Yikes!

My Next Award Travel

As a frequent flyer on American Airlines ("a member of the oneworld alliance"), can I use my miles to get a seat on the Pope's plane?

CAJE from the Bottom Up

[cross-posted to TAPBB]

A lot has been said and written about the recent cancellation of what would-have-been CAJE's 34th annual conference. I have my own thoughts about what caused this to happen, though it seems clear that the conference's non-existence this summer is mostly about financial management and the current economy, and little to do with the conference itself.

That being said, the absence of CAJE 34 presents a unique opportunity to look at the conference from a distance and to think out loud about what made CAJE great, what will make it great in the future, and what we can do to develop a conference that reflects that vision.

Rabbi Beth Nichols, an educator who is assistant rabbi at Temple Israel of New Rochelle, NY, taught the best session at last summer's CAJE 33 conference in Burlington, Vermont.

Beth's session was entitled "Evolving Bulletin Boards: Constructing the Big Ideas on Our Walls." A few nights beforehand, she was up late putting together sample bulletin boards. She brought pictures, she brought handouts, and she shared her ideas about how to make bulletin boards that "help students construct knowledge throughout the year." Beth spent her session sharing her own ideas — best practices for using bulletin boards as curricular tools — and soliciting discussion from colleagues who also have given some thought to using the walls of their classrooms in interesting ways.

CAJE used to be a conference full of sessions like Beth's. It was about professionals and not-so-professionals in the field of Jewish education spending time to learn with each other and from each other. But things have changed, and CAJE has become a "top-down" sort of conference.

There are plenty of examples of the "top-down" model in conferences for professionals in Jewish education. Here's how it works: An esteemed expert (a university professor, a government official with experience in the mideast peace process, a well-published author, etc.) stands in front a lecture hall full of people and imparts wisdom about his or her particular subject of expertise before taking questions from the audience. These speakers are not necessarily invested members of the gathered community; rather, they are hired experts who are flown in to deliver a keynote address and maybe sit on a panel. In these sorts of conferences, participants are, for the most part, passive. They are the recipients of knowledge and expertise.

In the "bottom-up" model, things work a lot differently. The classroom teacher's expertise is valued right alongside the university professor's. Every voice has a chance to speak and present, and every attendee is there to listen and learn.

Let me be very clear. The world of Jewish education needs "top-down" opportunities for teachers and educators to learn from experts. We need experts — people who've done research, who've studied the field, who have a breadth and depth of experience that can be shared — because experts help us to do our jobs better.

And there's plenty of room for experts in the "bottom-up" model. For many teachers and educators, CAJE is an opportunity to learn with an impressive array of top-notch educators and academics. There's something thrilling about the interplay between demographers, professors, idealogues and on-the-front-lines classroom teachers. We have a lot to gain from that relationship. It's just that we need to return to a conference model that is conducive for real free exchange, dialogue, and learning. I'm advocating for a conference that revolves a lot more around workshops and a lot less around keynotes.

We already have lots of conferences based on the "top-down" model. Annually, NATE and the JEA hold conferences where they invite experts to lecture and teach to assembled educational leadership. So does RAVSAK, and so do a number of other nationally-publicized conferences and "institutes" held annually. Local bureaus of Jewish education host community-wide in-services where local teachers can hone their skills. In a recent JTA article, Jonathan Sarna suggested that CAJE should be allowed to whither away because other organizations are basically doing the same work, sometimes with more innovation. And he's right, because he understands that CAJE has become just another "top-down" conference where teachers and educators can come and listen to the experts.

Recently, I was sitting at a table at the RAVSAK conference with acclaimed artist Mordechai Rosenstein. Mordechai was lamenting the withering of CAJE. "All those folks used to be the subversive ones. They were out to buck the system. Now they are the system." He's right. The "bottom-up" generation that created CAJE went and became experts. And the conference has slowly transitioned to become "top-down."

CAJE used to be a grassroots organization that was all about being "bottom-up." It's time for a new generation of leadership to re-envision the conference and re-adopt that role. Here's my plan to make that happen:

1. CAJE, as a conference, should cease to exist. It should be replaced by a new conference. I'd call it NGAJE (pronounced "engage") — A New Generation for Alternatives in Jewish Education.

2. The new conference should feature "experts" in Jewish education, but those experts should be encouraged to teach lots of workshops and participatory sessions, not deliver keynote addresses. Conference leaders should be charged with protecting the balance between bringing in established experts and providing opportunities for everyone to teach and learn. The new conference should be a place for new Jewish educational leadership to emerge.

3. The new conference should start out small, be volunteer led, and be extremely cost efficient in every possible way.

4. The new conference should be without specialized "tracks" or "conferences within a conference." Again, the conference should be about engaging, discussing, and exchanging ideas. It should not be a place where participants come to hear experts talk, or where they can seclude themselves within a particular bubble.

5. The new conference should not need to be profitable enough to cover the expense of maintaining a full-time staff and year-round initiatives.

6. The new conference should be totally inclusive. Anyone who wants to assume a leadership role should be afforded the opportunity, and anyone who wants to be invested should be part of the dreaming and planning process.

That's what I know... for now. There's probably a lot here I'm naïve about. But I think that might be the point. I think we need to dream big to develop a new national conference for people who are deeply invested in Jewish education. I'm very interested in engaging in discussion, in hearing what others have to say, and in being part of a vanguard that shapes the next generation's version of CAJE.

halloween scrooge

I've written in the past about how I don't understand the appeal of Halloween because the "rituals" of the holiday seem to have no apparent purpose.

Here you have a holiday that's widely celebrated, though it's totally detached from the original reason it was celebrated. (And if it was still attached to that original meaning, no one would celebrate it.) People do all sorts of things on Halloween, but they're all meaningless.

People carve pumpkins on Halloween. What's the point?
People dress up on Halloween. Why?
People knock on people's doors and ask for candy. What kind of ridiculousness is that?

Look, if someone's celebrating Halloween because these sorts of things have meaning for them, fine. But I don't know anyone like that. People don't celebrate Halloween because they connect to the ancient Druidic rituals or because its a deep and important part of their heritage. People celebrate Halloween because... they do.

Obviously, as someone who cares a lot about Jewish holidays, I want to celebrate festivals and holy-days that have some purpose and whose rituals are connected to said purpose. Lest you think that when it comes to holidays I'm a religious extremist, I think Thanksgiving and Mother's Day are really important holidays that are worth celebrating. Mothers Day, despite being invented by Hallmark, is about appreciating someone who deserves appreciation. I can get behind that holiday.

Anyway, I'm bringing up Halloween again because (a) its coming up soon, and (b) Joel Hoffman recently wrote a sort of Jewish Halloween manifesto that came to my attention.

Hoffman argues that Halloween isn't not a Jewish holiday, by which he means that the crap some ancient Israeli Hebrew school teacher once fed him about Halloween being an anti-Semitic holiday isn't true. And even though the holiday has some pagan and Catholic roots, they've never been part of the American way of celebrating the holiday. So there's nothing about Halloween that's anti-Jewish, according to Hoffman:

...in this country Halloween was never regarded as a sectarian celebration. It wasn’t even on most American calendars until the mid-nineteenth century. When it finally did take root, it was a mixture of pranks, dress up, jack o’lanterns, and candy, none of which is un-Jewish in any way. So my grumpy Israel teacher was wrong.

Hoffman goes even further when he says that Halloween is something that Jews should get behind because it's rich with values that we agree with:

If we abandoned everything that had a disagreeable history, we’d have to give up many of our favorite Jewish rituals, too.

Whatever their non-Jewish roots, American holidays such as Thanksgiving and Halloween are now symbols of pluralism, yearly signposts advertising America’s freedom and tolerance. These holidays are an opportunity for Americans, regardless of background, to come together and share an experience. And they can even be an enormous amount of fun.

Pluralism, tolerance, community, and fun are all Jewish ideals, and I, for one, am looking forward once again to greeting bizarrely dressed children as they come to my door and ask for treats.

I have two problems with this argument.

First of all, taking on a holiday that's not part of your own religious tradition just because it has values that you might like is a silly idea. To many Americans, Christmas is a holiday that's about family, generosity, hope, and good cheer. I like all these things, and, to be honest, all those things are Jewish ideals. Does that mean Jews should celebrate Christmas? I think not. ("Ah... But Christmas is different because it's a religious Christian holiday," you say. Actually, I think its pretty comparable to Halloween, at least by Hoffman's definition. Sure... Christmas may have once been a religious holiday. And it still is for some. But should we abandon it just because it has a "disagreeable history"? To many Americans, Christmas is a secular holiday where they give presents.) I think Jews shouldn't celebrate Christmas because it's not our holiday, and because, contrary to Hoffman's argument, you can't actually separate a holiday from its history.

But to be honest, that's not why I don't celebrate Halloween. As I said above, I don't have a problem with holidays that aren't Jewish. I celebrate Thanksgiving and Mother's Day, after all. Heck... I think more people should celebrate Columbus Day and Flag Day and Veterans Day. My second problem with Hoffman's argument is that I just don't accept that Halloween is about "[p]luralism, tolerance, community, and fun." I don't celebrate Halloween -- as I said above -- because it's a dumb holiday with no real redeeming value. If it really were about "[p]luralism, tolerance, community, and fun" then I might celebrate it. But it's not. It's mostly about candy and carved pumpkins (!) and stupid rubber masks. I don't want to sit around eating candy (or sit around giving it away to kids threatening to "trick" me if I don't give it to them). I'd rather eat pumpkins then carve them. And, well... I guess I don't have a problem with rubber masks.

I have better things to do with my Friday evening, so I'll stay away from Halloween, thank you.

of shofars and vespas

This is kinda old news. But I found it today.

Maurice Kamins is a very cool guy that I know. A few weeks ago, he was on the cover of San Francisco's Jewish rag with a great story about how he makes shofars, how he loves shofars, how he thinks shofars are awesome, etc. The story is also a bit about how he's a cool guy, and mentions his daughter Rochelle. I know Maurice because Rochelle is a good friend. Because Rochelle is such a good friend, I have an original Maurice Kamins shofar of which I am very proud and very fond. It is big and pretty and it sounds amazing.

I don't have any deep commentary on the subject. I just think that Rochelle is cool ("Rochelle, by the way, is a chip off the old block: She, too, rides a motorcycle, which likely will make her one of a rare breed of biker-rabbis when she is ordained next May. Dad, meanwhile, gets quite a few stares when he rides his Vespa around town with a 36-inch kudu shofar prominently sticking out."), and that her dad is cool, and that you should read the article, which you can find here.

Jewish Athletes

From today's Wall Street Journal article about recent changes to Mark Spitz's legacy:

Mr. Spitz's undisputed stature as one the greatest Jewish athletes of all time -- he routinely makes that list, alongside baseball legends Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg -- doesn't have quite the same cachet to him. "My mother and my mother-in-law and my wife will appreciate that," he says wryly, but it's not what got him into the pool to begin with.

A Refreshing Voice on the Peace Process

I don't know Rabbi Yosef Kanfesky, the rabbi of B'nai David Judea (just down the street from me), but he's pretty well respected by Jews of all denominations in this town. From what I hear, members of his congregation think he's just the bees knees.

So I was pretty fascinated by his article in this week's Jewish Journal, entitled, "An Orthodox rabbi's plea: consider a divided Jerusalem." He writes:

To be sure, I would be horrified and sick if the worst-case division-of-Jerusalem scenario were to materialize. The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story -- a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don't owe anything to anyone. Cries of protest, in particular from organizations that oppose Israel's relinquishing anything at all between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and which have never offered any alternative solutions to the ones they are protesting against, are rooted in the refusal to read history honestly. And I -- for one -- cannot lend my support to that.

Wow.

Lets stop asking the same old questions.

"What's Wrong With Hebrew School?"

That's the big question Mindy Schiller asks in the latest issue of "World Jewish Digest" (a publication whose name suggests an international following, but all the advertisers are from the Chicago area, as are all the schools cited in Schiller's article).

The article piqued our interest at work because, well, we're in the Hebrew school business. And in the end I have a number of major concerns.

1. The article asks all the same questions that we've been asking for twenty years, and offers a whole bunch of the same, tired answers. For example:

So, if Hebrew schools aren’t making the grade, what’s the reason?... [A] problem repeatedly expressed by critics of Hebrew school focuses on the teachers. Put simply, most are part-timers looking to earn a little extra money. (Unfortunately, educators say that hiring full-time teachers is something that most Hebrew schools cannot afford.) In fact, the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism estimates that approximately one third of Conservative schools employ a full-time education director. “If you’re working this as a supplementary job, with a supplementary salary, then that means it’s not your main focus,” says Saul Kaiserman, Director of Lifelong Learning at Temple Emanuel in Manhattan. “Even if you have a great, committed, involved teacher, they’ve got other things that are vying for their attention.”

Are you kidding me? Next the World Jewish Digest is going to ask the question, "Why are Jewish communities shrinking?" and they're gonna answer it with, "Well, it turns out that one major factor may be intermarriage."

The article keeps doing this. It sets up Hebrew school as being this giant failing enterprise, offers evidence that is mostly from Jewish adults whose experience reflects the state of Hebrew schools circa 1984, and then offers the same quotes from the same people (Jack Wertheimer and Steven M. Cohen... whoopdeedoo... No offense to those guys -- who are brilliant -- but isn't this just a rehashing of the same stuff they've been saying for years?).

Nothing new to see here.

(The author herself basically admits this when she quotes one source as saying: “The fact that Hebrew schools haven’t been working is old news.”)

2. The article's author takes it as a given that Hebrew schools are failing.

She gives some anecdotal evidence, quotes Wertheimer and Cohen (and their research), then declares, "Hebrew schools aren’t making the grade."

This is ridiculous. All of her evidence is from a handful of Chicago area schools. She doesn't look at programs anywhere else. She doesn't look at truly innovative programs happening right in her own back yard. She doesn't really look at all.

A better-written article would include commentary from people who would say things like, "Yeah... Hebrew schools have been a problem for a long time. But there are a lot of really good Hebrew school programs out there." This article doesn't do that.

3. Halfway through the article, the author gives up her whole entire premise. Wait... let me say that again. Half way through the article, the author suddenly (and without warning, or any indication to the reader that she's even aware she's doing it), the author totally changes direction.

She starts talking about a school at B'nai Tikvah in Deerfield, Ill. that -- wonder of wonders -- doesn't actually suck. As I read this, I'm thinking, "Hey wait a minute. This school isn't exceptional. I know lots and lots of Hebrew schools that are just as good as that one." And then... we get this:

The question is: is B’nai Tikvah representative?

According to JESNA’s Kraus, the answer is yes.

Wait a minute! Didn't she just say that Hebrew schools are broken? Now she's saying that this one excellent school is actually pretty normal, and that lots of schools are doing really great things.

So why did we need this whole long stinking article?

4. The author has a whole section that looks at ways in which new, interesting stuff has to "compete in the marketplace." Then, she talks about CHAI and Mitkadem, and the Conservative movement's educational/curricular initiatives. That's all fine and good. All that curricular stuff is great.

But nowhere does she even consider that new, innovative stuff has been coming out of the for-profit (and the non-movement-affiliated non-profit) world for years now. Are we cold borscht? What about A.R.E. (now part of Behrman, but still), or K'tav? What about the all those non-movement non-profit initiatives? Coming out with curricular "initiatives" (my boss loves to riff on why the word "initiatives" should scare us all) is all fine and good, but it is definitely not a new idea.

Case in point: The author, talking about the problems with Hebrew school curriculum, writes, "Critics cite a holiday-based curriculum that recycles the same topics year in and year out."

If she'd bothered to talk to anyone who actually works in a Hebrew school, she'd know that a few years ago, we released the Whole School Holiday series. The whole idea behind the series is that [a] schools only need to spend about one day per year on most holidays, and [b] kids should learn new, developmentally appropriate things each year. This set of materials offers kids something new to learn (as opposed to a curriculum that "recycles the same topics year in and year out") in every grade.

Anyway... I could go on for a while, but I don't want to take too much time disparaging this article. In the end, if it gets people to talk about Jewish education, then good. I suspect that the World Jewish Digest of Greater Chicago is actually pretty small potatoes, and that the few people who read this blog and then click over to the article will probably triple its readership. But whatever. It was a nice excuse to rant about the fact that Hebrew schools aren't actually all failing. I like talking about that.

Quote of the Day

“The only way I wouldn’t see God is if I stopped looking.”
- Dvora Weisberg

Favorite Things to Never Say on Hebrew School Report Cards

"Your child has exhibited no signs of a personality this semester."

"You child is about as useless as a poop-flavored lolly pop."

"Your kid might actually learn something if you stopped picking him up an hour early to take him to baseball practice."

"There isn't enough ritalin in the world."

"Your kid is very social. Too social. Please advise him that he may not remove his pants during Hebrew school."

"Your child can't read Hebrew, doesn't know Abraham the patriarch from Abraham Lincoln, and doesn't know any of the prayers. But it's ok... He'll have his bar mitzvah, and you'll feel like you got your money's worth."

"What's more important: your Lakers season tickets or your kids Jewish education? Nevermind. Don't answer that."

Saving Darfur

I teach an 8th grade Hebrew school class on Tuesday nights.

Tonight, I was teaching about generosity and tzedakah. After discussing some text, I split the class into three teams. Each team was given a hypothetical $100. I asked them to, as a team, figure out a way to spend their $100 that would most help the world.

One group was discussing whether or not to donate some of their money to (in their words) "save Darfur." One of the girls in the group asked, "What's 'save Darfur'?" Another girl answers, "It's for black people far away."

Thank God another of the kids in the group was able to give a real explanation.