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Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, Brandeis University

Tag: Mandel Center events (page 1 of 7)

Where all the Singing Happens

By Joseph Reimer

As I look back at last month’s The Power of Jewish Camps, a research conference at Brandeis’s Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education that Jonathan Krasner and I planned, I am pleased with how many of the sessions went. The session that made the deepest impression, however, is “Jewish Music at Camp and Beyond.” Let me share its significance.

Virtually anyone who has spent a summer at a residential Jewish camp could tell you what a significant role Jewish music, and particularly, communal singing, plays in the life of the camp. Camp alumni report remembering fondly the way the whole camp came together to sing on Shabbat and how they still remember the songs they once learned for a camp play or song festival. The music lives on when other details fade.

So how can we more systematically understand the role that Jewish music plays at these camps?

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For Camp Leaders, Some Questions and a Challenge

By Sandra Fox

Kiva Rabinsky, Seth Winberg, Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Joseph Reimer at the conference

At last month’s conference on Jewish summer camping, at Brandeis’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, I hoped my participation would place a friendly parenthetical question mark at the end of the conference title. This hope grew out my research, which  questions the assumptions Jewish leaders and educators hold about camp’s power, and highlights the perspective of the youth they seek to mold.  However, I ultimately found it refreshing to talk about camp with fellow scholars and practitioners–people who, like the historical figures I write about, participate in and shape the lived experience of Jewish camping today. Continue reading

Social Movements, Music, and Other Explorations at Camp Conference

By Daniel Brenner

When I envisioned attending The Power of Jewish Camps conference, convened by Brandeis University’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education,  my visceral camp associations—bug juice, fudge brownies, Deep Woods Off, and the smells of hormonal factories in full output mode—came into consciousness. “No,” I told myself, “this is not a conference at camp, it is about camp. It will just be an academic conference.” What I didn’t expect was both a thoughtful political analysis of the role of summer camp in Jewish life and a delightful exploration into the artistic diversity of Jewish summer camps.

First, the political analysis.

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Talking about Race in Jewish Day Schools

Due to a last-minute conflict, Yavilah McCoy of Dimensions Educational Consulting was unable to attend the recent Mandel Center conference, Inside Jewish Day Schools. Instead, she graciously pre-recorded this stirring framing statement for our panel entitled  “Embracing Diversity, Teaching Equity: Race and Ethnicity in Jewish Day Schools,” providing a context and a rationale for centering race and ethnicity in our conversations about teaching and learning and school culture in yeshivas and Jewish day schools.

 

 

 

The Impact of a Conference

by Elliott Rabin

IJDS Conference | April 30, 2018

Last week, I had the luxury and privilege of spending a couple of days with some 70 educators, administrators and professors at a remarkable conference on Jewish day school education, Inside Jewish Day Schools, hosted by the Mandel Center at Brandeis. Many things about the conference felt fresh, even pathbreaking to me. The focus entirely on day schools, within an academic setting. Attention paid to challenging subjects from contemporary society that rarely get addressed in the day school context: race, gender/sexuality, class. A screening of excerpts from the movie Race to Nowhere, with frequent interruptions in which we grappled with questions about homework. The framing notion of the “grammar of day schools,” component features that are accepted as a given. Addressing some of the big, catbird-seat questions about Jewish studies.

. . . the barrier between “academics” and “practitioners” of Jewish education appeared, for two days, entirely permeable . . .

But what struck me as most special and unusual about the conference was that the barrier between “academics” and “practitioners” of Jewish education appeared, for two days, entirely permeable. This conference was set in a magical kingdom where Continue reading

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