Section archive - Israel Education

With support from the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE), we set out to collect baseline data about public school Hebrew programs. The findings from our research appear in a new report Mapping Hebrew Education in Public Schools: A Resource for Jewish Educators. In it we focus on the programs’ rationales, language learning goals, instructional approaches, curriculum, and staffing.

By examining response patterns to questions about Jewish attitudes, the study identified five different types of Jewish identity among the young adults who applied to go on a Birthright trip in summer 2018: Ancestry, Secular Peoplehood, Casual Religious, Connected, and Committed. After sorting applicants into groups corresponding to their Jewish identity type, the study examined the ways in which participants in the different groups were impacted by their Birthright experience.

The Torah MiTzion (TMZ) is part of a broader phenomenon: the emergence since the 1970s – both within the modernist and haredi (traditionalist) Orthodox sectors – of the community kollel as a new framework for Jewish education.The community kollel can be described as a cottage industry within American haredi Jewry, with over thirty functioning programs and an average of four new start ups each year.The growth of these initiatives implies, among others, a change in focus away from collective ritual and toward individualized study as the method for strengthening Jewish life in America. My central contention is that TMZ points to a shift away from conceptions that until recently dominated Israeli Zionism in general and Israeli Religious Zionism in particular. This is reflected in its global character, its ambivalence in respect to promotion of aliya, or immigration to Israel, as well as in the cooperative Israeli-Diaspora nature of the project.

In order to enhance the efficiency and impact of Israel engagement, The Jewish Agency has developed a user-friendly mapping tool that helps identify key strengths and weaknesses of Israel engagement strategies on the local level, while building a data bank that can be shared across communities, facilitating shared-learning and collective impact. The new “Israel Engagement Mapping Tool” allows different Jewish communities to learn from one another and fine tune their Israel programming to achieve an optimal fit with needs and priorities locally.