Jon A Levisohn

Many people seem to share an intuition that something is askew in the field of Jewish education, that there is an
unhealthy chasm that ought to be bridged between something called “scholarship” and something else called “pedagogy.” This intuition has given rise to the research initiative at the Mandel Center: the Initiative on Bridging
Scholarship and Pedagogy in Jewish Studies. But precisely what is the intellectual or practical problem represented by this metaphor? This paper suggests a set of five inter-related answers to that question, each of which points
to an issue or a concern about contemporary Jewish education. Taken together, they represent the agenda of the
Mandel Center’s Bridging Initiative.