The rise of antisemitism challenges educators to respond creatively and provide our students with the tools necessary to prevent them from being influenced or hurt by the distorted narratives often constructed. I would like to suggest that familiarizing our students with the historical method and teaching them how to think historically will help them significantly in this effort.
Anti-Semitism, the condition of our world, the identity crisis of too many of our young adults and rising leaders, it can be and often is just too much. How do we respond? A young man from a Modern Orthodox Jewish home in a Northeastern community with a sizable Jewish population lives in the western part of the United States outside of any such community. He has blond hair and green eyes, slight muscular build, and is in his twenties. People who see him occasionally greet him with the statement, “You look like a great Aryan.” At other times, he confronts anti-Semitic remarks if anyone thinks he may be Jewish (due in part to his name). He has also been…
In an age of social media and social justice activism, when it comes to teaching our students about Israel, it can be challenging to find open and healthy discourse. When Ben & Jerry’s pulled selling of ice cream in what they called the “occupied” areas of Israel—my Facebook and Instagram feeds quickly became flooded with competing posts either extolling the company’s morals for taking a stand against Zionism or denouncing it for antisemitism. Perhaps we need to begin with some definitions. Antisemitism is defined as hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people; classical anti-Zionism is opposition to the premise that Jews have a right to self-determination or a state of their own. Classical anti-Zionism is mostly…
Anti-Zionism and anti-Israel sentiment are so prevalent that if students have not encountered them as of yet, whether on social media or in person, they are sure to have to grapple with them when they begin their post-high school experience. It would be a great disservice to them if we do not prepare them adequately, and it is the nature of that preparation which will determine our students’ abilities to feel confident in the face of antisemitic anti-Zionist attacks. The questions are how and in what context to do that preparation.
JEWISHEDUCATIONALEADERSHIP Jewish Educational Leadership is a publication of The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education of Bar Ilan University.Chana German, Executive Director Journal Staff Hyim Brandes | EditorZvi Grumet | Editor-in-ChiefChevi Rubin | Editor Please...
I’ve been heading up the Israeli division of the education, research, and documentation unit of the Holocaust Claims Conference since 2019. We fund Holocaust museum exhibits…
It’s usually hard to say goodbye to students at the end of a course or a semester because we’ve created a temporary community of meaning. But online education during COVID has shifted many classroom norms dramatically. One such norm is class closures. Goodbye is now emblazoned with the red “Leave Meeting” button. Worse still is the “End Meeting for All” tab that prevents any adult learners from lingering and reduces a class to a screen shot of people’s gaping mouths frozen, sometimes in mid-sentence.
Before I assumed a new headship a few years ago, I was given some excellent advice: to read a modest-sized booklet entitled “Entry Plan Approach: How to Start a Leadership Position Successfully.”
Throughout the COVID crisis, the discomfort of the daily uncertainty was often echoed in the familiar refrain of, “I just can’t wait to go back.” Zoom fatigue, social distancing, and the need to always be on watch, fed on each other in a spiraling yearning for going back to the familiar, to normal. Indeed, many schools did not hesitate to revert back to their “regularly scheduled programs” as soon as the guidelines permitted them, and were I to ask their leadership to reflect on what they learned, their answer would be something like, “We survived.”
Prior to the pandemic, the teachers and administrators at SAR High School frequently discussed student stress. We had, at times, sought to address it through various initiatives, some modest and some bold. As the pandemic raged last spring and we began to imagine the 2020-21 school year, we decided, first, to create more “down time” for students to alleviate the increased stress of this new reality.
