A trio of Jewish educators huddled around a computer one morning this past summer, Googling images of Star Wars characters and pasting them into iMovie, Apple’s user-friendly filmmaking program.
“Do we want Young Luke?” Dayna Gershon asked her fellow filmmakers, all of them students in the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Executive M.A. Program in Jewish Education, who were spending the day learning at the foot of Jewish educator-artist, animator, filmmaker and New York City public school teacher Hanan Harchol.
Within a couple of hours, Gershon and her colleagues were ready to debut their effort: a 2-minute film starring Han Solo, Rey, Princess Leia and Luke, and exploring the ideas behind Maimonides’ Ladder of Tzedakah.
“This makes everything so much more alive,” said Gershon, who directs formal and informal education at a religious school, as she marveled at her foray into text-based cinematography. “If it’s not relevant and doesn’t speak to [our students] individually, it’s not going to leave the room. What we want to figure out is, ‘How do we leave the room with them?’”
Harchol’s workshop was one of the first fruits of an effort by Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, the National Director of the School of Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in Los Angeles, to incorporate the arts — and creativity, more broadly — into HUC’s collection of graduate programs.
“The goal is for the arts to cease to be a side show in Jewish education,” Stern said. “We want them to be more integrated into the whole world of teaching and learning, and have a more central presence in the enterprise of Jewish education.”
“Often arts are brought in as entertainment, or they’re brought in as an experimental component, but they’re on the sidelines of the curriculum, they’re on the sidelines of the conferences. They’re perceived as something lighter, when in fact what they offer is much deeper, because of the variety of meaning that they unlock.”
Particularly in the world of traditional Hebrew schools, Stern said, there is “a real thirst for new pedagogy, for new models of engagement, for new methods of learning.”
“We are utilizing the arts to stretch people, to give them opportunities for deeper reflection, to learn to take risks," Stern continued. "I want the graduates of all of our programs to be able to introduce their learners to a multi-vocal, multi-lingual Jewish experience, where they can learn to navigate their values not just with books and words.”
Stern’s effort began last year with the executive M.A. program, a two and a half-year course designed for mid-career educators who have at least five years of experience in Jewish educational leadership, and who want to take their work and communities to the next level.
Dr. Lesley Litman, who directs the executive M.A. program, said the infusion of meaningful arts programming made perfect sense.
“You don’t study a text and then go ‘do some art;’ it’s through the actual creative process that you come to understand the text more deeply,” Litman said. “What we really want to do is open up important life questions, and use Jewish texts and Jewish perspectives to show that Judaism is a way that we can walk through our world.”
Harchol, who is also a professional classical guitarist and currently at work on a live-action feature film about his experiences teaching high school, is well-known among Jewish educators for creating an animated series, “Jewish Food For Thought”(supported by The Covenant Foundation). The series explores themes such as envy, faith and chesed (kindness), through fictionalized conversations between sketched-out versions of himself (Harchol was born in Israel and moved to the United States when he was two) and his parents, who raised Hanan as a non-observant Jew but retained the religious values and worldview with which they had been raised.
Harchol watched eagerly as the executive M.A. students pored through Sefaria deciding which texts to base their films on, debated plot lines and muddled through the new technology.
“You don’t want to have a story that has one right answer,” he reminded them. “It should be something where at the end, the viewer is left feeling torn. When people are continuing to think about that argument, that’s Torah study.”
“When the final videos were shown, even the newly minted filmmakers seemed surprised by what they had created.
“I never expected there would be something this well-produced,” Harchol exclaimed of a film in which expertly sketched stick figures (one of the educators, it turned out, was a talented artist) debated the significance of having, and violating, boundaries.
“This could lead to a wonderful discussion,” Harchol enthused. “This leaves me wanting to engage in a Talmudic discussion.”
The educators left the workshop intrigued by the prospect of bringing iMovie back home. “When we teach, we’re always trying to think about ways to bring the text into today,” said Stacy Shapiro, who coordinates youth programming at a Westchester County temple. “This makes it so relatable on so many levels.”
There was also some hesitation; one educator acknowledged the “anxiety producing” nature of navigating new technology, and the implementation challenges she expected to face. “My concern is, ‘Who’s going to do it?’” she wondered.
Stern said she fully understands that there will be a certain amount of trepidation as graduate students tread into territory that may feel uncomfortable now, even if it was second nature earlier in their lives. She saw this first-hand in September, when School of Education faculty and administrators gathered for a workshop with the paper-cutting artist Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik, as part of a two-day national faculty retreat.
“For some it’s a stretch outside their comfort zone, but we are practicing what we preach,” Stern said. “Even our veteran faculty are rolling up their sleeves and being creative together, as a way to change the culture of what graduate school looks and feels like.”
As part of the workshop with Brynjegard-Bialik, leading faculty members and administrators sat around folding tables strewn with Exacto knives, watercolor paper and comic book pages, producing papercuts exploring Jewish themes of change and new beginnings.
It was a powerful way to prepare for two days of visioning the future of Jewish education, and how creativity might play a role.
“It was a way for everyone to connect where they were in that moment to where we want to go with the institution,” Stern said. “The range of metaphors was really interesting… The arts can provide additional languages when words fail us.”
Whether you’re part of a “Tribe,” awash in the educational waters of “Mayim,”or have opted to trade in the one-size fits all religious school model for a forward-looking “JQuest”-- there are many innovative ways to obtain a synagogue-based Jewish education.
To wit: Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, CA was looking for a change to its religious school system, typical of many in that it mirrored public school in structure and format.
So, in 2009, Director of Education Rabbi Nicki Greninger—a 2012 Covenant Foundation Pomegranate Prize Award recipient—introduced an interdisciplinary track incorporating music, video and technology in exploring Judaism. Lo and behold, class enrollment doubled, and with a waitlist. In the years since, more tracks focusing on nature, art, culture, building and storytelling have increased enrollment to the extent that they eventually replaced the classroom system at Temple Isaiah entirely. The new program there is called JQuest. Jewish education, according to the JQuest website, “works best when it doesn’t look like, sound like or feel like school.”
And Greninger notes that it’s not just Temple Isaiah alone; many congregations have been shifting to change the religious school model.
On the east coast, at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, religious school students in grade 3-5 are divided into “Tribes” (also the name of the program), led by high school students (tribal chiefs) and teachers (tribal elders) to build a subculture of cohesion around Jewish thought and philosophy.
“We had a strong priority for relationship building,” said Rachel Brumberg, Assistant Director of Lifelong Learning. “And we also had this voluntary religious school program for our high school students.”
Kaiserman added that that their goal was for students to understand that Jewish learning doesn’t conclude at the age of 13. “We worked to put our third, fourth and fifth graders in conversations with people five or ten or even forty years older,” he said. “We believe that the big questions you have as a 10-year-old are often the same questions you’ll have as a 50-year-old.”
In a ritual that was drawn straight from the film Harry Potter, the children each choose their tribe drawing from a hat, which deems them either Estherites, Joshuahites, Noahites or Sarahites. Before the sorting takes place, teen tribal chiefs put on a skit or a presentation for the younger children, to introduce their tribal values. Each tribe even has its own chant.
“Ritual aspects help develop a subculture within the Emanu-El community,” Kaiserman said.
Back across the map, at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA, fourth through sixth-graders learn as part of one of three “Academies.”
Keri Loventhal, Director of Beth Shalom’s Etz Chaim Learning Center started the school’s Performing Arts Academy four years ago. She has since added a Technology Academy and a Fine Arts Academy. The academies were created to make religious school more competitive with students’ extra-curricular activities. Said Loventhal, “We felt that if we could connect their current activity interests to Jewish education, they could connect those skills to Jewish learning.”
The Performing Arts Academy brings in area artists to work with students in exploring stories from the Torah and Talmud through choreography, theater, script writing and stage production. Studies emphasize the nature of the characters, the culture and historical context of the story, and dramatic themes such as relationships, family, leadership, loss and hope. Technology Academy students work with professionals to use iPads to design web sites, blog and build apps, all focused on Jewish holidays. Students also learned to build a platform for an online game focusing on Jewish heroes.
“Part of being an educator is to look at education in a different way,” Loventhal said. “We have to adapt education and grow so we can help students be successful in Jewish learning.”
Over in Michigan, Rabbi Arianna Gordon, Director of Lifelong Learning at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, uses an elective model at its religious school.
Class themes are similar to those offered in public schools, but “taught with strong Jewish connections,” she said. An example is the school’s Healthy Relationships elective, which covers areas such as relationships, bullying and other issues students face. Classes feature discussion of text-based primary sources and often include guest speakers. Other electives include politics and current events, an introductory Kabbalah class, creative arts, comparative Judaism and comparative religion.
And the educators at Temple Israel are also willing to take their show on the road. In response to transportation challenges some students had in attending religious school, Temple Israel sent teachers to an area public school armed with bagels and lesson plans.
”It was remarkably successful,” said Rabbi Gordon. “The kids were already in a space where they were in ‘learning mode.’ And they were there with their friends. We’re looking to expand it.”
At another Michigan synagogue—Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield—Allison Gutman, Director of Youth and Family Learning, describes how every year the students come together to build the shul’s sukkah. “It is,” she says, “one of the best examples of how Shaarey Zedek students take what they learn from Halacha and bring it to life.”
While students in lower grades build miniature sukkot, in the days leading up to the holiday the fifth-graders build a fully-functional, halachic sukkah that doubles as a walk-through museum displaying the community values and halacha that were followed in its construction. Gutman brings in guest experts including an interior designer and an architect to guide the students’ construction and decoration of the structure.
Back on the east coast, Stephanie Tankel, Director of Religious Education at Washington Hebrew Congregation, trusts that social interactions are central to positive experiences in Jewish education. She shares examples of fun and innovative social events that have enriched students’ lives at her school, and led the 900-strong pre-k through 12th grade student body to a post-b’nai mitzvah retention rate of over 50 percent. For example, fourth-graders participate in a “Super Sloppy, Messy Day,” using shaving cream and other messy materials in games teaching Hebrew language, and fifth graders have a Shabbaton at the temple that Tankel says many will remember for the rest of their lives. The experience includes a scavenger hunt teaching Tanach verses, Hebrew language and the history of Washington Hebrew.
WHC’s success is also demonstrated by Mitkadem, its self-paced online Hebrew prayer program, developed by the Union for Reform Judaism press and now published by Behrman House. Children progress at their own paces, with temple clergy and educators signing off and providing rewards when units are completed.
“We have a culture in our school that encourages students to self-advocate and celebrate their own ability and progress,” said Tankel. “Educators have relationships with them that are so much more than just saying hello. Our kids know us. We know them. When you give praise that’s rooted in something substantive, it’s so much more meaningful: I’ve seen you make progress. I’ve seen you read. It’s safe to be who you are.”
Not far away, at Chizuk Amuno Congregation in Pikesville, MD, the “secret ingredient” for its seventh grade b’nai mitzvot students is also a geographic local change.
“We built a curriculum around three trips,” said Rabbi Stuart Seltzer, Director of Congregational Education and 2009 recipient of the Covenant award. “The trips motivate the kids to want to learn more. Frontal teaching gets a bad rap. But the trips are important for the amount of hours spent in the classroom. They’re the carrot at the end.”
The field trips are scattered throughout the school year, beginning with a visit to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, which includes a Jewish-history based scavenger hunt. The second field trip is to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of a unit on the Holocaust, which emphasizes the differences between bystanders and “upstanders,” people who act towards social justice. The third trip is a tour of New York’s Lower East Side, following a unit on Jewish immigration to America in which students trace their own family histories and interview older relatives.
The field trip approach was developed out of a concern about the goals of religious education in the seventh grade, which Seltzer explained should be more than just completing bnei mitzvah study.” We wanted to make it more about their personal Jewish stories and their connections to Judaism,” he said. “The field trip,” he added, “is the way we put it all together. “
For many synagogues, the religious school model is continually evolving, as Rabbi Darren Levine asserts, one could even think of their school as a continual “work in progress.”
According to Levine, Tamid’s school departs from a “broken Hebrew school model.”
“I wanted us to think about education differently,” he said.
By using Tamid Online, an E-learning Judaica curriculum that blends on-site school with at-home learning and including Jewish holidays, beliefs and culture, ethics and values, Israel, prayer and Hebrew language, the Tamid curriculum, “is asynchronistic,” Levine explained. “You can click on a link and start your learning. I wanted it to be free and accessible to anyone anywhere for Hebrew school learning.” There is no need for a teacher or guide; students move through the learning at their own paces.
Tamid does offer synchronistic classroom learning as well. “The way Tamid functions is with sync and async working simultaneously,” says Levine.
Together with the Tamid Director of Education Christina Broussard, Levine built the online lessons by curating information from existing web content. “Anything anyone needs is already out there,” he said. “[This model] allows us to keep our costs low,” he added. “We built our curriculum based on how we believed children could learn from a screen or a handheld device. There are no workbooks, no worksheets. Everything is on the screen. At the end of the lesson there are questions and answers about what they have watched. The pedagogy gets immediate reinforcement.”
Immediacy, flexibility, responsiveness to student interest and taking students outside the four walls of the synagogue building are common denominators among the goals of synagogue educators looking to revitalize supplementary education. And at Temple Beth Shalom of Needham, MA, all of those goals are evident in their K-5 curriculum, called “Mayim.” At TBS, educators are called “Learning Guides.” The school employs an adapted approach to project-based learning, according to Rachel Happel, the congregation’s Director of K-12 Learning. Children come to school once a week, but the school is open six days a week, giving families flexibility. The learning guides are full-time educators who teach each day and have 10 hours a week of professional development, preparation and community development fostering relationships between the children.
“If you walk into our classes,” Happel said, “it looks like a home living room environment. There are no chalkboards and desks and chairs. We have a couch area and a rug. It’s meant to be homey.”
Cathy Weisman Topal has been a visual arts educator at the preschool, elementary, middle school and college levels for over 40 years. She had a long career as a studio art teacher at the Center for Early Childhood Education at the Smith College Campus School in Northampton, Massachusetts and as a lecturer in Visual Arts Education in the Department of Education and Child Study at Smith College. She is also the author of six books that have grown from her explorations and exchanges with children, classroom teachers and in-service and pre-service teachers across the country.
Cathy’s grandson, Jacob, is a student in Covenant Award recipient Amy Meltzer’s Kindergarten classroom at the Lander-Grinspoon Academy in Northampton. In a very special conversation, Cathy and Amy discuss how children learn, how we can set up classrooms to best serve our youngest students, the value of “loose parts” and more.
AMY: Tell us about how young children learn.
CATHY: In watching children in early childhood settings, and now having the luxury of being a grandparent –which truly compels me to be fully present - I am convinced that young children learn through their explorations--touching, smelling, looking, listening, moving things, testing how things work; using all their senses as well as their intelligence.
My 4 _ year old grandson was outside my house the other day. He picked up a piece of birch bark from the ground. After holding this object carefully and really studying it for a while he said, “It's from a tree.” Shortly after turning the bark over and around, he said, “It’s very colorful.” As he unrolled the bark and studied this new section, he said, “But not here.” His words caught me by surprise and made me step back and wonder too. How much we take for granted!
Watching my grandchildren, I notice that they might not talk for long stretches, but they are listening in their own way. It may not seem as if they are paying attention, but they are! Consequently, as parents, teachers and caregivers, we have to also listen with all of our senses in a deeper, empathetic way to really “hear,” and respond. By recording quotes and observations and then revisiting them with the child, we connect sensations and discoveries with language and understanding. We co-construct knowledge.
AM: Do children learn differently from adults? If so, how?
CT: After teaching groups of many different ages and stages, and often pondering that question, I don’t think it is all that different. As I have grown, over time, to be a better listener and documenter, I have come to see that often children’s ideas and explanations are much more thoughtful and sophisticated than we might assume. But we don’t hear those explanations if we are not paying attention and allowing time and space.
AM: How do you think this understanding impacts the choices we make when we are setting up learning opportunities?
CT: In working with young children I keep stepping back to look for ways to put the emphasis on wondering about and exploring materials, tools, processes, strategies and approaches. What is this material? How can we describe it? Let’s make a list of descriptive adjectives. What actions can we do to change it? Let’s make a list of verbs. Let’s play with testing out some of our ideas - the actions on our list. How could we hold a paintbrush, scissors, printing stamp, or crayon? Let’s experiment with different ways. How can we move this particular tool to make it work better? From where in our bodies (what muscles, joints, etc…) can we initiate movement? What parts of the body are we activating?
Projects grow from explorations and discoveries. All work with materials is physical and involves movement and the body. I always offer a few techniques to try out first as a way to get the experimentation going. After all, getting started is the toughest part. And then, stepping back from experiments to look as a group and to share and discuss discoveries is critical! That is when children see and realize their strengths as well as the strengths of their classmates.
AM: When we understand how children learn, how does that impact the choices we make in setting up classrooms and learning opportunities?
CT: When working on Beautiful Stuff: Learning with Found Materials, we did everything in the classroom of four and five year olds. We did not have a separate art studio.
Immediately we noticed that children just wanted to touch and wonder about individual objects. We found that we had to figure out how to allow time for them to do that without having to make anything. That was a huge learning moment for me. Now, I allow time for wondering, exploring, and experimenting with every material, tool, or process that I offer.
Sorting and organizing also became a very powerful way to explore, to get to know and to enjoy materials without having to make anything. Creating order is an aesthetic and satisfying experience. That was another important finding from Beautiful Stuff.
There are always a lot of preparations to make in teaching with materials, and especially with young children. But, we should always ask, “Would this work be better for the children to do? How could we set it up so that it becomes a learning experience for the children?”
AM: How do you get teachers to feel more comfortable with materials?
CT: Teachers need time to explore with open-ended materials! I’ve spent my whole career teaching--more than 40s years--and I still have to experiment and play with materials before I teach.
I don’t think preparation for teachers today includes much experience with studio materials. This is unfortunate; so many of the goals for learning grow out of exploring materials, tools, processes and approaches to communicating. I think teachers might not realize that active learning--with hands and minds--has the same importance as play in the life of children. And, by the way, teachers also need on-going support to grow and to try out new ways of working.
AM: How does the Reggio Emilia method inspire your teaching?
CT: When I went to [visit a Reggio Emilia school in Italy] for the first time it was truly overwhelming. The classrooms were so beautiful--not in a fancy or expensive way, but in how they were arranged and organized. I did not see plastic toys in red yellow and blue. I did not see posters with the letter A and a picture of an apple. I did not see cartoon characters on the wall. I did not see primary and contrasting colors everywhere. Everything was soft, neutral colors. The theory is that by using neutral colors in the classroom space, you allow the “color” of the children and their work to stand out.
AM: Not every center can send their teachers to Reggio. How can teachers try this approach even without visiting?
CT: Teachers need to play with materials and processes, to explore, experiment and acquaint themselves with materials. It is also important for teachers to work together, to build relationships with and through the materials, to reflect on their experiences and think about how they could apply what they’ve experienced, in their own settings.
AM: What do you wish every early childhood teacher knew?
CT: I wish they all knew how much more rewarding, satisfying and just plain fun teaching could be if they let explorations with open-ended materials, tools and processes guide them, rather than cutesy projects like snow people made with cotton balls that all look alike. I wish they realized that most of the standards, benchmarks, and goals of teaching could be met simply by observing and listening to children as they explore and problem-solve, recording significant words, and reflecting with the children.
I suggest using the lessons in Explorations in Art: Kindergarten as a way for teachers to explore together.
AM: This year, your grandchildren were enrolled in Jewish preschool and kindergarten. Can you talk a little bit about where your approach might fit in, in a Jewish space?
CT: Amy, your classroom offers an excellent example. You were not always so comfortable with materials. You have used and built upon the units in Explorations in Art: Kindergarten, and Beautiful Stuff, Learning with Found Materials and used them to make important concepts in Jewish education and teachings from the Torah come alive. For example, I loved how you used watercolor explorations to express the feeling of Shabbat. You definitely enriched the experience by adding this emotional aspect.
Another fantastic idea you implemented was making beautiful stuff--or loose parts--available for children to tell the story of creation. Breaking the story down so that the children could really think about each facet added complexity. Children also worked in pairs, exchanging ideas and solutions-- adding another level of cooperation.
Sewing and decorating challah and matzah covers was another beautiful way to use new materials, tools and skills to further inspire the children. Bringing in a parent to work with the children on dying yarn and weaving certainly made the story of Joseph much more meaningful. It’s not easy, but making something real, overcoming problems, and getting good at the skills of sewing and weaving requires focus and attention. The fiber arts always seem to engage unexpected children--especially boys!
By using studio materials, tools and processes in teaching, you have made Torah come alive for your students, but also, you are deepening the way your students understand and apply these stories and lessons. And you are helping children turn these stories into memorable experiences.
“In celebrating Jewish education,” Dr. Rebecca Schorsch offers, “we remind ourselves of the contribution of Jewish education in making us whole.” Dr. Schorsch is Director of Jewish Studies at the Chicagoland Jewish High School in Deerfield, IL, and was a recipient of a Covenant Award in 2014.
In this video, Beth Huppin, an educator at Congregation Beth Shalom in Seattle, Washington, talks about the shared language that develops when she teaches texts to adults. She also muses on the profound act of bringing student and text together. “All the clutter, sadness, happiness…the stuff of life, goes away, and the real stuff comes out,” she says.” This video offers a glimpse into one of her adult education classes, where students look at psalms, “our words to God,” and study in chevruta. “They know stuff that I don’t know,” Huppin says, “and together, we come up with something good.”
Amy Skopp Cooper is the National Associate Director of the Ramah Camping Movement and the Director of Camp Ramah in Nyack, NY, a day camp for kids aged 5-13. Ramah in Nyack has over 700 campers and a staff of more than 400 people. “It’s like being the mayor of a town,” Skopp Cooper says. This video gives viewers a window into a day in Amy’s life as camp director, as she tackles a snag in the well-oiled workings of camp life. Faced with record-breaking temperatures one summer, Amy and her staff rally to take over 700 campers off-site and, at the last minute, find multiple air-conditioned spaces for them to spend a camp day. “I guess the way I like to look at camp,” she says, “is that our first answer has to always be yes. In almost every situation, you can figure out a solution.”
“What makes a teacher great is a love of learning and a love for humanity. Everything else can be taught,” says Gitta Jaroslawicz-Neufeld, Director of Education at the Allegra Franco School of Educational Leadership in Brooklyn, NY. “I can teach you how to transmit a text, how to manage a classroom—if you love what you’re doing, it’s a piece of cake,” she says. In this video, viewers watch as Gitta mentors a young Judaic Studies teacher, inside her own classroom as well as at Allegra Franco. She also talks about how important it is for teachers to be intellectually curious, and focus not just on transmitting answers to students, but also, on changing students’ lives.
In this podcast episode of Rak Rega, Rivy Poupko Kletenik, a 2002 Covenant Award recipient and the Head of School at Seattle Hebrew Academy, discusses the experience of being selected by Brandeis University for the Teacher Learning Project, to develop a shared vision of what “good Jewish education” looks like, and how to help new teachers thrive. “In the first year,” Rivy describes, “all of the teachers in our school leaned in together, struggling, thinking…arguing, about what good teaching looks like, until everyone came to a shared understanding.” That shared understanding, as Rivy explains, had to do with creating a positive Jewish environment in the classroom. “We are a lively beit midrash,” she adds. “We are teachers thinking about subject matter, thinking about practice, having lively conversations about Torah, education and what is best for our students.”
In this episode of Rak Rega, Rivy Poupko Kletenik talks about her vision for an integrated educational Jewish Day School experience, where Jewish American students studying in a dual curricular environment would have an “integrated persona.” She asks if it’s possible to dream that a Kindergarten teacher could one day teach both Judaic Studies and General Studies, in the same classroom, and she muses on what it might be like if a high school Judaic students teacher drew on knowledge of language and narrative when looking at passages from the Torah. What if this master educator also considered poetry and Shakespeare at the same time? She wonders. “Can it happen?”
In this podcast episode, Rivy Poupko Kletenik discusses Project Shalom, a Positive Based Incentive System program. “The core issues that we want in a school of excellence is teachers and all faculty and staff who feel deeply invested in the school and feel respected themselves,” she says, as she explains the impetus for this project. She also addresses the struggle of what it means to take a very lofty ideal like kavod hatalmid, and bring it down to the level of day-to-day minutia of school life: “what does kavod hatalmid look like as we wait in line at recess, or in gym, or in the computer lab? How do we take our deep belief and make it into a hands-on reality for every child and family in our school?” Ultimately, she offers, it’s “patience and time” that foster the meaningful changes within a school community.
How do we take the stories of women’s lives and turn them into a living museum?
How do we chronicle our own family stories?
How do we motivate a young audience into an historic journey?
How do we share it?
For the past 11 years, Barbara Rosenblit, a 2004 Covenant Award recipient, JWA board member, Humanities and Jewish Studies Teacher and Director of Mentoring at The Weber School in Atlanta, has been considering these questions.
And the answers have come in many different forms--dresses, purses, shadow boxes, sculptural books, lamps, vintage hats, gloves and pearls, embroidery hoops and place settings. These creations are all the work of juniors and seniors at Weber who have taken Rosenblit’s course “Addressing Women's Lives,” which she teaches together with Weber faculty member and conceptual artist Sheila Miller. In this interdisciplinary course, students engage in a year of studying the history of Jewish women in America, identify and interview a Jewish woman 75 years or older, and then create a mixed-media work that reflects something they have learned about each woman’s life. Rosenblit uses “In Our Own Voices: A Guide to Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women,” a curriculum developed by the Jewish Women’s Archive, to train the students in taking an oral history. At the end of the course each year, the students prepare to display their work in a public exhibition housed within the Weber School’s art gallery.
“In some ways, this course has changed completely and also not at all,” says Rosenblit, reflecting on the last 11 years. “Of course, the visualization changes every year—the whole first floor of our school is pretty much a gallery of these projects in their various incarnations,” she says. “But the purpose of all of this remains the same—to highlight the lives of women.”
“It’s like pentimento,” Rosenblit explains, invoking an Italian word that describes the process in art by which a composition shows the drawing or painting that has happened underneath it—so that when one observes the art, there are traces of the versions that came before. “Over time, as painters reuse canvas, white-washing over their previous work, the first painting bleeds through and shows up in their new work in curious ways, casting an image or shadow from the old painting. We feel that’s kind of how the lives of women are expressed through the lives of all of us, and through our students. The influence their lives have had on us sort of comes up, or emerges, over time.”
This year, Rosenblit and her students will consider the influence of famous Jewish women in history, as well, when they return to “A Place at the Table,” an homage to artist and feminist Judy Chicago’s famous installation The Dinner Party. Originally produced by Weber students many years ago, for 2015, the installation has a twist: students will design both a goblet and a plate. The goblet will honor a woman who has been interviewed by a student, and the plate will honor a Jewish woman in history whose story complements that of the interview subject. One of Rosenblit’s students has decided to create a plate in honor of Bel Kaufman, the famed granddaughter of Sholom Aleichem and a teacher and author best known for writing Up the Down Staircase, a novel about the realities of teaching in New York City public schools in the 1960’s. He chose Kaufman, who passed away last summer, because his grandmother had also been a public school teacher in New York.
On the outside, it might seem obvious why these stories should be told, but Rosenblit confides that year after year, those women who are interviewed don’t feel worthy of the attention. “The interviewees always think they are incredibly uninteresting people, that they are quiet women who have lived lives that are very ordinary,” Rosenblit shares. “But as their stories begin to emerge, and they reflect on—in some cases—almost a century of living, the backdrop of their lives broadens and they offer to these students a tunnel back into time that they would never have imagined they could share.”
For the students, there is surprise as well. “I’ll be honest,” Rosenblit says. “At the beginning of these interviews, the kids are not particularly excited. They’re not sure they’ll find their interview subjects interesting to talk to or be around…but when we tell them to turn off all technology and just listen…what happens is so cool. Every year, they wind up saying, ‘you know what? I had no idea…’ and then they begin adapting the lives of these women into their own sense of excitement, and into their artistic expressions.”
It’s that notion of “I had no idea…” that really motivates Rosenblit in her work. In her acceptance speech for a Covenant award in 2004, she said, “I’ve learned that it’s not important what I know, but what is important is knowing what my students know, and how to meet them where they are.” This imperative—that as educators, we must first determine where our students are coming from—combined with the knowledge that to help them succeed they must understand those who came before them, has formed the foundation upon which the Addressing Women’s Lives curriculum is built.
As Rosenblit continues to develop and rethink her work, she’s considered research from the social sciences to support the necessity of courses like hers, and in particular, research that’s being done at the MARIAL center at Emory University. There, Dr. Marshall Duke and others are studying ways to develop resilience in young people. We know that resilience is a predictor of success—as Rosenblit puts it: “anyone who has done anything worthwhile has failed many times along the way.” What Duke and others have learned, through their research, is that one way to build resilience is to teach the family narrative.
A student who is taught to develop their “intergenerational self[1],” a sense of self through historical time and in relation to family members, might also have a better chance of weathering the tides of their own experiences, research says. Sharing stories of triumph and tragedy gives kids a “psychological map” upon which they may begin to lay out their experiences and hopefully, develop a more resilient state of mind.
And Jewish teachings concur. In the Passover seder we are instructed to see ourselves as if we were slaves leaving Egypt. Abraham Joshua Heschel (noted in Dr. Duke’s work as well), urges Jews to locate themselves within the chronology of Jewish history, for these same reasons.
“Studying and learning from the details of a long life trajectory will teach you that lives have up and downs,” Rosenblit asserts, “students learn that there were times that were hard, and times that were great, and we struggled and we got through it,” says. “It doesn’t matter what the trajectory is, even a downward spiraling life story shows resilience because there is a person telling that story, which means, despite the struggling, they are still here.”
[1] Marshall Duke, Robyn Fivush and Jennifer Bohanek, MARIAL Center, Emory University.
In this podcast, 2004 Covenant Award recipient and Jewish Studies teacher Barbara Ellison Rosenblit discusses her reinterpretation of a midrash based on Genesis 1:16. Rosenblit explains that verse 1:16 is puzzling, as suddenly, of the two great lights that God has created—the sun and the moon—one, the moon, is abruptly demoted to a small light. Many sources have interpreted this passage through the lens of gender, assigning “male” to the sun and “female” to the moon and ultimately creating a dichotomy by which this tale is understood as a struggle for power, one gender pitted against the other. Rosenblit rejects this interpretation and offers her own—in which she “reinterprets greatness” and turns a lens on the “burdens of power” in a poetic and poignant midrash of her own.
By Adina Kay-Gross, for The Covenant Foundation
Rabbi Elana Kanter is the Director of the Jewish Women’s Learning Center in Pheonix, Arizona and a 1998 Covenant Award recipient. In this video, she offers “Two Minutes of Torah” and examines Masechet Chagigah 3a, from the Babylonian Talmud, where Rabbi Yehoshua asks his students what they learned that day and finds them apathetic in response. “You can’t have a school without new learning,” he urges his students. Then, upon the revelation that they have indeed learned something new at the feet of Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Yehoshua reprimands them for hiding a “pearl of wisdom” from him. Rabbi Kanter understands this passage as Yehoshua’s way of teaching his students that “there is no house of study without new learning,” and “the art of learning is not just to learn from one person and no one else, but rather, to learn from every person and every situation one encounters.”
Rabbi Elana Kanter is the Director of the Jewish Women’s Learning Center in Pheonix, Arizona and a 1998 Covenant Award recipient. In this video, she offers “Two Minutes of Torah” and examines Masechet Chagigah 3a, from the Babylonian Talmud, where Rabbi Yehoshua asks his students what they learned that day and finds them apathetic in response. “You can’t have a school without new learning,” he urges his students. Then, upon the revelation that they have indeed learned something new at the feet of Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Yehoshua reprimands them for hiding a “pearl of wisdom” from him. Rabbi Kanter understands this passage as Yehoshua’s way of teaching his students that “there is no house of study without new learning,” and “the art of learning is not just to learn from one person and no one else, but rather, to learn from every person and every situation one encounters.”