The Week That Was: August 21-27

A new feature – appearing every Sunday – on the eJewish Philanthropy website: the five most popular posts of the previous week.

Re-Inventing Jewish Community: a Response to Jonathan Woocher
by James Hyman

Jonathan Woocher is a passionate advocate for real change in Jewish education. There is little doubt that change is needed, and I fully agree with his beliefs that we have fallen behind the times and that Jewish education needs to innovate in order to catch up.

So while I agree that Jewish education needs to be reinvented, it cannot be done in a vacuum. I believe that there is a more fundamental challenge facing American Jewry and Jewish education today. Education is a reflection of the values and beliefs of a particular community.

We Must Bring Our Teens to Israel
by Dan Deutsch

We have a lot of anecdotal evidence and survey data that substantiates the importance of teen travel to Israel, yet over the last two decades we have failed our Jewish teens, allowing that critical travel to plummet by 40 percent. A trip to Israel during the formative adolescent years is a chance to solidify Jewish identity before leaving home to go to college.

Does the 21st Century Call for New Goals for Jewish Education?
by Yossi Prager

Innovation is the rage in the Jewish community today, especially as it relates to Jewish identity building and Jewish education (see Jewish New Media Fund, JESNA’s Jewish Futures Conference at the GA and JEP’s DigitalJLearning site). The risk in all the ferment about the medium is that we lose sight of the timelessness of the message.

The People of the Video Camera
eJP

The Jewish Day School Video Academy has been launched by the Avi Chai Foundation in partnership with Chicago-based communications agency See3.

“Our goal is to increase the capacity of Jewish day schools to be strong recruiting, fundraising and community building organizations,” said Deena K. Fuchs, Director of Strategic Partnerships.

A Lesson Learned from Generation Next
by Jessica Toledano

A lot and I mean a lot has been written about the generation that follows mine. I’m a Gen-Xer. We are commonly referred to as the so called MTV generation – need I say more? Quickly written off by “Boomers” as the “do nothing” generation, we have been passed over by what many pundits predict is the “next great generation.” Known as “Millennials” or “Generation Next,” they are the talk of the town – particularly in Jewish circles.

Click the red tab above for previous weeks most popular posts.