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Miriam Heller Stern, Dean of the Graduate Center for Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, responds to the recent Jewish education blogosphere discussion of the 'reinvention' of Jewish education. She claims that Jewish education must learn from the last century of attempted American school reform. Such reform was in reality, limited to what teachers actually chose to do, not what thinkers thought about and proposed.

The Foundation for Jewish Camp has received a $3.3 million grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation and AVI CHAI Foundation for a pilot initiative that will create senior experiential Jewish educator positions to be shared by nonprofit Jewish overnight camps and Jewish day or synagogue schools. This groundbreaking program, Nadiv, has several goals. The first is to experiment with a new model that could enhance the quality of education at Jewish camps in a sustainable way. The second objective is to create a new model for year-round positions for trained and talented Jewish educators and the third is to model a new way to foster deeper collaboration between different kinds of institutions in the Jewish educational world.

In a blog post on the URJ blog, Dr. Jonathan Woocher, Chief Ideas Officer and Director of the Lippman Kanfer Institute at JESNA, calls for a reinventing of Jewish education. That isn't because Jewish education today is bad; it's because it can be much, much better than it is. In order to have Jewish education serve the needs of the 21st century North American Jewish people, it is necessary to accelerate a few paradigm shifts that are already under way.

Is Jewish education predictable? The authors contributing to this issue of Sh'ma attempt to answer that question. Although prophecy is dangerous, some anticipate the continued growth of day schools unless the economic burdens become too heavy to bear and needed subsidies are unavailable. Supplementary education remains problematic. Will it slowly be augmented or will it be replaced by more emphasis on summer camps, intensive retreats and technology that creates virtual day schools, educative social networks and distributed Jewish education faculties? Will we see increasing emphasis on education later in life, when Jewish learning becomes voluntary rather than mandatory? Will we see the flourishing of Jewish studies programs in universities and colleges, the spread of Birthright programs and their follow-ups, and a dramatic growth in adult education programs?