Alan Levin, PhD., is an education specialist at the Union for Reform Judaism. He most recently served as the director of the CHAI: Learning for Jewish Life curriculum project. Wendy Grinberg, RJE, is an adult learning specialist at the Union for Reform Judaism. Her latest projects include parenting podcasts and free curricular modules for adults.

Visual art should not be reserved for enrichment. When we move art to the center, using visual images as a primary component of instruction, we open our stories and history to a new group of people. Some of those people prefer to learn visually or express themselves best through art. Others may be those who have difficulty reading, understanding and remembering what they read. Others may have recently come to our classrooms from other countries. Or, students may simply not feel that they are literate in Jewish texts and tradition, making visual art an excellent entry point. That is why the Union for Reform Judaism is piloting an art curriculum for teens as part of its newly launched Campaign for Teen Engagement.

The Jewish people are known as the People of the Book. We read and discuss our stories over and over; our Torah is read on a yearly cycle; our holidays highlight central stories; we read and we discuss. In the search for meaning, we can take one sentence or word and expound on it. But the word-filled Jewish world is somewhat out of sync with the image-dominated world in which we live. So many of the words we read are now hyperlinked to pictures or video clips, and our stories have been adapted to stage and screen. The stories of the Bible are so pervasive that we can find references to them in movies, television shows and even commercials.

The disparity between the world of the word and that of the image is keenly felt in our schools. The word is the primary subject of our Jewish schools, and it is the medium through which we teach and learn most frequently. Yet that approach to learning is falling short in engaging or retaining students and adults beyond the required classes leading up to bar or bat mitzvah. The Reform Movement has recently taken up the challenge of meeting the needs of our adolescents, facing head-on the crisis of losing our teens. Studies in learning and teaching have proven that people learn in a variety of ways, and that a visual component to learning can enhance understanding and memory.

We felt strongly that we needed a complete curriculum, including artwork and lesson plans. Training teachers about learning styles or Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is not enough. Teachers tend to teach as they were taught rather than as they were taught to teach. In religious schools, part-time, avocational teachers rely on the text book and only have limited time to plan. The curriculum is designed to both enhance the chances that visual art will be included in instruction (by providing images and lesson plans) and as a way of training and encouraging teachers to use visual art in the classroom. By providing model lessons and discussion questions to guide teachers and students unfamiliar with discussing visual art, teachers who feel that they do not have the ability to guide discussion of great art are guided through the process and gain confidence.

The program’s main objective is not to teach a survey of Jewish art, rather, to add an art dimension to our study of Judaism. Therefore, any art that enhances our discussion of Jewish identity, history, tradition or texts is relevant. Thus the name of our curriculum: Art of Enduring Jewish Value.

Each unit contains images which can be used for that unit and one complete lesson plan as well as background material on the artists. Teachers can substitute other images included in the unit using the same lesson plan. In the introductory unit, students consider the nature of Jewish art and how to define and relate to Jewish art. They learn how to assess the relevance and significance of art by Jewish artists or containing Jewish content. The discussion of defining Jewish art leads to a discussion of defining what makes a person Jewish. One lesson invites students to consider the work of two non-Jews: a work that struggles with the Holocaust by German Artist Anselm Kiefer and a biblical scene depicted by French artist Victor Eugène Delacroix. In the subsequent lesson, students look at the work of two Jewish artists: Marc Chagall, one of the most well-known Jewish artists, and Camille Pissarro, who painted mostly impressionist landscapes. Some of the questions we ask students to consider are:

• How do you feel about what you see?
• As a Jew, how do you relate to the Jewish image?
• Are there Jewish objects or themes or people in the work?
• Can you tell the time or day or year that the artwork is depicting?
• What movement or direction do you see in the art?
• Is this piece of art important, that is, of lasting value?
• Can Jewish art be created by non-Jews?
• Can art of enduring Jewish value be created by non-Jews?
• Can the Jewish experience be authentically expressed in art by non-Jews?

In the ensuing units, students learn about Judaism through art that depicts Jewish people, stories or objects. Ceremonial objects teach how Judaism was celebrated in different places and times. Pictures that depict historic events illustrate what Jews may have experienced in different times in history, or how others have perceived Jews throughout history. One unit in the curriculum focuses on the “strange and bizarre” as a way of introducing students to aspects of the Bible or Jewish history with which they may not be familiar (such as the story of Judith, or the popularity of protective amulets, or the legend of the golem).

Investigating portraits of Jews teaches about how Jews lived around the world, but it also raises deeper questions about Jewish identity. In one lesson, students try to learn about a Yemenite bride by analyzing her portrait, and they reflect on the nature of visual representations of Jewish identity as well. They consider how they would like to be represented in a portrait:

• If you were to work with an artist and the artist said he wanted to really capture who you are, what you like and believe, what might be included in the painting, drawing or collage?
• What would you want to be wearing?
• How would you want your hair?
• Would you want the picture realistic or more abstract?

Through this discussion, students begin to understand how portraits tell a story and how the way people present themselves is a reflection of identity.

As we have seen, this curriculum works on many levels: adding images to a discussion of Jewish history, identity and text; using artwork to introduce unfamiliar Jewish concepts; raising questions of the “Jewishness” of people and their work; generating a discussion about the students’ own Jewish identities; and considering how non-Jews perceive and represent Jews and the Jewish experience. On another level, the questions and the nature of the lesson plans are designed to train students to reflect thoughtfully on how they experience art and give them a way to discuss this experience with others.

We hope that the lessons included in this curriculum result in students and teachers observing the images and artwork in their world in a new way. And while the curriculum offers sample lessons and lists of specific images, the lessons are actually models that can be used with different artwork with only slight modifications in the lesson. Art can be selected by students as well as teachers and become part of classroom planning as students and teachers take control of their learning. In the long term, we hope teachers and students will become excited by the approach and substitute their own selected images for those in the curriculum and use art to enhance all areas of study in our settings. Visual art is a vital part of the conversation we are having with our students about what it has and does mean to live as a Jew, and this curriculum empowers Jewish teachers and learners to bring art to the table. Through this effort, we make the Jewish story more accessible and meaningful to a greater number of our potential students. We believe they will enrich our community as they add their voices, and images, to the conversation.