Jewish Education in the Encounter

Abstract

For over two years now, Jewish life has been set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent conversations in the pages of this journal have explicitly foregrounded the pandemic and its impacts on the evolving Jewish educational landscape. Our contributing authors have highlighted the social isolation experienced by young children (Novick et al., 2021) and young adults alike (Olson, 2021), and they have illuminated the technological and pedagogical tools that educators have used to connect learners to Jewish content and to one another (Aron & Hassenfeld, 2022; Gold et al., 2021). One thread that has tied these conversations together is a common desire for what Joshua Ladon (2021) has called “deep encounters” (p. 366). Educators, as Morey Schwartz has demonstrated, “crave connections among one another and within our learning environments” (2022, p. 37), and students want “to be heard by one another,” as Ziva Hassenfeld and her undergraduate students have shown (Stanhill et al., 2021). The ongoing conversations in this journal have repeatedly situated the power and promise of education as occurring in meaningful “encounter with another” (Buber, 1947/2002). Although not designed as a special issue crafted around a single theme, the articles in this issue of the Journal of Jewish Education all pick up on this thread that education happens in the encounter. The articles in this issue focus on three distinct kinds of educational encounters: encounters among teachers, encounters between learners around Jewish content, and encounters between different Jewish cultures. In our first article, Rebecca Shargel spotlights encounters among English, social studies, and Judaic studies teachers at a K-8 liberal Jewish day school. In “‘Let’s Talk About Justice: English, Social Studies, and Judaic Studies Teachers Deliberate About Justice Across the Middle School Curriculum,” Shargel’s qualitative case study demonstrates the powerful cross-disciplinary connections that teachers, and in turn their students, can make when given frameworks for curricular integration and consistent time for co-planning. Although Shargel outlines both the factors that support and those that constrain curricular integration, her study offers promising visions of the possible and next steps for planning, teaching, and professional development for schools that want to encourage meaningful encounters among teachers with different disciplinary training as a way of enhancing student learning. JOURNAL OF JEWISH EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 88, NO. 2, 101–103 https://doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2022.2066374