The focus of this hearing was on the issues of education of Palestinian young people, funding by the U.S. Government for the Palestinian Authority, and the implications on the Mid-East peace process. Opening statements were presented by Subcommittee Chairman Senator Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania; and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York. Witness…

Describes the participation of women in the struggle for the creation of Israel. Holds that Israeli women have failed to achieve political effectiveness because they could come to no common definition of the injustices they suffered and, thus, to no common decision on how to achieve redress through political organization. (GC)

Raphael Cohen-Almagor's article "Hate in the Classroom: Free Expression, Holocaust Denial, and Liberal Education" (2008) calls for sanctions on those K-12 public school teachers whose deployment of "hate speech"--and/or associations with others who deploy it--creates a "poisoned environment" in the classroom. While…

All languages encode aspects of culture and every culture has its own specificities to be proud of and to be transmitted. The papers in this book explore aspects of this relationship between language and culture, considering issues related to the processes of internationalization and localization of the English language. The volume is divided into…

For this study of sexual education in Israeli Modern Orthodox high schools, we interviewed teachers at the crossroads of conflicting values. Caught between a commitment to promote traditional practices and values, and a sense of obligation to serve as caregivers to students whose lived realities often do not fit neatly within the framework of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess to what extent social groups maintaining traditional-collectivistic or modern-individualistic lifestyles while sharing a similar nationality ethnicity and cultural origin, may be differentiated on the basis of their professional job perceptions and attitudes. Design/methodology/approach:…

Background: Great efforts are made to develop and implement contact activities for groups in conflict, yet studies of effects of planned contact interventions yielded mixed results. Previous attempts to explain why contact interventions do not fulfill their promise focused on the contact itself. However, the main focus of the present study was the…

"Where is God now?" is a question from the Holocaust memoir "Night" by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States. Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how…

Jewish history is unique in the sense that it expands over a vast period of time and takes place in almost all places in the world. This creates a major potential for historical debates. The state of Israel, which views itself as the high-point of Jewish national identity, has inherited these debates but attempted to find a way between them by…

The tendency of members of many ethno-religious groups to marry within their group has been considered evidence for the persistent role of ascription in modern society. What is the role of the family of origin in this process? To answer this question, we study the marriage choices of Jews in the Netherlands, using a unique dataset and a novel…

While a great deal of research has been done on identity development around awareness of racism and heterosexism, little has been conducted on understanding how Jews come to make sense of the impact of anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish oppression) on their lives. This article, based on my qualitative dissertation (MacDonald-Dennis, 2005) that explores…

The state educational system in Israel reflects the declared character of the state as a "Jewish state", and, consequently, the deep inter-group divisions in society, including a large Palestinian Arab minority. This study demonstrates how Israeli educational policy and curriculum are designed to support the Jewish nation-building…

In this article, the author discusses the problems faced by educators in teaching about the Holocaust. She relates that because the Holocaust is now frequently taught in middle schools and in upper elementary grades, by the time it is taught in high schools, students will experience "Holocaust fatigue." As such, teachers face the challenge of…

In this article, the author recounts her teaching experience with new high school students at Northwest Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox Jewish high school on Mercer Island. In teaching the students about writing, the author describes how she was moved by the narratives written by her students, and that after reading their stories she decided to…

Scholars of Israeli children's literature have recently noticed an interesting socio-literary phenomenon: the emergence of an entirely new branch in Israeli children's literature, namely ultra-orthodox children's literature. The books belonging to this special category are easily distinguished from "regular" Israeli children's books by…