In Israel, changes in history teaching and the publication of new history textbooks in recent years triggered a stormy public controversy that went far beyond the content of the books themselves. The disputes over how history should be taught revealed the state of transition that had characterized Israeli society since the beginning of the 1990s.…

Working across boundaries of power, identity, and political geography is fraught with difficulties and contradictions. In Tali Tal and Iris Alkaher's, "Collaborative environmental projects in a multicultural society: Working from within separate or mutual landscapes?" the authors describe their efforts to do this in the highly charged…

This article presents a brief synopsis of one example of the Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) approach to pedagogy and in-depth study of the events leading to the Holocaust. This particular approach puts the focus on the decisions made by individuals, communities and nations who contributed to that genocide or, in very exceptional cases,…

While Hebrew education maintains a dominant position in Jewish educational contexts, little research has looked at what the practice of Hebrew language education looks like on a daily basis. Drawing from an 18-month ethnography of junior high school students attending a private non-Orthodox all day school, this article critically examines the ways…

On the third floor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in Washington, D.C., inside a glass case, lie thousands of shoes. Old and mismatched, moldering after sixty years, they are what remains of countless Jews who were told to disrobe and who were subsequently murdered at Majdanek, Poland, during the final years of the…

This review explores Ben-Zvi Assaraf, Eshach, Orion, and Alamour's paper titled "Cultural Differences and Students' Spontaneous Models of the Water Cycle: A Case Study of Jewish and Bedouin Children in Israel" by examining how the authors use the concept of spontaneous mental models to explain cultural knowledge source of Bedouin…

This article examines how students and teachers at a non-Orthodox Jewish day school in New York City negotiate the use of translation within the context of an institutionalized language policy that stresses the use of a sacred language over that of the vernacular. Specifically, this paper analyzes the negotiation of a Hebrew-only policy through…

This article examines the educational philosophy that arises from several focal writings of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchek. These specific writings, however, do not deal directly with education, and the article illustrates the way that educational doctrine can be shown to arise from philosophical writings as such. On the basis of this research, the…

The great Jewish sage, Hillel, who lived in the first century BCE wrote: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself, what am I? If not now, when?" Parents of children with disabilities and Jewish educators have translated these words of wisdom into practice for they offer important guidelines toward educating children in…

One of the major challenges for the process of peace building is to overcome the rigid structure of the socio-psychological repertoire that accompanies it. Our longitudinal study examined one element of this repertoire among Jewish and Arab adolescents in Israel: the cognitive legitimacy and the emotional reactions toward the historical narrative…

This essay reviews the Vision and Practice section of the "International Handbook of Jewish Education" published in 2011. Gathered in this section, 24 Jewish educators (spread across 18 chapters) offer theoretical reflections on the state of Jewish education in the contemporary moment. These chapters seem, on first reading, a rather eclectic…

In this study, twelve expert teachers of Jewish Thought in Israeli high schools were observed and interviewed, in order to examine their ideas regarding the proper way to approach and teach Jewish canonical texts. Using qualitative analysis, I identified a central component of these teachers' Pedagogic Content Knowledge and named it their…

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with…

This article reflects on the experience of theorizing sacred space through field practice as part of a fieldtrip to Barcelona. In particular, it focuses on the critical analysis of different approaches to sacred space as applied to various sites in the city. The article opens with a brief review of three mainstream approaches to sacred space: the…

The aim of this research is to investigate the intergenerational changes that have occurred in Australian Jewish day schools and the challenges these pose for religious and Jewish education. Using a grounded theory approach according to the constant comparative method (Strauss 1987), data from three sources (interviews [296], observations [27],…