A class of preschoolers is enraptured by an immersive retelling of the Passover story through song and interactive props, such as finger puppets of feet walking across a table of sand. Campers sitting around a table begin a project by selecting one of the materials before them and explaining why it represents them, before using the paints and brushes and delicate paper and scraps of colorful fabric to make beautiful art. High school students study one of August Wilson’s plays with actors who have performed it and discuss the lessons of the American Black experience for a Jewish day school. Audience members grapple with antisemitism through a retelling of The Merchant of Venice that blends scenes from the original with representations of contemporary events. A class of Jewish education graduate students piece together broken pottery using the Japanese art of kintsugi and reflect on how their creations symbolize resilience and healing.

These scenes offer examples of how the growing use of the arts and creativity in Jewish learning settings has enriched and expanded our understanding of the practice and goals of Jewish education. In various ways they guide participants in exploring fundamental questions about what it means to be human – How do I see myself? What communities do I belong to? What do I care about, fear, hope to change in the world? Over the past twenty years, assumptions about the goals and purpose of Jewish education have undergone a significant paradigm shift, which one Jewish leader characterized as a movement “from Continuity to Renaissance and Renewal to Jewish Thriving.” (Bryfman, 2018) In other words, for many within the field the core purpose of Jewish learning has moved from “keeping Jews Jewish” to helping learners live fuller human lives along multiple dimensions. As this new understanding has taken root, the arts have emerged alongside more traditional Jewish sources and experiences as uniquely effective facilitators of human flourishing, resilience, empowerment, and connection.

The Covenant Foundation anticipated this shift by championing and supporting the arts since its inception in 1991. Over the past fifteen years the Foundation has deepened both its commitment to the arts as well as its understanding of the profound role and impact of “artist-educators.” Research conducted in 2012 found that during Covenant’s first 20 years, about 15% of grants were awarded in the category of “arts and culture.” From 2013-2023, this category had grown to 40% of grants, becoming one of the largest segments of the Foundation’s giving. More recently the Covenant Foundation has also utilized its thought leadership platforms –speakers, convenings, and publications – to highlight innovative scholars and authors whose work has uncovered new understandings of how art and creativity can touch and transform everything from the neurons within our brains to the future of the Jewish people.

The 2022 annual gathering of Covenant grantees featured the acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, who shared the revolutionary insight she explores in her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. As Paul explained, the more we can tap into resources and experiences outside of our own minds, the more creative and expansive our thinking and problem-solving can become. This creativity emerges from “the feelings and movements of our bodies; the physical spaces in which we learn and work; and the other minds with which we interact—our classmates, colleagues, teachers, supervisors, friends… When we reach outside [the brain] with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships—as capacious as the whole wide world.” (Paul, 2021, Preface) Although Paul does not exhort us to “reach outside the brain” through the arts alone (thinking with our bodies includes walking or gesturing, thinking with relationships can happen through discussion or even sustained eye contact) some of the most powerful examples she cites are forms of artistic expression. While all bodily movement spurs our brains to creative thinking, moving in synchrony with other people – such as through dance – also deepens interpersonal understanding and connection: “[When] others are making motions similar to our own, we’re able to interpret and predict their actions more easily…We learn from them more readily. We communicate with them more fluidly. And we pursue shared goals with them effectively.” (Paul, 2021, p. 217) Whenever we “think with peers” through social interaction we awaken neural networks that expand our mental capacity, but this is particularly true when our communication with peers is in the form of storytelling. Paul explains that this is because the way our brains process narratives means that we don’t simply listen to stories, but mentally place ourselves within them:

When we listen to a story, our brains experience the action as if it were happening to us. Brain-scanning studies show that when we hear about characters emoting, the emotional areas of our brains become active; when we hear about characters moving vigorously, the motor regions of our brains are roused…Because stories by their nature feature human actors carrying out observable actions, our brains generate a mental movie of the events—an imaginary film strip that doesn’t unfurl when we’re reading a set of facts or instructions. Such simulations offer a kind of practice by proxy; the experiences we hear about in stories didn’t happen to us, but thanks to the mental dress rehearsal we conduct as we listen, we’ll be better prepared when they do. (Paul, 2021, p. 206)

In 2023, the Covenant Foundation hosted Susan Magsamen, co-author (with Ivy Ross) of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, a fascinating overview of the burgeoning field of “neuroarts.” Magsamen and Ross explain how the captivating nature of artistic experiences makes them uniquely powerful conduits for learning, literally encoding their meanings into us at the deepest neurological levels. Art creates “enriched environments” of sensory stimuli that stimulate neuroplasticity and saliency within our brains: “Synapses can fire together, meaning communicate, but it takes something special for them to wire together, meaning fuse into a connection… It’s in the chemical soup of neurochemicals that strong synaptic connections are made, and that reflects the “saliency” of an experience… Something that is salient is important to us either practically or emotionally; it’s what stands out.” (Magsamen and Ross, 2023, p. 25-26) The more stimulating and attention-capturing an environment is, the more likely our minds will identify our experience as something salient, worth engaging with and remembering. As Ross and Magsamen write, “Arts and aesthetic experiences emerge as major conduits for greater saliency. So, arts and aesthetics can quite literally rewire your brain. They are a secret sauce that helps build new synaptic connections.” (Magsamen and Ross, 2023, p. 27)

Having captured and directed our attention to what is most salient, art then helps us process and attach meaning to the experience. Within our brains is the Default Mode Network (DMN), an area of the prefrontal and parietal lobes that is most active when we are tuned inward to our reflections, memories, and daydreams. The DMN is thought to be the primary brain area that identifies patterns and assigns meaning to the stimuli our brains are constantly processing. Because of the high salience they generate, artistic and aesthetic experiences are particularly potent for activating our DMN, as the authors learned from cognitive neuroscientist Ed Vessel:  

“A big part of what happens when you interact with a piece of artwork, or when you find something aesthetically pleasing, is that there is an aha! moment where you feel like you’ve seen the world in a new way,” Ed explains. “Or, as a maker of art, you’ve been able to look at a problem in a new way because art has enabled you to express things that you couldn’t before,’ he says. This meaning-making is happening in your DMN. Your DMN, then, is the neural container that lets you process when a work of art, a piece of music or a certain landscape in nature matters to you.” (Magsamen and Ross, 2023, p. 36)

The DMN’s meaning-making – forged from sensory stimuli and shaped by the context of our broader cultures and past experiences – is what makes aesthetic experiences so transformative, even (or perhaps especially) when the emotions they produce are difficult ones:

The arts and aesthetics encompass far more than just beauty. They offer emotional connection to the full range of human experience. “The arts can be more than just sugar on the tongue,” Anjan [Chatterjee, founder of University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroaesthetics] says. “In art, when there’s something challenging, which can also be uncomfortable, this discomfort, if we’re willing to engage with it, offers the possibility of some change, some transformation. That can also be a powerful aesthetic experience.” The arts, in this way, become vehicles to connect with ideas and concepts that are difficult and uncomfortable otherwise. (Magsamen and Ross, 2023 p. 32-33)

Miriam Heller Stern, Director of the School of Education at Hebrew Union College and Scholar in Residence at The Covenant Foundation, has spent years exploring the role of creativity in Jewish life, including how creativity has helped the Jewish people navigate that which is “difficult and uncomfortable” on a communal scale. In “Jewish Creative Sensibilities: Framing a New Aspiration for Jewish Education,” Stern argued that educating for knowledge is no longer adequate in times of great uncertainty about the future. Rather, educators today must learn how to educate for a “creative society” in which “participants know how to develop, discern, and leverage knowledge for the good of humanity and the world… people are prepared to collaborate and generate inventive and useful responses to the challenges of the times, [and] …ready to confront the problems of their day with imagination, empathy, and courage.” (Stern, 2019, p. 429)

Stern develops this idea further in her forthcoming article, “Jewish Creativity: An Essential Aspiration for Jewish Education,” explaining that creativity must become a central goal of Jewish education because it has always been and will continue to be essential for Jewish survival: “Creativity has, through the centuries, been a Jewish strategy for adaptation, transformation, and reconstruction…Jews have responded creatively to social forces and generated new ideas and culture over millennia. Creative thinking can be employed for cultural preservation and forging new pathways forward in the face of obstacles and threats.” (Stern, 2024, p. 3) Lest educators or learners view a perceived lack of artistic talent as a barrier to being creative, Stern proposes an expansive definition that offers vast opportunities for Jewish creativity: the generation of “chidushim…novel ideas, original interpretations, new twists on old customs, ‘yes…and’ responses large and small. These ideas have sparked Jewish adaptation and survival throughout Jewish history.” (Stern, 2024, p.11) Stern identifies the four “facets of Jewish creativity” that spark chidushim: interpreting, curating, making, and collaborating. As she writes, while these generative processes happen frequently within typical “artistic” settings, they are by no means confined to them: “[These] habits of mind and practices…are regularly developed in art studios and music rooms, in galleries and film production, in laboratories, maker spaces and garages. And yet, they are not specific to any setting: they are transferable to classrooms, living rooms, kitchens, outdoor spaces, and workplaces.” (Stern, 2024, p.15) In a beautiful passage, Stern describes our engagement with creativity as a way for humans to echo the divine power that created and sustains our world, and to remind ourselves that divinity and order remain present even when chaos threatens to overtake it:

We might think of creativity as human beings’ process of renewing creation itself, in our world today. This can be thought of as the work of mind and heart in charting a path of sensemaking through senselessness, striving to bring unity to a fragmented and chaotic world. It is also the creative work of putting ideas into action, especially as a response to the brokenness humans themselves have caused. These human activities bring the Divine into the world by creating meaning and order, whether the subject matter is math or metaphysics. (Stern, 2024, p. 7)

These scholars’ insights help explain how engaging with the arts and creativity supports our development and flourishing, both as Jews and as humans. This paper will share multiple examples of how Jewish artist-educators are achieving this through their work, and in doing so reshaping and expanding the field of Jewish education. These portraits are drawn primarily from interviews conducted with the artists and program participants, with additional information from Covenant Foundation internal documents such as grant proposals and reports. Through creative acts including visual arts, storytelling, song, and theater, these artists and those they work with have been able to deepen their understanding of and connections to the things that shape our humanity: our inner selves, our Jewish communities past and present, and the broader society and culture within which we navigate our lives.

Knowing and Growing the Self

As Miriam Heller Stern noted in an interview, meaningful Jewish education should not be about building a particular kind of “Jewish identity,” but rather helping Jews understand their full identities as humans:

Jewish education is about strengthening Jewish identity – another way of expressing those outcomes in Jewish education is that it’s about developing metacognition and self-awareness as a Jewish person. And that means that I don't necessarily need to separate out what's Jewish about it, but just focus on: who am I? What do I care about? How am I navigating challenge, complexity, optimism, failure, love, loss, etc.?

Rabbi Adina Allen founded the Jewish Studio Project to help learners answer these critical questions through a unique synthesis of hevruta (paired study of Jewish texts), creative art-making, and reflective “witness writing” to surface insights and emotions leading to self-discovery. In a personal essay shared with The Covenant Foundation, she described her initial inspiration for and experience with bringing these two seemingly disparate methodologies together to create a powerful resource for learning and introspection:

I grew up in the studio. As a child, paintbrush and pen were given to me as tools for self-reflection and spiritual connection. I was taught that creativity is everyone’s birthright and that we all possess inherent creativity simply by being human. The expressive arts have been a pathway for me to learn about myself, process challenges, and connect to God. In rabbinical school, I began to experiment with combining hevruta learning with tools I had inherited from the field of art therapy. As I led colleagues and friends through these experiences, I began to see how the two approaches enhanced one another. Together, they offer a new way into the religious experience - one that welcomes all parts of who we are, opens a space for new and diverse voices, and allows for a deep and generative encounter between ancient tradition and the human soul.

In an interview, Allen elaborated on how the Jewish Studio Process – and art-making in general – facilitates self-discovery by activating mental and spiritual capacities that exist beyond the rational mind:

Our tagline is, “Have you made art about it yet?” The pedagogy behind that is that each of us have a source of wisdom, each of us have answers that exist within us, and art-making is a way to discover that deep knowing that is there within all of us. I think Karl Jung said, “Often the hands can solve a mystery that the mind has struggled with in vain.” When we are making art, something comes through us that we didn't know was there. And the witness writing process that we do afterwards is a way to make that knowing legible to the mind in a way that's profound.

Ilana Jaffe-Lewis, an educator and trained facilitator of the Jewish Studio Process who has led JSP workshops in a range of settings, recalled a powerful example of one participant’s ability to uncover and express intense emotions within the “sacred container” of the shared creative process the group had experienced together:

I remember during a Mother's Day program that I led for Jewish Studio Project, folks were sharing and some people were a bit emotional. One mother shared, and you could hear the anger in her voice reading the witness that she had written about the weight of motherhood and how messy it was. Everyone was just like, “Yeah, I feel that way too.” It was a very powerful moment of witnessing this mother's anger and frustration in this sacred container. And it wasn't bad. It was okay that she felt angry and no one fixed it, and it was just witnessed. That in itself was sacred and important for all of us.

As Jaffe-Lewis explained, once people are willing to open themselves to creativity and artistic expression, it becomes easier to acknowledge and face other truths about oneself: “There's a vulnerability that you already are engaging with when you are being creative. Once that layer is stripped away, there's all this stuff there that comes out of you. Because you're producing something and it is of you and through you, you are one step closer to understanding yourself better.”

Even when writing and language is not part of the process, art can be a critical tool for self-knowledge through engaging the “whole self” in multi-sensory experiences. Jon Adam Ross, founder of the InHEIRitance Project – a theater company that works with multi-faith communities to develop collaborative theater projects inspired by biblical texts – explained in an interview how the physicality of theater and movement-based art expands the boundaries of what is considered a “text,” thus allowing more people to engage in and learn from “text study,”

Because theater contains all the different modalities, it really taps into multiple intelligences. Some people learn by sitting and reading text, but the idea that that is text study and dancing to the words or to the images or to the ideas isn't text study is [nonsense]. That’s just preserving access for people who happen to have an intellectual affinity for sitting down and reading words on a piece of paper, as opposed to auditory learners or kinetic learners. Art contains so many different entry points for people.

Author, teacher, and artist Ariel Burger similarly reflected on an expanded definition of “text” and “Torah” that encompasses wisdom gained through our emotions and senses as well as our intellect:

Art calls forth more and more of ourselves as whole human beings, so that we're not just learning from our heads, but we're learning from our hearts, our guts, our hands, our feet. I like to ask learners, “What do you call the intuitive reaction you have to a Jewish text, whether positive or negative, resonance or dissonance? We call that Torah.” The unfolding of your encounter with the text, that’s part of Torah.  

Shira Kline – co-founder and spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, an arts-based spiritual community in New York City – described how art and music create “embodied” ritual and educational experiences that engage and reach different parts of the self, depending on whether language is part of the experience: 

An element that is important about these educational programs in their art forms is the embodiment of them. They call the whole body to presence. We use tons of music, and we pay close attention to when is a song in English, therefore in your mother tongue that you'll be comprehending and singing with us, vs. when is it okay to let the beautiful poetry of Hebrew float in the air and be the incantation that creates the space. So, there's a lot of care taken to how we use text and when does it need to be translated and when does the translation take the form of musicality and movement instead of comprehension of the words?

Connecting with Jewish Community, Past and Present

While understanding and valuing oneself is a critical first step for a meaningful life, we can only live a full life through our relationships with people, communities, and cultures. The arts are a powerful way to for individual learners to connect with Jewish texts, ideas, history, and traditions – not for the purpose of simply preserving these components of Judaism, but because they offer precious resources for understanding and enriching our own lives. Alica Jo Rabins is a musician, performer, poet, and songwriter who created “Girls in Trouble,” a collection of albums “about the complicated lives of women in Torah [that] mines the complex and fascinating stories of Biblical women, exploring the hidden places where their lives overlap with our own.” Rabins recounted how she was first inspired to explore these characters through song as a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary focusing on the stories of women in the Torah: “My advisor noticed that I was uncharacteristically procrastinating on writing my thesis and asked what was going on. I explained to him that these women had really come to life for me, but to write about them in a thesis that I suspected not many people would read felt like I would be trapping them again in paper.” The advisor wisely suggested that Rabins should use her musical talent to bring the characters to life through song instead. Through her recordings, live performances, and curricula developed to guide educators in teaching her songs, Rabins has shared her musical interpretations with an ever-expanding audience, including many who might never otherwise have been exposed to these texts:

[Girls in Trouble] has the express goal of using the power of art to breathe life into myths and stories and traditions that for many – especially if, like me, they didn’t grow up with a Jewish background – can be hidden behind a veneer of archaic language or customs. I mean, it's a 3000-year-old scroll that we're reading! But as all Jewish educators and scholars and lovers of Torah know, when you can take the leap through that veneer of archaic-ness, it's so alive and so relevant and so personally relatable. 

In extolling the power of art to make ancient texts come alive for modern audiences, Rabins emphasized that her core goal as an artist and educator is not simply transmitting and preserving Jewish tradition, but rather helping people understand and connect with the Jewish past in order to better cope with the challenges and complexities of the present:   

I've always been interested in the ancient and the contemporary and where they meet. I've always found it very comforting and helpful to contextualize my own experience and what society is going through today, which can feel so unprecedented. It really helps to widen the lens and think, “Wow, this is just what it is to be human. This is not the first time this has happened.” Our ancestors have passed through these times and survived, and now it's our turn to do that and to make sense of it. I'm grateful for these stories that we have in our tradition – it's a wealth of information and legend and support and advice and commiseration about how complicated it is to be human. So, to me as an artist, it feels like a privilege to interact with that and weave that into my work.

Similarly, for Aaron Henne, Artistic Director of theatre dybbuk in Los Angeles, challenging eras and events in Jewish history become valuable lenses for interpreting and engaging with Jewish life and culture today. Henne explains that “theatre dybbuk’s work operates from the belief that exploring Jewish history’s complexities opens a door to greater understanding of oneself and society, resulting in deeper connection to one’s own communities and traditions, as well as to the betterment of the world.” Theater dybbuk’s performances – which blend drama, music, poetry and dance – take as their “point of departure” a Jewish mythical or historical document or setting. These have included: Exagoge, the first recorded Jewish play from the 2nd Century B.C.E.; the midrash of Lillith, Adam’s first partner before Eve; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and a 16^th Century Italian Kabbalistic text about descending into Gehenna. Henne described how the last of these, which generated the performance “hell prepared: a ritual exorcism inspired by kabbalistic principles,” became a lens for exploring issues of power and marginalization:

Part of our process was to discuss questions of how marginalized groups in our own society operate. Because if you're living in the Venice Ghetto at that time period, what does that mean for how you process your relationship to the dominant culture? So, the idea of the descent into Gehenna became an attempt to exorcise the dominant culture. Which raises the question of, can you actually exorcise the dominant culture? That’s what we were exploring.

Henne further noted that the “artistic” and “educational” dimensions of theatre dybbuk’s work are inherently intertwined, as it is the encounter with stirring and thought-provoking artistic experiences that makes people more open to engaging with challenging ideas and facts in both the past and the present:

I think that one without the other, the history and the creative work, would not have the same impact. You put the two together and there's the excitement of being entertained and provoked and informed simultaneously. The fluid interaction between the two also helps us hear that every creative text existed in and was created at a certain time and shaped by historical forces. That helps us hear our own time in a new way, that the things we're creating are in dialogue with every force around us, maybe in overt and maybe in unconscious, unexamined ways.

Peter Berg, a rabbi in Atlanta who brought theatre dybbuk to his congregation as artists/scholars-in-residence, shared how this process unfolded through the performance of “Breaking Protocols.” This theater dybbuk performance interprets “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” through the style of vaudeville, a deliberately jarring juxtaposition. As Berg described, this unsettling contrast led the audience on a journey from shock to acceptance to insight:

They did a play based on the Protocols that used a vaudeville setup to have us understand the absurdity of what happened. At first, people were just shocked because it was like when you saw “The Producers” for the first time and were like, what is this? And then you start to realize that the absurdity of vaudeville helps us understand the absurdity of what happened in our own history. It just shows you the power of theater for conveying a message that you could not necessarily convey in a classroom or in a lecture.

While Rabins and Henne create artistic works primarily aimed at adults, the arts can be especially powerful for making Jewish history and culture come alive for children. Producer and educator Jonathan Shmidt Chapman is a pioneer in using the methodologies of Sensory Theater and Theater for Young Audiences to immerse children and families in Jewish stories and rituals. After decades of working in secular theater spaces, Chapman brought his training to the Jewish world when he developed Aggadah Adventures – a series of multi-sensory, immersive performances based in Jewish stories for young children and their families – at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City. As Chapman explained, this form of theater can be a truly transportive experience that dissolves the boundaries between audience and actor, self and story:

Immersive sensory theater allows us to feel a part of a story, to lose ourselves even more fully as an active participant in an aesthetic experience or in a world so that we're changed in some way. We've gone somewhere that the art has allowed us to travel and either put ourselves in the shoes of someone else or traveled to a different world. I believe that that kind of engagement is transformational.

When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the congregation and performances to close, Chapman brought his ideas online by creating “K’ilu Kits,” resource kits for families to create their own theatrical experiences about Jewish holidays, including music, easy-to-make props, and step by step instructions for involving children in the immersive production. Chapman titled the kits “K’ilu” to reflect the edict we recite each year at the Passover Seder (itself a form of immersive, sensory theater) that every generation should view itself as having participated in the exodus from Egypt:

K’ilu as a framing for me is really powerful, how it’s embedded in the way that we think about Passover, that we're supposed to experience the story k’ilu, as if, we were there ourselves. So how do we apply that ethos to all Jewish engagement? To think about, not that it's something that happened to people a long time ago, but that our stories are still active, that we are a part of them, that we are experiencing them, that they hold meaning in our lives today. I think theater can do that and can activate Jewish content to make relevance and meaning and make kids feel a part of the tradition of our stories.

Not only does theater help us imagine ourselves in another place and time, it places us within other people’s stories in such a way that those stories become our own, bridging the distance between our lived experiences and those of others:

Theater allows us to lose ourselves in someone else's story, to make the other personal. I've heard throughout my career the idea that theater is a greenhouse for empathy, that it provides a container for us to have that window to see someone else's experience and the mirror to reflect back to us what is true about ourselves.

Encountering Other Cultures with Empathy and Understanding

The challenges of the past year have underscored that Jews live within and must navigate broader cultural contexts, and that Jewish communities are strengthened – not threatened – by developing empathy for and understanding of these other communities and cultures. Lonnie Firestone, founder of Exploring Black Narratives, partners with Jewish day schools to teach curricular units on acclaimed dramatic works by Black playwrights. The units are team taught by Firestone, classroom teachers, other educators who identify as Jewish and Black, and Black artists who have been involved in productions of the plays. As Firestone noted in an interview, this pedagogical approach creates “an expansiveness in the kinds of people who are leading classroom discussions and the way we delve into it before we even open act one, scene one. By having teachers who have the ability to come to the material from multiple vantage points, we're able to discuss the literature in ways that feel deeply human, multifaceted, and never monolithic.” 

Regarding the choice to build her curriculum around drama specifically, rather than a broader range of Black authors and literature, Firestone explained why theater is the artform most likely to engender empathy and understanding:

I think theater is the most profound way that we can arrive at deeper understandings of ourselves, of other people, and of groups that differ from our own. The reason is that theater is the storytelling form that relies most on the spoken word. Theater is nothing without dialogue. Whereas other storytelling forms incorporate dialogue while using other methods – interior monologues, or visuals – as either equal or primary forms of narrative. With theater dialogue is our method of communication, and it is therefore the storytelling form that most succinctly and beautifully and perceptively gets us to a place of understanding how people think and talk and communicate. If we want to understand how people of different backgrounds think about the world and reflect on their experiences, theater is the art form that really gets us there.

As an example of this, Firestone recounted exploring the play “Fires in the Mirror” by Anna DeVere Smith with a 10th grade class in a New York City Jewish day school. Rather than begin by discussing the historical event on which the play is based – the 1991 Crown Heights riot – Firestone and her co-teachers instead focused on how DeVere Smith uses her talent for embodying characters to make events vivid and alive:

We weren't sidestepping the conflict, but our way in was to focus on the artistry of how a performer like Anna DeVere Smith performs over thirty roles – Black men, White women, the brother of Yankle Rosenbaum, the Hasidic man who was killed – portraying people who differ so visibly from herself, from her own identity as a 50-year-old Black woman. She does it by truly hearing their modes of communication in her interviews and embodying them to the place of a full immersion in a person. We started from that perspective of artistry, and then asked the students to embody a person in their life. By the time we got to what happened over three days in Crown Heights in 1991, the students were fully immersed in what it's like to think, feel, and use the gesticulations and speech of another human, what it means to begin to have a sense of embodying a different lens on the world, a different perspective.

The units conclude with the students’ reflective writing as they respond to an open-ended prompt (“What are you contemplating?”) with whatever has moved them intellectually and emotionally. Following their encounter with “Fires in the Mirror” and study of DeVere Smith’s immersive approach to character, the students shared reflections on whether and how individuals and communities can connect across cultural divides: “I am contemplating how we think of other people and how we have no idea what it’s like to be in their shoes or have their life. I have a wider perspective now;” “I'm thinking about how different cultures can learn so much about each other and can work it out when their cultures conflict;” “I’m left thinking about empathy found around us and whether the current nature of our society is one that nurtures it or one that neglects it;” “I’m contemplating and thinking about my own biases and trying to learn how to not be biased toward certain groups.”

The In[HEIR]itance Project, founded by Jon Adam Ross, also taps into the power of theater to develop cross-cultural empathy and connections. The company engages local community members of multiple faiths and backgrounds in a months-long process that involves text study with artists and clergy, writing workshops to generate the play’s script, and community events where local artists and audiences respond to the source material. The process is designed to engage members of diverse faiths and cultures in delving into the shared histories and experiences that generate mutual responsibility for their shared community. Often these shared histories and experiences are painful ones for the community, and the act of creating theater together becomes a pathway to dialogue and healing. Ross described how this process played out in two cities that were navigating recent communal traumas:

Three months after the massacre at Mother Emanuel Church, we were commissioned to develop a play for the first anniversary, working with the Jewish and Black communities. The civic conversation that was happening in the wake of the shooting was around systemic favoritism. So, the inherited text that we chose was Rebecca, who practices parental favoritism. The play took place inside Rebecca's womb with a black actor and a white actor. It was about Charleston as the mother, and when did she play favorites among her children? Over a thousand people were involved in creating that play.

In Kansas City there had been the shooting at the JCC a few years ago, and then two Indian men were killed by someone who thought they were Muslim and was targeting Muslims, so there we brought together the Jewish and Muslim communities to explore the story of Sarah and Hagar. There was an imam and rabbi whose mosque and synagogue were one mile apart who had never met each other, and they met for the first time on stage. 

Ross emphasized that while these and other plays have garnered large audiences and are widely acclaimed, the true value of The In[HEIR]itance Project is in the process, not the product. As community members of diverse backgrounds and views create a dramatic work together, former strangers become fellow travelers in a shared journey:

I think if you go see Schindler's List and you're an anti-Semite, you could leave Schindler's List and still be an anti-Semite. But I think if you were invited to spend nine months writing a play about the Holocaust with your neighbors, at the end of the play, you still process, you might be an anti-Semite, but now you know your neighbor's name, where they shop for groceries, what their kids' names are and where they go to school, and it changes your relationship with them. It’s that participatory artistic process where you are collaborating with your neighbor that builds those relationships.

This ability of collaborative artmaking to develop mutual understanding among diverse community members was experienced by one Minneapolis participant in “The Abraham Play,” which reinterprets Abraham’s story as that of a Wall Street stockbroker wrestling with the legacy left for him by his recently deceased father: 

The arts are singularly effective because they bring together different components of an individual’s life like nothing else does – it’s an integrative process. The Abraham play did that in a remarkable way. [Jon Adam Ross] brought together the most unexpected set of materials – the stories he used were mostly coming from people who live in the community. Putting together a sociologist, a high school teacher, and a journalist…that was a theatrical mind that made these juxtapositions. That’s what grabbed this audience and shook them out of their dispositions. They met a version of Abraham for the first time in that play. (Horowitz 2018, p. 10)

Ariel Burger has also explored how the arts – in particular visual art and storytelling – can help develop our empathy and connections across cultures and give people tools to work towards social change. He has engaged in this work through Illuminated Jewish Stories – an adult learning program that used Hasidic stories and art-making to explore themes of otherness, belonging, and civic responsibility – and currently at The Witness Institute, in which emerging leaders (of all faiths and backgrounds) study the work of Elie Wiesel and its enduring relevance for moral development and ethical activism. Burger described how his awareness of the connection between storytelling and social change deepened when he realized how the personal stories of those he was teaching intersected with the pressing political issues around them:

The real evolution [in Illuminated Jewish Stories] happened because of the political developments and climate in the US and around the world. As people were sharing their personal stories, it was clear that those stories had a kind of political relevance and depth. So, I made shift to focus more on storytelling and doing workshops on storytelling for social change. Unearthing people’s family stories revealed hidden diversities in the room, and there was a lot of resonance and connection with current issues around immigration policy and refugees.

Burger singles out midrash as a particular mode of layered storytelling – authenticating a text while at the same time reinterpreting it, thus holding two truths in tension – that can offer a model for how to navigate complex challenges in the world that defy simple answers:

Midrash is the act of saying, I'm not going to pretend the text isn't there, or that the text is saying something that it's not saying. I have honesty and humility in front of the text, and at the same time I have the daring and chutzpah to say, the way we're reading this text is not going to work for our time. We have to find a new way of interpreting. I think that's one of the things we can offer learners is that we have a formula for balancing humility and daring, which they can bring to other contexts, for example, challenging institutional power or systemic problems in the world.

While The Witness Institute is not solely for Jewish participants, the curriculum and pedagogy of the core program, a 15-month fellowship for emerging leaders, is shaped by Burger’s deep immersion in and love for Jewish learning, text, and artistic expression. Each session begins with a fellow-led “tisch,” a gathering filled with music and community bonding (from the Yiddish for “table,” a Hasidic tisch is a joyous Shabbat gathering at the Rebbe’s table). As Burger explained, leading off each session with music and dance and art creates a foundation for the kind of challenging introspection and interpersonal dialogue necessary for moral growth and leadership:  

Each session starts with a tisch that the fellows run. It has to have song, it has to have blessings, and it has to have some kind of embodied activity. There's a lot of music and dancing, and sharing artistic work. We're finding that that's the place where people can notice their own blocks or their own growth in areas like compassion or reflection. Or exploring, “What’s an idea that I'm holding onto too tightly or a conflict that I'm not engaging in well with someone in my life, particularly around politics or ideology?” I think there’s more and more evidence the arts can shift and move and facilitate those processes in a way that words cannot.

Building a Field of Artist-Educators

The shared vision of the artist-educators spotlighted here is that creativity and the arts will become fully integrated into Jewish education as a way for learners to understand themselves and the world and connect with their community and history. Jonathan Shmidt Chapman leads trainings for those with backgrounds in either Jewish education or theater to develop expertise in arts-based family engagement and sensory theater for young audiences. Chapman explained, “My dream is to seed more people creating at this intersection of theater and Jewish family engagement so that we have more content that's being created in new and interesting ways and more pipelines that can keep generating it across the landscape. When you experience something new, maybe it inspires you to then go create something, and that's how a field gets built.” This was the trajectory for one early childhood educator who experienced Chapman’s artistry and then felt both inspired and empowered to recreate it in her own teaching:

When I saw Jonathan's work for the first time, it was like light bulbs went off in my head: this is exactly the best way for our kids to learn. The beauty of his design is that it’s so exciting and accessible that you feel like you can do it too. Your home, your classroom is already a place of magical Jewishness, and he helps unlock it. It's the magic of a sheet's not a sheet. It's the ocean. It's the sea parting. When Moses had to go on a long journey, he literally just had all the kids walk their fingers across a long journey. I'm like, Yes! everyone has fingers they can use. Got it, let's go. Let's go across the sand together. I can't necessarily transform every classroom into a completely immersive experience every single time, but I'm feeling that it's so possible to do it a little bit at a time and little glimmers at a time.

Adina Allen has led multiple cohorts of Creative Facilitator Training for educators and professionals looking to bring the Jewish Studio Process to their communities. As Allen shared, it’s especially meaningful when people become deeply engaged in the JSP “who feel like their creative self and their Jewish self – they're both really important but have been completely bifurcated and separated – to see them realize, ‘Oh my God, I can be both things in the same place, and those things really do speak to and inform one another in a way that I never had a space to explore.’” These Trainings also help those who more confident in their Jewish knowledge than their artistic abilities discover how to unleash their creativity and, in doing so, become more skilled and empowered as educators, as one participant described:

I’m the Education Director at a Jewish camp, and this summer I decided to do a visual art project with the kids that’s JSP-inspired. Before [the Creative Facilitator Training], not only would I never have tried that, I never would have been able to even conceptualize the possibility of doing it. I would have thought, “I wish I could hire an artist who could do this,” not realizing that I could be that artist. And that, as an adult learner, is an incredibly empowering thing.

In early 2020, Miriam Heller Stern launched Beit HaYotzer–The Creativity Braintrust at HUC-JIR’s School of Education. In the project’s initial proposal to The Covenant Foundation, Stern articulated Beit HaYotzer’s mission of “seeding and nourishing a cultural change in the field…to prioritize and establish Jewish creativity as an essential tool and aim of Jewish education.” The two primary vehicles for working towards this goal would be a “creativity brain trust of artist-scholars  who meet regularly to provide mutual support and strategy for one another’s projects and strengthen their own work as mid-career trailblazers,” and opportunities for these artist-scholars to “teach in a Teaching and Learning Laboratory, nestled within the coursework and extra-curricular immersive learning experiences in the HUC-JIR’s graduate programs in Jewish education and teaching.” (Stern, 2022)

The initiative has not only succeeded in achieving these original goals, but sparked “Yotzer Or,” a student-led group created to provide HUC-JIR students with ongoing opportunities to bring the arts into their graduate learning experience. Members of Yotzer Or gather regularly for enriching workshops that blend Jewish learning, artmaking, and fellowship. The broader aim of the group is to continue Beit HaYotzer’s campaign to integrate creativity and the arts more thoroughly into HUC-JIR’s curriculum within all its schools and departments. Allison Lester wrote in an article recounting the founding and initial year of Yotzer Or (2023), “The notion that art-making is merely recreational is being challenged. [Yotzer Or’s founders] see the integration of creativity and self-expression into the educational environment as paramount.” (p. 17) In an interview, Miriam Heller Stern reflected on her vision for how programs like Beit HaYotzer and Yotzer Or could be the first steps towards the next paradigm shift in Jewish education:

The next frontier is to create a network of artists and educators who have a shared love of creative process and creating a field of educators who are interested in fully integrating these approaches to how we think, how we interpret, and what we create in Jewish life. …I would love to see more arts integration into Jewish learning spaces that is intentional about collaboration, reflection, self-awareness, metacognition sense-making, interpretation, being accountable and responsible and caring…That is, I think, what needs to happen next in order for more people to learn how to do the work, and then ultimately for Judaism itself to be transformed through this kind of teaching and learning.

In the post October 7, 2023 era, the need for Jewish learning with art and creativity at the center feels more relevant and pressing than ever. At a time when the phrase “ein milim” (“there are no words”) is often heard in response to the pain that has been suffered since October 7, the ability of art to help us express what we cannot otherwise is especially compelling. Jon Adam Ross reflected on how The In[HEIR]itance Project’s methodology helps people to approach difficult topics by allowing them to step outside of themselves and their roles in other parts of their lives: “Art creates a platform for people to have conversations about issues that they couldn't do over the checkout line or at a school board meeting. Art gives you permission because you're not having the conversation as yourself, but having a conversation as an artist, as a collaborator, as a co-creator.” Even creative experiences that don’t directly address difficult and painful subjects (such as those for younger children and families) can offer much needed comfort and hope in these times, building resilience and reminding people of the joy at the center of Jewish life and culture. As Shira Kline of Lab/Shul reminds us, the greatest power of art is allowing us to envision a world which does not yet exist, but which we hope someday will, “The experimentation and risk taking that creative play invites us into, this is the radical imagination that Jewish learning asks of us, the radical work of imagining the world to come that we want to live in.”

Meredith Woocher, PhD is the Director of Learning at The Covenant Foundation

References

Bryfman, D. (2016). When You’re Happy and You Know It – The True Purpose of Jewish Education. eJewishPhilanthropy.com. Retrieved from https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/when-youre-happy-and-you-know-it-the-true-purpose-of-jewish-education/

Horowitz, I. (2018) Education Through Participation: A Case Study Of The In[HEIR]itance Project. Submitted to The Covenant Foundation.

Lester, A. (2023) Yotzer Or: Educators Creating Light at HUC-JIR. Unpublished paper.

Magsamen, S. and Ross, I. (2023) Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. New York, Random House.

Paul, A. M. (2021). The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside The Brain. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Stern, M.H. (2019). Jewish Creative Sensibilities: Framing a New Aspiration for Jewish Education. Journal of Jewish Education, 85:4, 429-446

Stern, M.H. (2022). Beit HaYotzer Summative Report. Submitted to The Covenant Foundation.

Stern, M.H. (2024). Jewish Creativity: An Essential Aspiration for Jewish Education. Forthcoming.