In 2011 we started following a cohort of 1,000 Jewish 11-year-olds as they entered Jewish and non-Jewish secondary schools in Britain. We were interested in finding out about their Jewish behaviors, attitudes and identity, milestones, and significant events. What follows in this article is an analysis of six family stories, which show how we have…

This study explored the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Jewish lives of teenagers in Jewish schools in the UK. We found that young people have been thrown back on the resources they locate under their own roofs. For some, it has resulted in a thin version of Jewish life and a sense of disappointment. For others, the Jewish resources at home…

This paper is a first effort to systematically document programmatic interventions in five of the ten communities participating in The Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative, a joint philanthropic effort launched in 2013. The paper identifies patterns and trends reflected in the programmatic choices made by each community. It…

Jewish overnight summer camp has been touted as an especially well-suited venue for Israel education. This article brings an institutional lens to test this proposition. Data come from the survey responses of 1,382 campers, CITs, and staff at 12 overnight and day camps. We find that Israel education does indeed occur almost anywhere at camp. At…

Research into school choice has generally explored both the processes by which choices are made and the considerations that parents explore when making this important decision on behalf of their children. This article examines the secondary school choices of Jewish parents in the United Kingdom. It explores parents' reasons for choosing to select…

This article takes up categories from literature on political and civic engagement to help make sense of data collected from interviews with 40 American Jewish day high school students about what they think and feel about Israel. Viewed through a set of lenses that distinguish between the manifestations and motivations of political and civic…

In this paper the authors explore the heuristic potential in the image of the teacher-as-stranger and use it as a frame for reflecting on teacher change and growth. Drawing on the sociological figure of the stranger, they conduct a qualitative study of a sample of teachers who are not only strangers in a metaphorical sense, but who, because they…

What are North American Jewish day schools doing when they engage in Israel education, what shapes their practices, and to what ends? In this article, we report on a multi-method study inspired by these questions. Our account is organized around an analytical model that helps distinguish between what we call the vehicles, intensifiers, and…

Set in a private parochial high school, this case invites consideration of the costs and benefits in a range of tactics that schools use for teacher recruitment. The case calls attention to the technical solutions that make one particular school an adept recruiter of teachers and to the extensive human and social capital at its disposal. At the…

This paper sheds light on previously unresearched dimensions in the private-parochial school environment, which help account for the willingness of private school teachers to accept salaries inferior to those offered in public (state) schools. In-depth biographical interviews with a group of 18 Canadian university graduates, qualified to teach in…

Examines the strength of teaching archetypes, highlighting accounts from Jewish day school teachers about their lives and work to investigate the strength of traditional conceptions of teaching. Results illustrate how a teacher draws on a strong tradition of Jewish teaching even as she transforms her enactment of that tradition to accommodate new…

The recent growth of Jewish day schools in the United States and United Kingdom has consistently been attributed to the declining appeal of public education among minority groups in general and the Jewish community in particular. In this article I review the interpretative heuristic that lies behind this claim, and ask whether this heuristic…

This article proposes to read events of the educational past not as history but as midrash. It juxtaposes an historical account of a watershed experiment in adult education (Franz Rosenzweig's Freie Judisches Lehrhaus) with an ethnographic account of a presently practicing elementary school teacher. These accounts are generically different and…