed over the past decade in three discrete yet often overlapping areas, thereby realizing its editors’ vision.

This series of articles explores the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Part 1 covers the first fifteen years of JE's publication (1929-1944).