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Jewish Learning

Approach to Teaching Humash: JOFA’s Curricula

JOFA’s Bereishit and Shemot curricula promote gender sensitivity, encourage questions, and use differentiated learning techniques. Inspired by students’ thoughtful questions that many teachers did not have the tools to address, the curricula were developed to encourage more reflective study of p’sukim, and thus to accommodate new interpretations, personal connections to principal characters, and attention to […]

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Pluralism in Practice

I teach rabbinics in the middle school of the Jewish Community Day School of Boston (JCDS), a pluralistic school just outside Boston that runs from kindergarten to eighth grade, with nearly two hundred children whose religious affiliations range across the spectrum of Judaism. I have been involved with JCDS for the past twelve years, since

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The Role of Summer Camps in the Education of Orthodox Girl

Summer camp is an informal but powerful part of girls’ education in contemporary Orthodox society. It is generally accepted that camps are so effective in transmitting educational values and knowledge because of their emphasis on experiential learning. In addition, sleepaway camp settings often offer ideological choices that may not be available in terms of Jewish

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This I Believe

That my mother was driving me to the airport that brisk autumn morning in October of 1976 was already curious—my father was the standard driver to the airport.  My mother at the wheel meant “keep noise to a minimum and allow for concentration.” My father at the wheel meant that traffic laws were optional and

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Searching Our Past: Who Was the Ba’alat haBrit and What Did She Do?

Ba’alat haBrit: …[T]he ba’al brit… appears in a number of texts. In one manuscript of the Mahzor Vitry, dated to the first years of the thirteenth century, one extra line appears that tells of another participant, the ba’alat brit, a female ba’al brit. The line reads as follows: They brought the baby into the synagogue.

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Emerging Voices: How Teaching a Friend to Leyn Taught Me More Than I Could Have Imagined

“Ta’amod Rivka Pazit bat Avraham Chaim v’Yehudit Rachel.” The complete pride and worthiness that shot through me when I heard my name called out, the gabbait’s voice as feminine as my own, were paralleled only by what I felt moments later when my friend Leah Slaten began to read from the sefer Torah. We had

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