This article presents the author's response to Joseph Reimer's essay titled, "Beyond More Jews Doing Jewish: Clarifying the Goals of Informal Jewish Education." Learning from experience, Joseph Reimer maintains, lies at the heart of informal Jewish education. Learning, Reimer explains, entails "going deeper": becoming immersed in the activities,…

Background/Context: Rabbi Raymond Zwerin and Audrey Friedman Marcus published the Gestapo Holocaust simulation game in 1976. Since that time it has been a source of debate among Jewish intellectuals and other scholars concerned with the pedagogy of the Holocaust. Even the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has weighed in on the issue, taking…

This article looks at the cultural impact of faith schools on their pupils in terms of what it teaches them about their own identity, and what it fails to teach them about the identities of people whom they live among in the wider society. On the basis of personal experience it attempts to tease out the assumptions on which such an education is…

In this essay, I seek to read the rhetorical theories set forth by Belgians Chaim Perelman and Paul de Man as responses to the Holocaust. To accomplish this aspiration, I draw from Dominick LaCapra's framework for the analysis of trauma and its expression in historical and theoretical texts. Reading the rhetorical theories of Perelman and de Man,…

This 11th annual census indicates that, after more than 10 years of growth, many characteristics of MPCP (Milwaukee Parental Chide Program) schools are not markedly different from those of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Key findings reported include: (1) Total voucher use grew 5% over last year, the second smallest annual growth since religious…

Reviews censorship of "The Merchant of Venice," which has been based on its portrayal of the Jewish character Shylock. Background information is followed by an annotated bibliography which includes 15 citations dealing with Shylock, 22 citations to articles that address the censorship of the play, and 64 works of literature that have…

From a contemporary perspective, the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers can be considered the last grand modern attempt to offer transcendence, meaning, and religiosity rather than "emancipation" and "truth." In the very first stage of their work, Adorno and Horkheimer interlaced the goals of Critical Theory with the Marxian revolutionary…

Paul Abraham, one of the Berlin Academy's most experienced researchers, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. The fate of this Jewish scholar reveals much about the inner life of the Academy, and its treatment of Jewish staff, during the World War II. This paper describes his life, against a backdrop of war, revolution, and dictatorship, and in the…

Explores the national defense mechanisms used by the education system of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-independence Israel, in response to the Holocaust, as well as the significance of these responses and their contemporary implications. Concludes with contemporary applications of national defense mechanisms and their possible…

Interest by American educators in the Holocaust has increased exponentially during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1960 the Holocaust was barely being addressed in American public schools. Yet by the 1990s several states had mandated the teaching of the event. Drawing upon a variety of sources including unpublished works and…

This paper article on a study focusing on Israel's Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jews) community, exploring its members' perceptions of Hebrew, Yiddish and English in terms of the language's importance, usage, holiness and related emotions. Questionnaires were distributed to 180 participants from five prominent subgroups within the community. Analysis…

Drawing on the importance of future orientation for adolescent development this analysis presents a model describing how future orientation is affected by high challenge (or resilience) in the face of political violence. The analysis consists of three parts. The first two present future orientation conceptualization and the psychological processes…

This paper considers a case of sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by a rabbi within an Orthodox Jewish community. The material is drawn from public records and interviews conducted with the family of the reported victim and others involved in the matter. Consideration is given to judicial procedures unique to the traditional Jewish community and…

This dissertation investigates how the intersections of race, class, and gender operate in the everyday teaching and professional norms of middle-class White women teachers--particularly in schools such as the one in this study, where a majority of middle-class, White women teachers serve predominantly low-income, racially and ethnically diverse…

This article presents the author's response to Joseph Reimer's essay titled, "Beyond More Jews Doing Jewish: Clarifying the Goals of Informal Jewish Education." The author focuses his response on Reimer's notions of challenging advocates of informal Jewish education to "go deeper" into the learning processes they envision. The…