Will The Third Temple Be Built in Second Life? Bringing Jewish Education Into The Twenty-First Century

Running head: BRINGING JEWISH ED INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Will the Third Temple be Built in Second Life?
Bringing Jewish Education into the Twenty-First Century
David Levy
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the MAJS and MJEd degrees at
Hebrew College
BRINGING JEWISH ED INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ii
Abstract
For years scholars have spoken of Jewish educational practice being stuck in the 1950s
suburban experience, with Jewish educational philosophies being grounded in 1970s
identity politics. This thesis examines how both American society and Jewish culture in
America have evolved in the ensuing years, and how progressive educational practices in
the digital age might transform Jewish teen education into an approach more suitable for
today's adolescents. An academic analysis of modern Jewish history and sociology
challenges current definitions of Jewish identity. Examining best practices in
contemporary secular education reveals a new pedagogic approach to support this
emerging paradigm of Jewish engagement.

BRINGING JEWISH ED INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract................................................................................................................................ii
Table of Contents................................................................................................................iii
Bringing Jewish Education into the Twenty-First Century..................................................1
Chapter One: Introduction.......................................................................................1
Thesis Statement..........................................................................................1
Selection of the Topic...................................................................................2
Chapter Two: Review of Literature..........................................................................4
Jewish Life in Mid-century America............................................................4
What is Judaism?..........................................................................................8
What is Judaism about?..............................................................................12
The Jewish Educational System.................................................................16
General Education......................................................................................21
Today's Teens.............................................................................................24
Chapter Three: Analysis of the Current Situation..................................................29
Chapter Four: Strategic Plan..................................................................................35
Focusing on the Future when the Future is Now........................................35
Plugging It In..............................................................................................39
Superstructure.............................................................................................41
Chapter Five: Next Steps.......................................................................................45
References..........................................................................................................................48
BRINGING JEWISH ED INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Thesis Statement
In 2010, the majority of American Jewish children are being educated in a system
devised in the 1950s to accommodate the particular needs of that generation's Jews:
newly suburban, second-generation, Conservative-affiliated by default rather than
ideology, and interested in religion more for its place in American society than for any
particular theological reason. While the emergence of identity politics in the late 1960s
pushed some of the content forward, little since has had much effect on American Jewish
religious school classrooms.
Critics of the American public school system similarly complain of an out-of-date
system, devised in the industrial age to produce obedient factory workers suited for 19th
century life. They propose a complete overhaul of our education systems, beginning with
the very assumptions we hold about the purpose of public education. Furthermore, they
demand we take into consideration the mismatch between the tools and technologies
young people use in every aspect of their lives outside of school and what happens in
today's classrooms. I propose turning the same critical lens on supplemental Jewish teen
education, beginning with essential questions of the purpose of this education. With a
clear purpose in mind, I offer a vision for employing progressive educational practices,
authentic to the lived experiences of the “Net Generation,” enabling this cohort to take
their place in contemporary Jewish society.
Selection of the Topic
From the time Douglas Rushkoff (1999/1996) first suggested the metaphor of
immigration to describe the profound generation gap caused by advancing technology,
much has been written about the inability of those born before the age of the internet to
effectively speak the same language as those in the “Net Generation,” those born into a
world of interconnectedness facilitated by technologies such as the internet and mobile
telecommunications. As a “Digital Pioneer” (Shrock, 2008), I find myself well-positioned
as a translator between these two populations1. As a practitioner in the field of Jewish
teen education, I see “technology” bandied about as a buzzword, supposedly the panacea
that will make Judaism relevant to teens, causing a flood of new students into the
correctly wired programs. The reality, of course, is much more complex. How do we
determine which technologies belong in the classroom, or whether instead to invest in
technology that can extend learning beyond the classroom or circumvent the classroom
altogether? Is the medium really the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously said
1 Palfrey & Gasser (2008) remind us that the majority of the world do not have access to digital
technologies, and therefore the majority of young people today, growing up without the privilege of
affluence and connectedness that we take for granted in America, are not Digital Natives.
during the previous generation's similar stand-down with the new technology of
television? Or are there more thoughtful ways to match medium to message to maximize
the learning taking place?
The present moment is not the first time American Jewish education has faced the
challenge of potential reinvention as a response to changing lifestyles. I set out to
uncover what we have learned from the experience of the previous generation with the
hopes of developing a contemporary approach to Jewish teen education taking into
consideration the unique qualities of this cohort of learners.

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Jewish Life in Mid-century America
Many studies of Jewish life in America distinguish chronological periods with
reference to generations, grouping the adults of a time period with respect to ranges of
birth dates. Such grouping enables authors to draw conclusions about these populations'
motivations and actions based on historical trends and assumed distance from the
generation of immigration. Neusner (1987) identifies thirty-year definitional windows,
beginning with a first generation arriving in America born between 1890 and 1920.
Ignoring the Jewish communities extant in the United States since the mid-17th century
serves his assertion that third-generation American Judaism is grounded in “Holocaust
and Redemption,” rooting all Jewish families in the imagined first-generation that
immigrated either in anticipation or aftermath of the genocide of World War II.
Despite Neusner's definition of generations, his sample represents the largest
segment of the American Jewish community so it useful for making generalizations. He
notes the second generation did not need schools or youth groups in order to explain what
being Jewish meant. It could rely on two more effective educational instruments: memory
and experience – specifically, memory of genuinely pious parents and experience of anti-
Semitism. Emil Lehman's 1953 study of synagogue leadership within the Conservative
movement (as cited in Hertzberg, 1997) showed marked decline in observance of
Shabbbat and kashrut rituals compared to the previous generation. What's more, the self-
study revealed that fifty-eight percent of synagogue board members attended services
without their children, setting the stage for further distancing of the next generation from
Jewish ritual.
Kaplan (2005) sees a different motivating force in the establishment of Jewish
identity in the post-WWII generation: American Jews' desire to distinguish themselves
from Christians. The mass exodus to the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s therefore
necessitated the building of hundreds of synagogues, less out of an increased piety than to
provide a meeting place for Jews to meet other Jews. Hertzberg (1997) concurs,
describing suburban Jews who integrated with their gentile business associates by day but
retreated to all-Jewish social circles for their nights and weekends.
Hertzberg writes of the 1950s and 1960s as “the heyday of the supplementary
Jewish school in America” (p. 320). This heyday must have been strictly numerical, since
Hertzberg's description paints a rather dreary picture of the schools:
The after-hours schools in the synagogues were being used by the Jewish parents
for their own ends. What the mass of parents wanted, apart from a decent
performance at bar mitzvah, was that the school impart to their children enough of
the sense of Jewish loyalty so that they would be inoculated against intermarriage,
that is, that they should remain a part of Jewish togetherness. Once that
inoculation had supposedly taken hold, the Jewish child could then be launched
on his next task, to succeed in being admitted into a prestigious college. (p. 320)
The story of the suburbanization of American Judaism might have ended this way,
with each successive generation less in need of Jewish space in their private time. One
can only imagine such a scenario leading to the gradual erosion of the synagogue,
religious school, and the rest. But the 1960s brought upheaval to the social structures that
preserved the American status quo. Amidst this context, two defining events in Israel
would destabilize American Jewish identity to such a degree that consensus placed two
new ideas at the very center of what it meant to be a Jew in America. But was this new
center for American Judaism a panacea or merely a band-aid?
The rise of expressions of Jewish ethnic pride in the 1960s are attributed to a
number of factors that can be broadly characterized in two categories: new interest in
situating the Holocaust within Jewish history and self-perception, and renewed zeal for
the State of Israel. Kaplan (2005) cites the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and the
subsequent explosion of Holocaust-related books as the beginning of public Jewish social
activism. There seems to be scholarly consensus, though, that the Israeli victory in 1967's
Six Day War provided American Jews with the fortitude to go public with support for
Israel and less specific expressions of Jewish pride. Certainly, in the age that also brought
Black Power, Women's Liberation, and Gay Liberation, the rise of Jewish pride cannot be
attributed to one particular event.
Woocher (2005) describes the convergence of Jewish pride, support for Israel and
social justice as the three pillars at the core of “Jewish civil religion,” the somewhat
secular replacement for traditional Judaism within the suburban synagogues. I say
“somewhat secular” because in Woocher's estimation, the perpetuation of Judaism (and
the support of Israel) became sacred missions. Hertzberg (1997) echoed this answer,
calling “the glory in Israel” the late 1960s answer to Philip Roth's question of “what is
Jewishness to the unbelieving Jew?” (p. 364). Close to fifty years later, “the glory in
Israel” is no longer a satisfying answer to Roth's query for most American Jews, but the
organized Jewish community struggles to find a workable substitute.
Many scholars of mid-century Judaism write of the Jews' struggle to stake their
claim on American identity. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, there is no question
that the Jews have arrived as fully American. Horowitz (2003/2000) understood this
achievement as having created a new danger to Jewish identity in America. Now,
American identity is the default for most American Jews. Active rejection of Judaism has
become less of a concern than mere indifference. “Being American has simply
become the default position, and any active relationship to Jewishness requires either
prior commitment (i.e. a history of involvement or prior socialization) or an act of will”
(p.vi).
In this milieu, does civil Judaism still suffice as a motivating factor for American
Jews to remain part of the Jewish people? With considerable communal angst spent on
what our mid-century forebears called Jewish survivalism and what more recent thinkers
deemed Jewish continuity, one wonders why so few pages have been devoted to the
question of what exactly we are meant to perpetuate. To answer that question, it may help
to take a step back and ponder what exactly it means to be a Jew in America today.
What is Judaism?
Today's Jewish landscape presents a fractured Judaism, or perhaps a plurality of
Judaisms. When pundits or communal leaders talk of the perpetuation of Judaism, what
exactly are they hoping to perpetuate? Many of the scholars contributing to the
Cambridge Companion to American Judaism (2005) attempt to differentiate between
Jewish religion and “Jewishness” while struggling against the usefulness of such a
dichotomy in describing the actual beliefs and practices of American Jews. The 1990
National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) revealed an age-related divide with regards to
nature of Jews. Goldscheider (1997) found “those over 50 tend to regard Jews less as a
religious group than younger people, who are evenly split between the two options” (p.
54). It's notable that this datum is age-related and not generational, as Goldscheider noted
“among Jews older than 50, those who are third and fourth generation Americans were
more likely to include religion in their group identity than younger ones” (p. 55). The
further away from immigration, with the strong need for ethnic support that comes with
it, the more likely a Jew is to foreground the religious nature of Judaism over the ethnic.
(The 2000-2001 NJPS did not examine this dichotomy.)
Boyarin (2008) took a different approach, eschewing the term Judaism in favor of
a Jewishness he describes as “all associations that gather around the substantive 'Jew' or
'Jews' and around the modifier 'Jewish'” (p. 1). His avoidance of the more familiar term
Judaism is strategic; the use of a less familiar term (in his estimation) aims to dissuade
readers from layering their own preconceived notions of “Judaism” onto his subject. It is
nonetheless clear that Boyarin's “Jewishness” incorporates both religion and ethnicity
while interrogating both modes of identity construction. His most direct definition of his
subject is that Jewishness is “one of the strategies (or sets of strategies) for sustaining the
life of Homo sapiens, that is, for integrating creaturely mortality with symbolic
consciousness.” In other words, Jewishness is the methods Jews employ to make sense of
the human condition. This may be a useful definition for a philosophy of Jewish studies,
but those engaged in the work of inducting new generations of Jewish children into the
project of Judaism may want more guidance.
Bayme (1997) reframes the divide between Judaism and Jewishness as one
between structure and content. In his estimation, “structure” serves Jews on the periphery,
requiring low ideological commitment while providing opportunities for the kind of
Jewish socializing that can produce the ultimate prize: Jewish grandchildren. Structure is
embodied in Jewish organizations such as Federation or Hadassah that provide
opportunities to socialize or perform a task within a Jewish context without strong
ideological material. Content, on the other hand, appeals to and therefore strengthens the
Jewish core, those who receive Wexner Foundataion grants or study Tanach with the local
Rebbe in their law firm's conference room during lunch hour. Bayme argued firmly for
content: “We cannot and should not define as Jewishly authentic anything that Jews
happen to do. On a pragmatic level, I doubt that a focus on structural factors alone can
ensure continuity” (p. 398).
In Phillips' (2005) reading of the NJPS 2000-2001, he notes the new phenomenon
of ethnicly Jewish adults who identified their religion as something other than Judaism.
And yet in the same volume, Kaufman finds that available data “sensitize us to patterns
of engagement that do not fit comfortably within any one of the so-called two identity
packages (ethnicity and religiosity) that currently dominate inquiry into contemporary
Jewish identity” (p. 181). This echoes Goldscheider's 1997 findings that:
48.5 percent of the respondents [to the 1990 NJPS] identified their religion as
Jewish but ignored the religious aspect of Judaism when responding to a question
concerning the meaning of being a Jew in America. It might well be that the
concept of 'being a Jew' is ambiguous, even for many Jews. (pp. 61-62)
Woocher argues for a new vision of American Jewish civil religion, linking the
transcendence traditionally associated with religious rites to the organizational work that
has become more popular than synagogue attendance among certain sectors of
contemporary American Jews. Liebman (2005) does the reverse, observing that even in
purely “religious” settings such as the Shabbat morning service, ethnic motivations are
inseparable from religion.
In his search for an essential American Judaism, Liebman looks to draw
boundaries between someone viewed as a “bad Jew” and one who is considered to have
actually left Judaism. He comes to the conclusion that those who are Jewish by ethnicity
but practice none of the identity markers he names “may be defined as Jews, but they are
unlikely to be thought of as 'fellow Jews'”(p. 140). This is an important distinction to
keep in mind as we grapple with the core question of what Judaism is all about. Horowitz
(2003/2000) described a new urgency for establishing compelling central themes for
American Judaism:
The dynamic of acceptance versus rejection/belligerence regarding one’s
Jewishness has been replaced by a dynamic of finding Jewishness to be
meaningful versus remaining indifferent to it. Jewish continuity of the group as a
whole has come to depend on the individual’s commitments and decision-making.
(p. 183)
Küng also noticed the growing irrelevance of the tired chestnut “If you forget that
you are a Jew, others will remind you.” But he saw opportunity for new self-awareness:
“If you do not forget that you are a Jew, you may also remind the others of that fact” (p.
459). The difference between his view and Horowitz's comes down to the source of
meaning. Küng seems to imply that Jews will find meaning for themselves in Judaism;
Horowitz seems to put the onus on the Jewish community to foreground meaning as a
safeguard against losing individuals from the communal body. Horowitz's view resonates
with Cohen & Eisen's (2000) concept of the “Sovereign Self,” the prioritizing of personal
meaning over communal concerns, and the construction of Jewish identity on a
scaffolding of what elements of Judaism they have embraced rather than what they have
rejected.
One wonders to what extent this difference between Küng 's view on the one hand
and Horowitz's on the other can be accounted for in their stance relative to the
community – Küng is a Christian looking in from beyond, Horowitz a Jew writing on
behalf of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York,
one of the largest Jewish communal organizations in America. Regardless, if connecting

Jewish individuals to meaning within Judaism is a central task of Jews, the obvious
question is what sort of meaning are we talking about? Are there clear boundaries around
Jewish meaning, and if so how are they determined? What data exist around previous or
current attempts to harness meaning for the sake of engagement, and lessons do they
provide for the future?
What is Judaism about?
As Neusner's (1987) naming the third generation as the generation of Holocaust
and Redemption suggests, he and others identify memorializing the Holocaust and
support for Israel as two of the main foci of mid-to-late twentieth-century Judaism. As
late as 2000, Cohen and Eisen found the Holocaust ranked higher than any other element
(including belief in God) in the formation of American Jewish identity. Rapaport (2005)
examines scholarship around the issue and notes a tension between those who worry
about Judaism centered on victimhood and tragedy and the reality of an American Jewish
populace that ranks remembrance of the Holocaust more important than any other
religious or cultural aspect of Judaism. Nearly every scholar who took up this question
railed against Fackenheim's “614th commandment,” although Fackenheim continued to
preach the prohibition against giving Hitler a “posthumous victory” as late as 2002.
Rather than draw Jewish identity from a place of negativity, they argue that Jewish
identity must be positively defined. Rather than simply being against Hitler, we must be
for something.
In the years immediately following the Six Day War, being for Israel appeared to
be the natural solution. However, none of Israel's struggles in the past thirty years have
offered the same kind of moral clarity as the 1967 war. Consequently, support for Israel
has not kept pace with memorializing the Holocaust among the populace. Although
Rosenthal (2005) saw “general support of Israeli policy” among American Jews, he
located this within a “new distancing” of American Jews from Israel, which he tied to
“the failure of Israelis and American Jews to create any great common cultural bonds” (p.
222). And while Rapaport saw the focus on the Holocaust as providing a religious
framework for Jewish social justice activity, Rosenthal saw American support for Israel
as having no residual effect on other aspects of Jewish identity such as commitment to
religion or cultural activity. Gordis (1997) called organizing American Jewish life around
Israel “a convenient but always questionable strategy [that] is becoming increasingly
obsolete and ineffective” (p. 2). Regardless, Goldscheider (1997) interpreted the 1990
NJPS as reinforcing the idea that “Israel and the Holocaust have become ideological
substitutes for religious ritual, God, and Torah” (p. 36)
Where does God fit into this picture? A 1952 poll in Time magazine (cited in
Hertzberg, 1997) revealed that 70% of Jews polled professed a belief in God, a figure that
Hertzberg understands to prove that at least some of the non-believers belonged to
synagogues. In 2000, Cohen and Eisen found 52% of their respondents felt belief in God
was “essential” to be a “good Jew” (with 85% believing it was at least desirable); with
similar numbers professing their own certainty (56%) or probable (27%) belief in God.
The apparent rise in belief in the past half-century has not brought with it a concurrent
rise in synagogue affiliation or adherence to Jewish ritual law.
Küng (1995) observed that despite the distance moderns feel from ancient
religion, they are open to true religiosity, which he
want[ed] to understand this Jewish religious feeling as postmodern religious
feeling – beyond total repudiation and total fusion, after the Holocaust and the
foundation of the state of Israel. However, this is a postmodern religious feeling
which can in no way dispense with certain 'classical' constants of faith if it wants
to go on remaining Jewish religious feeling. (p. 457)
He identified these constants as God, the land of Israel, and the Jewish people. In
other words, if contemporary Jews can revert the focus of Judaism to a central idea of the
covenant between God and Israel, all the particulars can be related to the ever-changing
world.
Sarna (2004), however, saw ritual observance divorced from theology as an
emerging framework. He connected this to a developing “cafeteria-style Judaism,” which
has sprung from an increase in Jewish learning, enabling Jews to make more informed
decisions about what elements of the religion they adopt or reject. Sarna was not
disinterested in finding foci for contemporary Judaism, but unlike Küng, he mused rather
than prescribed, wondering “could the grand themes of late twentieth-century American
Judaism – the Holocaust, Israel, feminism, and spirituality – inspire Jews to remain
Jews?” (333). Boyarin (2008) saw potential in “constant reinvention” as a positive
reframing of the dual recurring dangers Atlan identifies (as cited in Boyarin, 2008), “the
Scylla of fossilization and the Charybdis of dissolution.”
Others, among them Sacks (2009) and Brown & Galperin (2009), debate Jewish
peoplehood as a potential new center for Judaism, and indeed Horowitz (2003/2000)
identifies “historical people-consicousness” combined with Jewish values as an emerging
mode of engagement for contemporary Jews. While Brown & Galperin traced the term
“peoplehood” to a 1942 article by Mordechai Kaplan, Sacks noted the term's recent
resurgence began in the 1990s. All three seem to agree that a robust understanding of
peoplehood must not be only a linking of Jews by common fate, but also a common
vision – what Brown & Garlperin call values and Sacks calls faith. They share an
emphasis on the future as an essential element to balance out the Jewish tendency to
fixate on history.
Sacks advanced this argument a step further. While Brown & Galperin understood
peoplehood primarily for its benefit to Jews, Sacks argued “Judaism is both particularist
and universalist” (p. 118). Jewish faith, according to Sacks, holds that we all – Jews and
non-Jews alike – worship the same God, but each people of the earth has a different
relationship with God. The fate Sacks therefore saw for Jews is to share Jewish
understandings of the world with everyone else, “to be a blessing to the world” and help
everyone appreciate difference and the promise of peaceful coexistence (p. 130).
Can the notion of peoplehood serve as a new foundation for American Jewish
coherence? Is peoplehood possible without a return of God, Torah, and Covenant to the
center of Jewish understanding, or might Jews be a unique blessing to the world without a
theological underpinning? And does any of this matter if the Jewish educational system is
still trying to impose mid-century ideals on a turn-of-the-next-century populace?
The Jewish Educational System
In Lipset's 1997 article looking at what the 1990 NJPS had to say about Jewish
education, he discussed a correlation between amount of Jewish education and
commitment to Judaism (as measured by the question “How important is being a Jew for
you?”). While Lipset wanted to read causality into these numbers, he acknowledges the
difficulty in determining whether education breeds commitment or rather committed
families engage in more education. Regardless, he found that the greatest indicator of
adult practice was the number of years of religious education an individual had in his or
her youth. While the NJPS lacked any control for the quality of education provided, this
data at least indicate the importance of keeping Jewish education attractive enough to
teens to keep them involved beyond b'nei mitzvah or confirmation. By the numbers, more
is more regardless of the actual educational content. Lipset, however, was not content to
end his article without editorializing on quality:
We obviously should try to develop better educational techniques, recruit more
sophisticated educators, and provide a more meaningful social and physical
environment for Jewish youth. We should also recognize that such improvements
will not stop the decline. For a ll except the Orthodox, improving the content of
Jewish education—what is taught—is more important than the technical factors

which can be improved with more money. And here most of the Jewish
community is at a loss. They, themselves are not religiously observant, much less
so than most Christians. They do not believe in the Torah. Yet, the schools are
expected to teach the children what their parents basically reject by their actions.
(p. 196)
To understand this quality conundrum, it may be helpful to trace the evolution of
the contemporary synagogue supplementary school, which Cohen & Eisen (2000) found
is still the primary source of Jewish education for the majority of American Jewish
children. Kaufman (1999) tells the story of modern Jewish education through the story of
Samson Benderly, the visionary who cultivated and trained a generation of educational
leaders, known as the Benderly Boys, “who went on to become the organizers and
directors of Jewish schools and citywide bureaus of education around the country”
(p.129). Among Benderly's many contributions to the field, perhaps the farthest-reaching
was his marrying of Jewish studies with the constructivist educational philosophy of John
Dewey, who taught many of Benderly's protégés at Teachers College of Columbia
University. However, the Benderly Boys were primarily involved in establishing stand-
alone Talmud Torahs, hybrids of the old country's religious schools and the new country's
settlement houses. These Talmud Torahs were rarely affiliated with established
congregations. If a turn-of-the-century Talmud Torah was affiliated with a synagogue, it
was likely because the school sponsored the creation of a synagogue as a program for its
students and their families.
Kaufman correlates the rise of the congregational school with the period of second
settlement, when Jews made their first upwardly mobile moves from their initial
American homes (e.g. those on the Lower East Side of New York) to the “better
neighborhoods” (such as Harlem and Brooklyn). The newly affluent Jews populating
these neighborhoods could afford to build synagogues with school facilities, and the
synagogues saw their schools as membership incentives. Pilch (1969) pointed to this
relationship between schools and membership as a problem: “the new synagogue,
competing not only for adult membership but also for children, frequently had to resort to
practices which favored a large school rather than a good school” (p. 125).
In Pilch's chronicle of the next phase in the development of Jewish education, he
saw a rise in enrollment coupled with a decline in hours of instruction characterizing
supplementary schools in the 1950s. His description of the phenomenon focuses on the
sociological conditions of the newly suburban Jewish population:
Better economic conditions, more leisure and higher level of education acquired
by the majority of parents in the 1940's and 1950's than in the previous decades
made it possible for them to desire and to afford for themselves and their children,
music, dancing, frequent vacations, various sport activities, and other forms of
recreation. This, in turn, called for a weekday afternoon school with limited hours
of instructions (p. 123).
Pilch drew the obvious conclusion, “curtailed hours of instruction of necessity
curtailed the possibilities for a sound Jewish education” (p. 124) but noted a secondary
effect on the profession of the Jewish educator. With fewer teaching hours available, the
professional Jewish educator of Benderly's days fell by the wayside, replaced by “non-
licensed, part-time teachers, ill equipped to do an effective job in the Jewish school”
(note to p. 124). This coincided with the draining of Jewish practice from the home,
which shifted more responsibility for not only Jewish education but also Jewish
enculturation onto the shoulders of the synagogue educators. “The school had not only to
teach the Qiddush, the Four Questions at the Seder, etc., but also to create conditions
whereby the child would practice what he learned” (p. 131).
Pilch fretted at the erosion of subjects such as Bible, Hebrew language, and
history in favor of a preoccupation with customs and ceremonies. Katzoff's 1949 study of
Conservative congregational schools (cited in Pilch, 1969) highlights the predicament of
schools simplifying their curriculum as inoculation against a perceived thread of drop-
out. By this time, the school hours had already diminished to five to six classroom hours
per week aimed at a minimum proficiency with the skills involved in a bar mitzvah
service.
While there have been some innovations since the 1950s – the most notable being
the elevation of Israel- and Holocaust-studies alongside (and, in many cases, above)
“customs and ceremonies” – the structures, content, and challenges of the synagogue
school have remained more or less static for the last half-century.
Woocher (2008) notes two opposite yet complementary trends in the last twenty-
five years of Jewish education: the perceived distancing of a large segment of Jews from
traditional Jewish expression and the simultaneous rise in interest in a more intense
relationship with Judaism among a different segment. The distancing seems to be
winning, as “intensive educational experiences still reach only a minority of Jews” (p. 32)
and “a majority of teens continue to exit the educational system between bar/bat mitzvah
and high school graduation” (p. 32).
A recent trend has been to propose upgrading the Jewish educational system
through the introduction of new technologies into the classroom (Administrator, 2009).
Despite the number of technological products available in the realm of Jewish education,
Woocher observes that few have made much impact. Most simply add a technological
facade to established Jewish educational practices rather than reconceptualizing
foundational notions of how, where, and when Jewish education takes place.
Despite the central role Dewey played in the foundation of modern American
Jewish education, few of his constructivist ideas are present in contemporary
supplementary education. Since these schools often take on the role of training young
people in how to perform Jewish ritual (and, in may senses, how to perform Judaism),
Dewey's concept of authentic learning seems particularly germane. In light of Dewey's
(1990/1899) charge that education must be built on authentic performance, it is necessary
to determine what exactly constitutes “authentic Judaism.” Amkraut (2008) draws from
Web 2.0 culture the idea that user-generated content is as authentic as that originating
with experts. Therefore, authentic Judaism includes the contemporary practices of Jews,
whether sanctioned by an authority or not.
This does not mean that Jewish educators can abandon traditional text or concepts
of authority, but it does open space within Jewish education to explore the full spectrum
of Jewish expression and examine issues of creativity and authority. But Jewish educators
do not need to solve these problems alone. Just as the supplementary school system was
original set up with an eye to how public school functioned, the Jewish educators today
can and should look to best practices in the field of general education to improve
religious education. Of course, this begs the question of whether there are best practices
in the field at the moment. May it be that our answers lie within the domain of the merely
theoretical, or may we find that real differences between Jewish education and general
education call for different approaches?
General Education
Over 100 years ago, Dewey (1990/1899) laid out the argument for authentic
education, which became the basis for experiential education. “The only discipline that
stands by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself” (p.
17). In other words, the memorization of facts from lectures and textbooks will never be
as effective as learning-by-doing. In order for experiences to become educative, they
must be structured around learning, reflection, and interpretation.
Shaffer (2006) asserted that since most contemporary life skills (at least in terms
of employment) are integrated with technology, school must employ these technologies
so students have assimilated the skills involved into their own tool kits: “But what would
education 'based on life itself' – learning to solve problems that matter by working on
things that matter – look like in our high-tech, digital world?” (p. 6). Palfrey & Gasser
(2008) echoed Shaffer's recommendation, saying “Programs where students are doing
applied work, research and writing, arts and music, and problem solving are obvious
places to seek [technological] integration” (p. 247). Gee (2007) called this
“connectionism,” the theory that reasoning based on pattern recognition comes more
readily to humans than that based on abstract principles, so learning through experience
helps create the patterns that over time become the basis for general knowledge.
Prensky (2006) and others argued that computer gaming is the prime format for
putting technology to use for education. Video games' immersive experience, adaptivity,
and ability to provide instant feedback make them ideal vessels for educational contents.
However, the cost of developing new games for the education market is generally
prohibitive.
Shaffer's formulation of epistemic games – i.e., simulations structured to orient
students to a particular way of thinking – presents a model that may prove more
accessible to Jewish educators. “Any epistemic game starts with the question: What is
worth being able to do in the world? ...Whatever is worth doing, though, some group of
people in society knows how to do it... So the second question is: Who knows how to do
this kind of thing, and how do they learn how to do it?” (p. 180). The field of
connectionism suggests that the skills once rooted in embodied experience ultimately
translate beyond the specifics of the contexts in which they were learned, so the
educational impact epistemic games extends far beyond the particular practicum
employed.
Certainly, technology in the classroom is not without its detractors. Stoll (1999)
attacked technology in schools, but his arguments mostly take issue with poor
implementation. There are bad teachers, sub-par textbooks, and bored students in the
traditional classroom; computers and those who create education content for them are not
immune to similar pitfalls. Cuban (2001) saw a more pressing problem: the ecology of
schooling is still oriented towards industrial-era goals of producing a new generation of
obedient factory workers. As Samuels (2008) put it, “On a fundamental level, our schools
are still structured by the modern celebration of the isolated individual who is rewarded
for individual acts of creativity and/or conformity, while our students have embraced a
more collaborative and distributive mode of learning and working.” (p. 221) Fundamental
changes in the way schooling works would need to be put in place to support a vision like
Shaffer's, and that degree of institutional change is unlikely to come to an institution as
large and ingrained as the American public school.
Shaffer identified this problem as well, acknowledging that the kind of attention
epistemic games require does not readily fit into the strictly structured school day. They
work best in third spaces such as
clubs, after-school programs, summer camps, and community centers... As a third
space between formal instruction and free play, epistemic games can explore what
can happen to games when the primary focus is on learning rather than on market
forces in commercial game production or on the institutional imperatives of
schools as they currently exist (p. 183).
Jenkins (cited in Joseph, 2008) echoed this prescription, seeing great opportunity
in third spaces also due to their ability to adapt and change more rapidly than the more
institutionalized school. While secular schools and even day schools may struggle with
this reality, supplementary Jewish education – both formal and informal – is built on a
third space model. The opportunity for transformative work is presenting itself, so how
can we better take advantage of this perfect alignment of factors?
Today's Teens
Palfrey and Gasser (2008) examine the teens they dub “Digital Natives”
(borrowing Prensky's term, itself a gloss on Rushkoff's metaphor). They emphasize that
“Digital Natives” are not a generation, but rather a population, a subset of the generation
born into the wired world. This population is determined as much by access to
technology (often determined through factors such as class, race, gender, and geography)
as by age.
Digital Natives have a different relationship with the concept of identity than their
parents do. They do not separate their sense of identity into different spheres in the way
their parents might; they understand themselves to have one identity that may find
different expression in different spheres. Greenberg (2004) described young people
“building identities in communities rather than finding them in ascribed characteristics”
(p. 15). Salen (2008) extended this to their “learning identities” as well, describing
“hybrid identities that seemingly reject previously distinct modes of being” (p.2)
combining all the different roles kids take on in the classroom – and anywhere else
learning takes place. Taken together, a picture emerges of young people who may no
longer relate to terms like “Jewish identity” any more than they do to the idea of an
“online identity,” seeing all aspects of themselves constantly at play, if ever-shifting in
prevalence. And yet, because (as boyd (2008) points out) the most popular social media
sites are built on a platform originally designed for online dating, there is strong emphasis
on displaying identity-characteristics (e.g. gender, religion, political affiliation) in their
default structures.
This feature, along with the prevalence of internet protocols allowing for screen-
name and avatar creation (e.g. instant messaging, online discussion forums, massively
multiplayer online role-playing games, etc.) allow for what Palfrey & Gasser (2008) call
“identity play,” in which “a Digital Native's identity is context-specific; its expression
depends on who's asking, what environment they're in, and what day it is.” Because of
the aforementioned inextricablility of online and offline identities, the ability to create
and play with multiple identities “complicate[s] matters in terms of how Digital Natives
think of themselves and present themselves to the rest of the world.” (p. 27) Several
scholars draw connections between this online performance of identity and Goffman's
(2007/1959) theory of performance. However, in an online setting in a multitasking
world, multiple performed identities can be on display simultaneously, sometimes even
contradicting each other. Unlike Goffman's conception of multiple fronts distinct from a
truer “backstage” identity, these online contradictions don't necessarily reveal duplicity or
privilege one “true” identity over other false identities.
Identity is not the only aspect of Digital Natives' lives being reshaped by their
technological context. Simon (cited in Salen, 2008) described an evolution of the concept
of knowledge, which has “shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to
being able to find and use it” (p. 5). Prensky (2006) went so far as to suggest the very
wiring of their brains has evolved to keep pace with the demands of their “twitch-speed”
culture. While Prensky knew of no direct studies of brain development in this population,
he raises a powerful suggestion. McPherson (2008) extended the question to recognize
that individuals' engagement with technology is also mediated by cultural context,
providing another dimension calling for further study. McPherson called for both an
understanding of “the specific mechanisms deployed by and the affective or emotional
registers activated by our embodied engagements with digital technologies” as well as an
understanding of the ways in which shifts in perceptual and cognitive facilities “are part
and parcel of larger cultural forces” (p. 8).
Rushkoff (1999/1996) examined youth culture circa 1996 and concludes the
current generation, which he dubbed “digital kids,” have flourished in an environment
that thrives on chaos. He identified abilities such as multitasking and swift judgment as
the positive flip side to the attention deficit disorder that became emblematic of this
generation. Rushkoff asserted that digital kids have traded attention span for attention
range, an ability he predicts will serve this generation well in the working world. Yardi
(2008) documented the success of incorporating group “backchannel” internet chat into
the classroom as a way to take advantage of students' ability to multitask. She observed
“students are able to ask questions, receive answers, and solicit information without
having to interrupt the frontchannel presentation” (p. 150). The result is a digital iteration
of constructivist learning, allowing students to “create their own knowledge by having

the freedom to direct the discussion in ways that are relevant, contextual, and
instructional for their own learning purposes” (p. 149). Yardi also identified social
benefits of the backchannel format: “Students who may have been too shy and inhibited
in the physical classroom had an opportunity to express themselves in the backchannel.
The chat room transitioned from a simple tool for social communication to a tightly knit
community” (p. 146).
This multilayered approach to the classroom is not restricted to the backchannel
format. Writing just before the explosion in the content-creation tools that have defined
“Web 2.0,” Rushkoff (1999/1996) observed that the immersive experience of video
games does not divorce the players from reality. Although video games convert “stories
told or observed into stories experienced” (p. 178), the active role gamers take as co-
creators of story content also creates a distancing not unlike Brecht's alienation effect.
Rushkoff connected this to the 1990s' obsession with irony, preferring to recast the stance
as one of recapitulation. “It gives us an insight into how nature works, and motivates us
to become more fully conscious and self-determining” (p. 228). In other words, kids can
be at once inside a complex issue and outside-looking-in. Rushkoff argues that in order to
reach the stage of recapitulation, learners must first pass through the simpler stages of
straightforward experience and metaphoric storytelling, and today's teens do so faster
than any generation before them. While it took centuries for barter to give way to notes
based on a gold standard before our financial system developed into a credit-based
recapitulation, teenagers can move from Mary Tyler Moore to Murphy Brown to Chelsea
Lately in the course of one evening of television viewing.

Knowing the ways in which today's teens are primed not only for new learning
formats but also active, collaborative participation in the world, educators must ask
themselves how they can adopt new approaches to teaching and learning to take
advantage of this population's particular aptitudes. As Balsamo & Anderson (2008)
remind us, we must rethink “our sense of students not as younger versions of ourselves,
but as members of a generation with its own unique disposition” (p. 244). For Jewish
educators, this directive should have double resonance, for our students have a unique
disposition not only with regards to how they learn, but to what they learn as well. To
serve this generation of learners, Jewish educators need to begin the hard work of
determining what the core content of Judaism is, how it might speak to this cohort of
students, how they will be best able to learn it.

CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION
There is a crisis of content in Jewish education. In short, there is no agreement as
to what liberal Jewish education is about. In the age of “Jewish continuity,” there was an
attempt to create an educational system with the goal of promoting endogamous marriage
and the ultimate production of another generation of Jewish children. However, that goal
proved to be empty without a fuller understanding of what exactly Jewish children were
expected to carry on and why. As Bayme (1997) put it, “One cannot expect continuity if
Jews know little about what they wish to continue” (p. 399). As Horowitz (2003/2000)
and Cohen & Eisen (2000) demonstrated, this generation of Jews more than any before it
demands a compelling message from Judaism to keep them involved.
This new stance towards meaning is not the only distinguishing characteristic of
today's Jews. We live in an age of extreme interconnectedness facilitated by networked
technology. For those of us old enough to remember the world before the internet
pervaded every aspect of our life, we see tremendous changes in how individuals receive,
interpret, and react to information. Those born into this networked world have never
known a different mode of relating to information. If their educators expect these Digital
Natives to mine meaning from their learning, it is incumbent upon the educators to keep
their pedagogy and curricula in sync with the needs of today's students.
This new status quo is complicated by most educators' relationship to technology,
which can be described in one of two ways: total dismissal (if not fear), or fumbling
attempts to incorporate the trappings of technology into traditional schooling formats.
(Even most online distance learning is a hybrid of correspondence course and in-class
lecture.) A third model is emerging, which requires educators to examine how Digital
Natives' use of technology reveals the ways they acquire, process, and use knowledge.
So, at the same time that Jewish educators must reinvent the what of Jewish education,
they must also reinvent the how. Thankfully, these two directives are not as separate as
they might first appear. The new ways that young people interact with and interpret the
world offer us helpful insight into what elements of Judaism best speak to their
experience and are most likely to draw youth into deeper, more meaningful engagement
with Judaism.
Greenberg (2004) noticed Generation Y's patterns of religious engagement
trending away from traditionally structured worship services and classes, preferring
informal expressions with groups of friends. However, she observed “There is a genuine
attachment to religious life and very little loss of faith, but it occurs in the context of a
full life complete with competing worries about getting good grades, finding a job or
getting a sexually transmitted disease” (p. 10). This move towards informality appears to
reflect the privatization of spirituality observed by Cohen & Eisen (2000) and Sarna
(2004). An understandable first reaction to this move on the part of the organized Jewish
community might be one of alarm – so much of Jewish American identity is built around
ideas of community, whether in the religious sense of minyan or the structural sense of
federation. But is the privatization of spirituality necessarily a bad thing?
This approach to ritual may simply be a reflection of a more wide-spread
approach to interests and information in general. Samuels (2008) observes that one of the
biggest differences between in-class discussion and online discussion is “the ability of the
individual user of new media to control the flow and intake of information,” or in simpler
terms, students can limit their reading to only the bits they're most interested in. He
stresses “that the power of new media to cater to real and imagined feelings of self-
direction threatens to hide and render invisible important social and public forces” (p.
229). This echoes Sarna and others' observations about cafeteria-style Judaism.
Samuels reveals that most of the “digital youth” he interviewed feel that
“automation gives them more autonomy to concentrate on what really matters” (p. 230).
He names this trend “auto-modernity,” situating it in light of postmodernity; where
postmodernity gave equal credence to all points of view, automodernity supposes a
worldview in which individuals' experience of the other is that of “an automated mirror
of self-reflection” (p. 233). Because today's digital youth are so used to the micro-
customized point of view necessitated by the overwhelming amount of information
available and our search-engine and social-networks world, they “are motivated to seek
out only the sources and blogs that reinforce their own personal views and ideologies.”
This is complemented by a “need for digital youth to have their autonomy registered by
others” (p. 234).
However, there's a flip side to this tendency towards increased specialization:

increased cooperation. Becker (2006) remarked on the importance of cooperation in most
video games, both with other players and non-player characters (NPCs) within the game.
Au (2008) described extensive collaboration within the virtual world of Second Life, a
simulation with no built-in objectives or competition. Role-playing games built on the
model of Dungeons & Dragons – the most popular of which today is World of Warcraft
(“P.C. Gaming Records,” n.d.), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game –
require players to specialize (as warriors, healers, etc.) and then team up and work
together. Gamers are particularly primed to bring together their complementary skills to
achieve a goal, but this feature is not limited to gamers. Digital youth collaborate in the
construction of websites, the production of blogs, videos, and other media content,
priming them for the “crew culture” described by Anderson & Balsamo (2008):
Students across grade levels not only learn from each other, but they also learn
that they are part of a community-of-practice. This is an important part of social
literacy that all students need to learn: how to interact with people who have
different skill sets, different levels of expertise, and different intellectual and
cultural profiles. (p. 253).
If this population is interested in specializing but then collaborating in gameplay
and media production, can we capitalize on this pattern in the realm of Jewish education?
There may be an opportunity to seize on individuals' willingness to engage in ritual to
connect them to others with different interests. In this way, Jewish education may benefit
from becoming a simulation of the Jewish world. While, for example, both the butcher
and the scribe must understand bible, Talmud, and how halacha works to do their jobs,
the particular texts and skills they mastered don't much overlap. And yet, no one would
suggest that either has an inadequate Jewish education to function as a Jewish adult.
Today's Jewish community has many more characters than butchers and scribes; but we
are not appropriately training our children to find and take their places a society that
needs journalists and ritual directors, philanthropists and program directors, theologians
and activists. Sacks (2009) pointed out all the ways in which Judaism is, by its essential
nature, future-oriented. Why then does so much current Jewish educational practice focus
on fetishizing the past?
One can understand the concentration on history, particularly in the generation
directly following the Holocaust. The combined forces of “never again” and “look at how
much knowledge was lost” were surely intense. On a more practical level, a focus on
history offers no challenge to the student's current practice. Fackenheim's 614th
commandment might provide some a sense of urgency to “be Jewish,” but it doesn't
describe what “being Jewish” actually means. When so much of the curriculum is
backwards-looking, Jewish practice may also blend into the landscape of “how things
used to be” rather than “what we do today.”
Certainly from the late 1960s onward, one loud answer to “what we do today” has
been supporting the state of Israel. However, research has shown that “Supporting Israel”
as an end in itself has not taken root with the current generation. A recent feature in the
New York Review of Books (Beinart, 2010) leads with a story of a 2003 study uncovering
nothing but indifference on the part of American Jewish college students toward Israel,
not because they haven't learned about the state, but rather because they are fed up with
the actions of the state. Regardless of how any one of us feels about the politics of the
middle east, this is not a situation to which we can feel confident about staking the
survival of our people.
This is not an argument to eradicate the study of history from our religious school
curricula, nor is it a strike against Holocaust- or Israel-studies. But if the goal of Jewish
education is to give youth the tools and desire to become engaged Jewish adults, the
pedagogy and content must be designed with that goal in mind. While for the most part
that hasn't been the case thus far in supplementary school education, there is hope. In the
next chapter, we'll take a look at constructivist models for teen education that enable our
young people to encounter the powerful ideas that have motivated Jews for millennia
while developing their tools for putting these ideas to work in their own lives.
CHAPTER FOUR: STRATEGIC PLAN
Focusing on the Future when the Future is Now
As with any quality educational plan, we must begin at the end: establishing our
goals. I propose the goal of Jewish teen education must be to give teens the knowledge,
skills, and motivations to be active participants in Judaism. You'll note I don't speak about
turning them into Jewish adults. Although there is value in being future-focused, I believe
it is dangerous (and somewhat disingenuous) to continually treat young people as though
they are simply a generation-in-waiting. If there's one positive lesson to take from the
overwhelming focus on bar mitzvah of many synagogue schools, it's that our teens are
whole people in the eyes of Judaism. The rise of the phrase “Jewish identity” in
educational discourse reinforces this approach. As Buckingham (2008) reminds us, “[A
focus on identity] entails viewing young people as significant actors in their own right, as
'beings,' and not simply as 'becomings' who should be judged in terms of their projected
futures” (p. 19).
Focusing on who our kids are today (and not simply who they might be in the
future) also demands educational practice built on a framework that takes advantage of
Digital Natives' experience of the world. This does not necessarily require any new
technology in the classroom; rather, it requires a reformatting of school to take advantage
of Digital Natives' breadth of attention, willingness to be content creators, and reliance on
cooperation. As Palfrey & Gasser (2008) put it:
In order for schools to adapt to the habits of Digital Natives and how they are
processing information, educators need to accept that the mode of learning is
changing rapidly in a digital age. Before answering the questions about how
precisely to use technology in schools, we must understand these changes. To do
so, it's necessary to expand the frame to all learning, not just the kind that happens
in the classroom (p. 239).
While this may seem like an overwhelming project, it's important to recognize the
ways in which contemporary Jewish teen education is already fertile ground. In
discussing the uses of video games in education, Gee (2008) identified five conditions
necessary for experiential learning, concluding that these same conditions characterize
well-designed video games. Gee's characteristics strongly echo Reimer's 2003 six-point
response to Chazan, which suggests that learning through video games may not be so
different from the learning through other kinds of games already popularized by informal
educational practice.
Video games may be just a previously under-explored context for a familiar kind
of education. While Jewish informal education may still be under-appreciated by some
sectors of the Jewish educational establishment, many studies (and in turn, foundations)
have taken note of the success of educational camping, travel, and youth groups
(Wertheimer, 2008). The growing call for integration of informal and formal Jewish
education (Reimer & Bryfman, 2008) means we're already on the right path.
Bogost's exploration of gaming rhetoric (2008) offers one window into methods
for improving informal education by learning from the world of gaming. In exploring the
social practices both within the world of a game and around the playing of the game,
Bogost asserts “we can learn to read games as deliberate expressions of particular
perspectives” (p. 119). Thus the world of gaming can induct the gamers into particular
roles (with their concurrent values and viewpoints) in similar ways that camps, youth
groups, and other informal educational structures induct their participants. By thinking
through the procedural rhetoric of a game (or informal experience) – the ways in which a
viewpoint is asserted through the rules forming the game's framework – students can
understand what they are being asked not only to do, but to be. As Bogost puts it, “we
may want to question the values of professional practices rather than assume those values
blindly. Procedural rhetoric offers an approach to do so.” (p. 130).
Today's students are savvy consumers, and they are primed to “talk back” – they
share news stories on blogs or Facebook, leave comments arguing with the news, and
register their votes for the next American Idol via SMS text messages. In the same way
students of the past have been trained to understand the underlying bias of a news article
or textbook, today's students must also learn to read for bias in the procedural rhetoric of
a video game – or a Jewish organization. They can then be empowered to make use of the
tremendous digital tools at their disposal to explode the inherent biases and make
informed choices about their own affiliations.
This bidirectional exploration of the world – seeking and contributing information

at the same time – produce feedback loops, as Palfrey and Gasser (2008) explain: “The
idea is that she may react publicly to the story or remake and retell it in some fashion.
Digital tools enable her to have an impact on the way the story is told. This feedback loop
should be taken seriously” (p. 243). In other words, our students are better primed to
gather and recreate information, although they need guidance in best practices. As Jews
who are part of the developing Jewish story, teen voices in the feedback loop matter on a
level deeper than simply acknowledging the democratization of information in the digital
age. Their voices are an essential part of the Jewish story, and a large element of Jewish
education is giving our kids both the tools and the confidence to contribute.
One of the biggest contributions Digital Natives have already made to Judaism is
the introduction of remix culture. Remixing is cited over and over as a definitional
feature of this population, and Brown & Galperin (2009) bring the concept into the
Jewish world, saying “A remix identity is a commentary on an existing identity” (p. 162).
Of course, commentary is one of the things Jews do best, and have been doing for at least
a couple thousand years. What today's digital kids call remixing, the rabbis called
midrash, aggadah, or simply Torah study.
Yet despite proliferation of articles lauding the democratizing of media that Web
2.0 has brought about, McPherson (2008) notes the disconnect between these
proclamations and the actual percentage of Web 2.0 users creating media. She does
question what threshold is used in measuring creation: does leaving a comment on
someone else's video count as media creation? If our students have, as Samuels (2008)
suggests, a need to “have their autonomy registered by others” (p. 234), we must nurture
their abilities to make themselves heard, while providing ample options for teens to
customize their learning experiences. This doesn't mean we give in to their tendency to
only seek out points of view that agree with theirs; as Sacks (2009) argues, we must teach
them the skills of listening and understanding so that they may also be understood.
Plugging It In
Having identified some of the features of contemporary teens' lives that can
inform Jewish education, let's imagine what some of these ideas might look like in
practice. Of all the models proposed in the literature, I find Shaffer's episetmic games to
be the most compelling for use in Jewish teen education. While Prensky (2006) and Gee
(2008) both made persuasive arguments for the use of video games in educational
contexts, there are two main drawbacks to their approaches. Prensky's proposal for
crafting new games for educational purposes simply costs too much for the actual market,
especially given the reality that not every game developed would be a success. Gee's
model of building lessons on the basis of existing, popular games is more realistic, but
limited by the diversity of who our students are. While a random sampling of a dozen
Jewish teens may include twelve kids who all play video games, it's unlikely that there's a
single gaming platform (e.g. Xbox vs. Wii vs. Playstation) shared among all members of
the group, never mind a particular game.
Epistemic games, on the other hand, require no particular investment in

equipment, although technology can ease their implementation. Remember, at the most
basic level, these games are simulations modeled on professional practicums designed to
teach the participants how to think in a certain way. Naturally, in the process of learning
how to think like a particular kind of person, the participants also master using the tools
of the related field.
The two major hurdles Jewish educators must clear to begin employing epistemic
games are the narrow vision many people have with regards to what it means to be a
“professional” Jew, and the lack of practicums on which to base our simulations. With
regards to the former problem, one could argue this has been a structural issue with
Jewish education even when epistemic games are not part of the picture. For the majority
of Jewish laypeople, the only idea they have of a professional Jew is a rabbi (Friedman,
2010). For the purpose of our epistemic games, we must both remember the other
professions that make the Jewish community run (from journalists to philanthropists to
kosher butchers) as well as expand our understanding of “professions” to include anyone
who knows a lot about something and does it well.
Of course, this still leaves the other problem. What, for example, is the training
practicum for a Jewish homemaker? This gets to the heart of one of the major unspoken
issues of Jewish education in our age. Jewish educators are being called on to teach
young people the aspects of Judaism that would most naturally be learned through
mimesis in the Jewish home of yesteryear. But to assume that any imagined role we hope
our kids might take on can or should be taught through an epistemic game is a mistake.
As Shaffer (2008) demonstrates with his science.net project, it may be useful to train
students to think like a professional in a realm not immediately identified with the subject
being studied – in this example, he models a science class around a journalism
simulation. This enables the students to benefit from a dual curriculum, learning the
content of science through their journalistic research while simultaneously taking on the
professional skills and identity of journalists. This resulted in what Au (2008) called
“mirrored flourishing” – the students' lives outside of the simulation were enriched by
what they were doing within the simulation, and vice versa. Shaffer reported students not
only being able to relate better to their science learning, but also speaking up more in all
their classes, asking better questions, etc. When we speak about Jewish teen education,
which most families view as even more optional than any study that takes place prior to
the bar mitzvah, these sorts of demonstrable benefits may be particularly useful as a
marketing point for students overwhelmed with the array of activities vying for their
attention. A fifteen-year-old (or her parents) may not understand the value of hevruta
study, but the value improved writing or public speaking skills are readily apparent for
their applicability to the secular world.
Superstructure
Adopting new models like epistemic games and adapting our teaching styles to
account for the ways in which our students understand and interact with the world is key
to bringing Jewish education up to date. But there are lessons to be learned from our
interaction with technology that can also be applied to the superstructure of Jewish
education. I have already discussed the power of “mirrored flourishing” as an organizing
concept not only within our lessons, but also as a selling point for educational programs.
In addition to mirrored flourishing, Au (2008) identified two other core aspects of the on-
line virtual world Second Life that I think are also useful to keep in mind when designing
our own simulations, which are, after all, smaller versions of virtual worlds in
themselves. Au calls these elements Bebop Reality and Impression Society. Bebop
Reality, named for the subgenre of jazz music, is the value placed on the playful
improvisation of participants within the virtual world. Impression Society is the social
structure that values this creativity, in that the most creative/soulful individuals reap
rewards.
Each of these principles can and should be incorporated into teen Jewish
education. To a certain extent, each is already present. Religion – particularly one as
ancient as ours – can seem dauntingly calcified and stuffy (Boyarin, 2008). And yet, is
Bebop Reality so foreign to a culture that created great works of midrash riffing on
elocutionary similarities among disparate texts? What is pilpul if not the Beit Midrash's
version of a virtuoso jazz solo, rendered in halachic reasoning rather than musical notes?
In this case, educators may simply need to reframe how we teach certain concepts to
emphasize not only the creativity but also the playfulness inherent in even the most
serious Jewish practices.
Emphasizing the bebop reality inherent in the Jewish textual tradition lays the
groundwork for creating an impression society, a social milieu placing value on

individuals' creativity. In some ways, teens have already established this as a Jewish
phenomenon on their own. One can see memes spread throughout Jewish youth culture –
both positive, like a new melody for an old Shabbat zemer, or negative, like the “points
system” that has plagued most (if not all) Jewish youth groups for decades (Greenwald,
2008). The proliferation of Facebook groups like “You Know You're Jewish When...” and
“I Love Jewish Geography!” is a testament to individuals' ability to launch their creative
products into the world, even when the products aren't particularly creative. Despite the
somewhat mundane nature of these groups, they continue to host active discussions years
after they first launched, so they clearly meet a need. The challenge for educators is
harnessing this desire and ability to share and spread ideas, so students spread more
zmirot melodies and fewer points systems. When this happens, the students will not only
be teaching each other, but nurturing a self-renewing environment that continually
encourages further engagement with meaningful content in a creative manner.
Second Life and virtual worlds aren't the only technological product with lessons
to offer. School structures can also incorporate “key community features that are
characteristic of P2P [peer-to-peer] platforms, like shared playlists, recommendation
systems, and P2P webradio services” (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008, pg 146). Imagine a
socially-networked course catalog, so students see what their friends are taking, read
what previous students have said about classes & teachers, and make their own
recommendations to their friends and eventual successors. Au (2008) cautions that ratings
systems can easily fall prey to dishonesty. In a school setting, where the information
ecosystem is small enough to be carefully and thoughtfully monitored, this should be a

manageable issue. And remember, enabling these social features not only assist students
in making automodern educational choices, they also give the educators an additional
window into how students are experiencing their program which should be used as
another data set in program evaluation and assessment.
Of course, the kinds of systems I'm now describing may seem beyond the realistic
reach of most Jewish educational programs. This problem too has solutions in the world
of technology: open-sourcing and interoperability. The open source movement advocates
for resource sharing so that all users of a product might benefit from the product, and all
who have something to contribute to the product can do so in turn. For example, the word
processor on which this paper has been composed is OpenOffice.org Writer, software
whose source code is freely available for developers to view and change, on the
agreement that their changes be shared “to enable innovation for building the next
generation of open-network productivity services” (OpenOffice.org guidelines, 2010).
Interoperability is the idea that diverse systems can work together. Sieradski (2010) has
been a vocal proponent for establishing open-source standards across Jewish technology,
specifically to encourage interoperability. In terms of Jewish education, we must be
willing to share the costs (financial and otherwise) of developing tools and systems for
our institutions, while making sure they can all speak to each other. If one community has
created a useful system for student registration, no other community should have to start
at square one to develop their own. Should the preexisting tool not exactly meet the needs
of the second community, they should be encouraged to build upon the existing tools and
in turn share their innovations as well.

CHAPTER FIVE: NEXT STEPS
By means of reaching a conclusion, it is time to finally address the elephant in the
paper, the question asked in the paper's title: Will the Third Temple be Built in Second
Life? Leaving aside the thorny theological issues this question brings up, it should be
clear that I believe the answer is no. Despite the messianic vision technology enthusiasts
like to apply to whatever the next big digital thing may be, meaningful content will
always trump shiny form. But as any postmodernist would tell you, form and content can
never be entirely divorced from each other. Today's educators must carefully examine
both what they are teaching and how they are teaching in order to ensure that both form
and content remain as meaningful as possible to their students.
Unfortunately, that divorcing of form from content is exactly what large swaths of
American liberals Jews have done to Judaism in the last half-century. Synagogues
attendees without a deep sense of worship, rituals without a meaningful connection to
theology, and organizations whose missions have only a tenuous connection to anything
particularly Jewish have quietly drained any sense of urgency from Jewish life. If Jewish
values are simply American values with Hebrew or Yiddish names, what is the point of
marking ourselves as different? Haven't we learned from the Holocaust that Jewish
difference makes us a target?

While this may be an overstatement of the case, it's hard to argue against the
preservation of Judaism relying on making a claim for Jewish distinctiveness. We must
reclaim the elements of Judaism that aren't exactly the same as American values, and
celebrate our unique place in the tapestry of American society. Whether strong Jewish
voices are willing to stand up for unpopular ideas like placing the well-being of the
collective (or, dare I say it, covenantal mission) ahead of personal fulfillment remains to
be seen.
The good news is that our young people are particularly up to this challenge.
Having been primed to make their voices heard in a variety of ways unimaginable to their
parents at that age, Digital Natives are unafraid to leap into the Jewish conversation – as
long as it's taking place in settings they inhabit, in a language they speak. This is not to
say that we must give up on time-tested traditional modes of learning about Judaism.
Rather, we have an opportunity to expand the ways in which we all encounter Jewish
wisdom and embark upon the activities that make up our Jewish lives. Today's Jewish
educators need to learn not how to speak to Digital Natives, but how to speak with them,
becoming partners in creating a new learning structure – a remix of the hevruta learning
partnership that has sustained serious Jewish learning for dozens of generations before us.
Jewish teen education is already in a strong starting position. By offering a safe
third space for teens to explore issues of meaning and depth away from the pressures of
school and family, camps, youth groups, travel programs, and supplementary high school
programs are a natural locus for transformative experiences. Experiential Jewish
educational practice already reflects much of what the best of video games also offers.
But further mindfulness of who our students are and what their experience of the world is
like can only strengthen our position as educators.
Perhaps the most important lesson reflected in the automodernity of this
generation is, ironically, best summed up in a retired phrase from the 1960s: the now
generation. Digital Natives are active participants in society, content creators who can be
indistinguishable from adults when masked with the anonymity of a computer screen and
carefully chosen avatar or screen name. To borrow a metaphor from a different sort of
game (that I much prefer playing on Wii than on a grassy diamond), the Jewish
community needs to stop treating kids as the generation “on deck” and accept that they
too are already up at bat. And through a thoughtful partnership between young people and
elders, educators and students, tradition and technology, the American Jewish community
may find itself batting a thousand... or at least have their score posted to the online
leaderboard.
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Will The Third Temple Be Built in Second Life? Bringing Jewish Education Into The Twenty-First Century

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Running head: BRINGING JEWISH ED INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Will the Third Temple be Built in Second Life?

Bringing Jewish Education into the Twenty-First Century

suburban experience, with Jewish educational philosophies being grounded in 1970s

today's adolescents. An academic analysis of modern Jewish history and sociology

challenges current definitions of Jewish identity. Examining best practices in

contemporary secular education reveals a new pedagogic approach to support this

emerging paradigm of Jewish engagement.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

newly suburban, second-generation, Conservative-affiliated by default rather than

religious school classrooms.

Critics of the American public school system similarly complain of an out-of-date

their place in contemporary Jewish society.

Selection of the Topic

immigration to describe the profound generation gap caused by advancing technology,

world of interconnectedness facilitated by technologies such as the internet and mobile

telecommunications. As a “Digital Pioneer” (Shrock, 2008), I find myself well-positioned

as a translator between these two populations1. As a practitioner in the field of Jewish

determine which technologies belong in the classroom, or whether instead to invest in

the learning taking place?

challenge of potential reinvention as a response to changing lifestyles. I set out to

hopes of developing a contemporary approach to Jewish teen education taking into

consideration the unique qualities of this cohort of learners.

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Jewish Life in Mid-century America

Many studies of Jewish life in America distinguish chronological periods with

generation of immigration. Neusner (1987) identifies thirty-year definitional windows,

serves his assertion that third-generation American Judaism is grounded in “Holocaust

immigrated either in anticipation or aftermath of the genocide of World War II.

Despite Neusner's definition of generations, his sample represents the largest

segment of the American Jewish community so it useful for making generalizations. He

movement (as cited in Hertzberg, 1997) showed marked decline in observance of

Kaplan (2005) sees a different motivating force in the establishment of Jewish

identity in the post-WWII generation: American Jews' desire to distinguish themselves

retreated to all-Jewish social circles for their nights and weekends.

Hertzberg's description paints a rather dreary picture of the schools:

center for American Judaism a panacea or merely a band-aid?

subsequent explosion of Holocaust-related books as the beginning of public Jewish social

attributed to one particular event.

“somewhat secular” because in Woocher's estimation, the perpetuation of Judaism (and

organized Jewish community struggles to find a workable substitute.

achievement as having created a new danger to Jewish identity in America. Now,

prior commitment (i.e. a history of involvement or prior socialization) or an act of will”

Today's Jewish landscape presents a fractured Judaism, or perhaps a plurality of

Cambridge Companion to American Judaism (2005) attempt to differentiate between

(The 2000-2001 NJPS did not examine this dichotomy.)

project of Judaism may want more guidance.

embodied in Jewish organizations such as Federation or Hadassah that provide

opportunities to socialize or perform a task within a Jewish context without strong

ensure continuity” (p. 398).

inseparable from religion.

In his search for an essential American Judaism, Liebman looks to draw

unlikely to be thought of as 'fellow Jews'”(p. 140). This is an important distinction to

The dynamic of acceptance versus rejection/belligerence regarding one’s

Jewishness has been replaced by a dynamic of finding Jewishness to be

meaningful versus remaining indifferent to it. Jewish continuity of the group as a

whole has come to depend on the individual’s commitments and decision-making.

meaning over communal concerns, and the construction of Jewish identity on a

community – Küng is a Christian looking in from beyond, Horowitz a Jew writing on

behalf of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York,

one of the largest Jewish communal organizations in America. Regardless, if connecting

provide for the future?

What is Judaism about?