The Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning, which operates in the greater Washington, DC community, is launching an imaginative new initiative to broaden the scope of synagogue-based education by providing students in congregational programs with opportunities to learn as well at JCCs, camps, and even day schools.  You can read a story from The Forward about the initiative here.

 

Synagogues remain a vital…

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Know any cutting edge innovators? Entrepreneurs who are out to change the Jewish world? 



PresenTense is looking for the best and the brightest to join its fifth Global Summer Institute in Jerusalem. We're specifically… Continue

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The idea of the 'social sermon,' a concept pioneered by Darim Online that encourages rabbis to involve congregants in learning with them and helping to develop their weekly sermons by using Twitter or Facebook, seems to be gaining visibility.  The idea also seems to have applicability well beyond the context of the synagogue sermon.  How about using it with teens or to make learning for busy young adults more practical?

 

Check out the story from the Covenant Foundation, which…

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Gail Naron Chalew has a cover story in this week's Baltimore Jewish Times that describes some of the efforts underway to create alternatives to the traditional "Hebrew school."

 

There are a large number of such endeavors today -- many more than the story was able to cite -- involving both synagogues and other settings.  In fact, many…

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Kathleen Cushman has published a challenging and encouraging book, Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery (Jossey-Bass, 2010) about how to engage and inspire students to undertake serious learning.  You can read a review of what she found in her…

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Aharon Horwitz, from PresenTense, has an articulate blog post about the challenges of attracting and retaining young adults in advance of a conference in Detroit on that topic. He summarizes his recommendations as follows:

1. Let's not focus on a specific solution, but rather on building a framework for solution creation and a marketplace for good…

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Adam Gaynor and Rabbi Brent Spodek have written an interesting piece in eJewishPhilanthropy on what makes Jewish service learning programs both ethically sound and Jewish. They write (in part):

...[S]ervice-learning experiences offer unparalleled opportunities for hands-on work, meaningful engagement with the complexities of the Jewish tradition, learning from peers,…

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Everyone knows George Santayana's warning that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But, what exactly we're supposed to learn from history is not always so clear. For example, what is the lesson of the Chanukah story? It's quite likely that the author of the Book of Maccabees had one thing in mind, the Talmudic rabbis quite another. For some today, the lesson of Chanukah is the need to resist tyranny; for others, it's about fighting assimilation. And, of course, we know… Continue

If you missed the Jewish Futures Conference in New Orleans (or were there but want to revisit what you saw and heard), the full set of videos from the Conference are now on line. Go to the Jewish Futures Conference website to view the videos from Laurie Karr, Patrick Aleph and Michael Sabani, Ori Brafman, Charlie Schwartz and Russel Neiss, Clare Burson, and others.

The JEWISH EDUCATION CHANGE NETWORK is powered by the people who are making positive change happen in Jewish education today. The vision and values we hold for Jewish education will shape tomorrow’s reality. In an effort to stimulate conversation about that vision and those values, we’ve drafted the following statement about what we believe, what we seek to do, and how we can do it. But, this statement is just a first draft. …

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The Jewish Futures Conference at the GA in New Orleans has provoked a number of interesting reflections online. You might want to check out...

• David Breakstone's "glimpse of the future" in The Jerusalem Post;

• Shmuly Yanklowitz's questions about…

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