Sephardi Jews (of Middle Eastern origins) make up 65% of Israeli school enrollment but lag far behind Ashkenazi Jews (of European origins) in academic achievement and educational attainment. Reforms of the 1960s-70s, which focused on compensatory education to remedy "cultural disadvantage," reinforced ethnic underclass stereotypes,…

Issues related to the immigration of Russian Jewish students into Israel are discussed, with emphasis on teaching them English whether or not they already know Hebrew. (LB)

After interviewing Jewish teenagers about death, finds Reform Judaism teachers teach about love and marriage but not death. Observes students know little of Jewish customs related to death. Notes Jewish doctrine focuses on the needs of the living. Considers elements that will be necessary to provide for effective death education in Reform Jewish…

Describes how a survivor of the Holocaust helped a sixth grade class understand the experiences of the Holocaust and how the class helped the survivor to reach into his own repressed pain. (PRA)

Although the Holocaust was an assault on Jews, gypsies, and gays, it has universal implications for everyone. This article explains several approaches to teaching the Holocaust, including literature about teenagers facing complex moral issues, interdisciplinary methods, interviews of survivors, field trips to temples or synagogues, research…

Points out that the images and voices of Jewish women are largely absent from prime-time television. Links feminist theory and images of women as signals of systemic troubles in a community to mass communication theory. Provides a multidisciplinary approach for considering "doubly" and "triply" oppressed minority women. (SR)

Evaluates a teaching initiative that aimed to teach about the Holocaust through a traveling exhibit on Anne Frank. Data from 10 case study schools show the success of the approach and some ways in which the teaching relevance might have been strengthened. (SLD)

Investigates associations of acculturation attitudes, measures of sociocultural adjustment, and length of the encounter with the host society (Israel) among 300 Jewish sojourner youth, 15- to 18-years-old. Reveals that the adjustment scores decreased over the time spent in Israel. (CMK)

The importance of learning lessons from the Holocaust and from the mass slaughter in Rwanda was recognised in the theme underpinning Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day in 2004. This article is principally concerned with the lessons learnt from the Holocaust by a culturally diverse group of students aged 14 to 16. They all attended schools in an…

Democracy offers no automatic principles for a decent and civilized life. Its principles require interpretation and compromise, and must be balanced between the welfare of individuals, groups, and the state. In Israel, the situation is made even more complex by the fact that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state. Surrounded by hostile forces,…

One week after Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the killings, rapes and other atrocities committed in Darfur amount to "genocide," in mid-September the United Nations' World Health Organization issued new figures saying 6,000 to 10,000 people are dying per month there in one of Africa's worst humanitarian crises. Powell had…

The analysis compared differing correlates of life satisfaction among three diverse population groups in Israel, examining background and health status variables, social environment factors, and activity indicators. Multiple regression analysis revealed that veteran Jewish-Israelis (n = 2,043) had the largest set of predictors, the strongest of…

In the Jewish religion, a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony is the rite of passage from childhood towards adulthood. Twenty-one youngsters who attended two special education schools in Israel participated in group bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies. Parents were interviewed both before the learning process and after the ceremony. Findings showed that the…

This article, based on field research, considers how an adolescent graduate of a New York Jewish day school constructs his moral identity now that he is in the larger setting of a large public high school in metropolitan New York. Jeffrey Schochet (a pseudonym), the subject of this article, wrestles with moral issues throughout his school day,…

Anna G. Sherman (1897?-1980) taught Hebrew language at the various extension schools of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in a career that began in 1923 and lasted for nearly forty years. Her name appears on the academic registers of the institution--with respites for residence in "Eretz Yisrael," childbirth, or illness--through 1960-1964,…