Search results for: History of Jewish education

In a recent treatise on the 'Historiography of American Jewish Education' the author (Krasner, 2011a, p. 117) quoted Sarna's critique on 'the death of high caliber scholarship on the history of American Jewish Education' (Sarna, 1998, p. 8). Indeed, the aim of this study is an historical-analytical exposition of 'Theories of Americanization' referring to Jewish education at one of the major crossroads in the United States of America, the latter years of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century.

This review will stick with scholarly publications on Jewish religious education of the highest quality that have appeared in the past decade and that are also accessible in their style for all sorts of readers. In other words, although the books in question represent the best in the academic study of Jewish education, they share the virtue of being engaging and useful resources for a wider audience. Furthermore, the review will identify three areas and discuss at least one representative book from each category. Those categories are: History, Identity, and Setting. There is also one book that encompasses all of the previous domains and that presents an in-depth transnational survey of Jewish education

The present study deals with one of the greatest rabbis of the Middle East in the modern period, Rabbi Isaac Aboulafia, Chief Rabbi of the Damascus community between 1883 and 1895, in his role as educational revolutionary. The study examines the relationship of Aboulafia to the Alliance Israélite Universelle and to the issue of modern education as it arose with the renewal of the society’s activity in Damascus in 1880, after a lapse of about ten years.

Levenson presents Nehama Leibowitz (1903-1997) as a principal figure in making the Bible a centerpiece of modern Jewish intellectual life. Complementing the already impressive literature on Leibowitz's pedagogical techniques, Levenson emphasizes the interdependence of Leibowitz's historical context, biography, and exegetical stance. Leibowitz's encounter with German intellectual life 1919-1930 gave her a means of synthesizing her early traditional upbringing with her later encounter with modernized culture in Israel. Leibowitz's inclusion of German commentators such as Hirsch, Buber-Rosenzweig, and Jacob mark her as a conscious modernist. The New Literary Criticism's focus on the received text allowed her to deploy heterodox and non-Zionist commentators with whom she was ideologically at odds.