I recently wrote about USCJ’s proposal to defund their college student program, KOACH. As typical for USCJ, this plan was made without much public discussion.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is the Conservative movement’s main organization for supporting Conservative Jewish communities in North America. USCJ supports Conservative communities on
The NY Times recently published an article about an unusual public apology by Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a prominent psychiatrist. In the early 1970’s, Dr.
In past posts, I’ve briefly mentioned the efforts of several families and organizations in my community to create a program for elementary school students that
The Forward just published Conservatives Grapple With Gay Wedding Rite. In an effort to create a typical news article conflict, it misses the bigger picture.
I posted about the Jewish Futures Competition a few weeks ago. It asks how Jewish life, living and learning will change as we move to
Since I wrote a rather critical post about one of Leonard Saxe’s studies, I wanted to positively highlight a recent piece of his: The Jews
I’m going to try something a bit new here and take a close look at the data analyses from a single study. I chose this particular study, The Impact and Lessons of Taglit‐Birthright Israel by Saxe et al, because someone asked my opinion about it and I thought it did some things very well. I think the data supports some interesting findings, although it includes some all-to-common misinterpretations of statistical results.
The Jewish Futures conference is holding it’s second annual competition. The basic idea is you create a 4-minute YouTube video or written document that addresses their topic of the year. This year, that topic is: “The Jewish Prosumer: The Move from Consumer to Producer in Jewish Life and Learning.” They want people to address, “How will Jewish life, living and learning change as we move to a society in which individuals are not only consumers of information and culture, but also producers of their own and others’ experiences?”
It seems obvious to say we can’t address Jewish education challenges with simple solutions, but the stream of such claims appearing in major Jewish publications makes me think it’s not as obvious as it should be. We need to find ways to bring more children into formal Jewish education, starting at young ages. We need to work together to improve the quality of Jewish education for children in all forms of educational programs. We need to innovate, document, and evaluate new models of Jewish education to increase the quality and content of Jewish education for children inside and outside day schools.
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