Jon A Levisohn

In their new study, Benji Davis and Hanan Alexander propose a conceptual taxonomy of six types of Israel education. But it is not at all clear that the different types of Israel education are associated with different pedagogies, or indeed, whether they are significantly distinct from each other. Davis and Alexander also propose their own version of Israel education that they call "Mature Zionism," in which they engage with some important questions about the "liberal-religious Jewishness" that, in their view, characterizes American Jews. But this chacterization may be challenged, and more importantly, the proposed distinction between the six prevalent types of Israel education and the seventh does not hold up.

This article examines the ways that Jewish studies teachers think about their teaching. It analyzes data from a three month teacher study group in which teachers read educational research articles as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching. The data suggest that Jewish studies teachers take one of two approaches in talking about their teaching: Half the teachers focused on the process of teaching, the specific modalities and teaching moves they employed, while the other half focused on the goals of teaching, the specific outcomes they wanted to see in their students. We also found that those teachers who were more focused on outcomes (rather than process) saw personal identity as an essential ingredient in effective Jewish education. This article raises questions about the efficacy of transferring professional development models from general education to Jewish education, without special attention to the specific cultural context of Jewish studies.

We frequently encounter the claim that a particular Jewish educational experience will be "transformative" for the participants. The language may be hyperbole. But it may also point to educators' aspirations to affect not just knowledge and practice but character and identity. In order to understand this phenomenon-not the phenomenon of the use of the language of transformation, per se, but the phenomenon of aspirational Jewish educational programs-this article develops three case studies (Encounter, the Bronfman Fellowship, and the Wexner Heritage Program). What emerges from these cases is a set of models or theories of transformative change: the Maimonides model, learning a habit such that, over time, habit becomes character; the paradise-and-exile model, becoming a seeker after an ideal that one has glimpsed; and the outsider-to-insider model, moving from a sense of fraudulence to a sense of confidence within a particular domain.

No articulation of `historical thinking' has been as influential as Sam Wineburg's position, according to which historical thinking is, fundamentally, the recognition of the ways in which the past is different than the present. Wineburg argues, further, that achieving that state is `unnatural.' This paper critiques both of these claims, arguing instead that we should replace a generic conception of historical thinking with one that is much more rooted in the specific practice of the discipline. It is surely necessary for students to learn this practice, but it is not unnatural. Instead, learning to think historically is learning to speak the language of the discipline that we call 'history.'

Generally, in the Jewish tradition, a mitzvah is understood to be an obligation imposed upon, and carried out by, individuals. But some mitzvot operate differently. These mitzvot are not individual obligations; there is no one person responsible for carrying them out, and no one person can fulfill them. Instead, the community bears the burden of these responsibilities.
These communal obligations are distinct from individual obligations to serve the community (e.g., paying taxes). They are also distinct from individual obligations that, when fulfilled, contribute to developing a certain kind of community. Instead, in these cases, Jewish legal authorities declare that the obligations themselves are communal, calling them Ḥovot ha-Tzibbur (“Obligations of the Community”) or Mitzvot ha-Mutalot ‘al ha-Tzibbur (“Commandments that Devolve on the Community”).
This article names this category, identifies the relevant classical sources, discusses the central conundrum of the operationalization of communal obligations (i.e., who fulfills the obligation in practice?), and then—to promote the idea that communal obligations may serve as a resource for imagining Jewish community—distinguishes three modes in which these mitzvot function. An appendix presents the full dataset of over fifty communal mitzvot.