PEDAGOGIES OF PEOPLEHOOD

Shlomi Ravid

In 2011 CJPE's Global Task Force on Peoplehood Education found that Peoplehood educators had almost no programs, manuals or materials to work with. Ravid recalls that finding and a 2013 call to shift from concept-building to people-building, then marks the M² and Z3 fellowship as the first serious answer, a meta-program for developing many Peoplehood programs rather than a single one.

Amitai Fraiman

In 2024, 43 percent of American Jews told the Jewish Federations of North America they were engaging more deeply in Jewish life or wanted to. Eighteen months after October 7 the figure had fallen to 31 percent. Fraiman, founding director of the Z3 Project, argues that the educator's task has shifted from awakening belonging to helping Jews understand what an already awakened belonging asks of them.

Shuvi Hoffman

A wine-stained illuminated Haggadah or a handwritten Chana Senesh draft with crossed-out words does something a website cannot. Hoffman, of the National Library of Israel, walks learners through authentic sources using PaRDeS, moving from what is on the page to its context, its meaning for the learner, and what it says about the Jewish people, before inviting each learner to add a piece of their own.

Analucía Lopezrevoredo

A vintage suitcase sits in the middle of the room. Out of it come a siddur annotated in several languages, a vial of anise, maracas and a kippah stitched with Indigenous textile patterns, passed hand to hand before anyone speaks. Lopezrevoredo, founder of Jewtina y Co., builds a 100-minute multisensory session on the Jewish story of migration, ending with each learner writing a note to a future relative.

Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath

Classical Hebrew speaks of zakhor, memory, where modern Hebrew speaks of history, and Vinokor-Meinrath builds her pedagogy on the difference. Learners draw a stick figure and fill it with their Jewish lives, a story on the mouth, someone they carry on the heart, a food memory on the stomach and a Jewish place on the feet, then share the portraits in chevruta and build a group composite such as a cookbook.

Mollie Andron

Six months into the first cohort of twelve master educators, October 7 happened, and the question of how to cultivate Peoplehood stopped feeling conceptual. Andron describes the fellowship's two cohorts meeting every other week on Zoom for ten months, the disagreements that surfaced inside the group itself, and how the editors chose ten of the 24 pedagogies produced for this edition.

Yakir Englander

"It is complicated" has become the phrase that shuts down Israel conversations. Englander, raised in a Hasidic community in Israel, proposes the Hasidic story as the way out, a genre that keeps tension alive, puts the storyteller and the body inside the narrative, and ends by inviting the listener in. His workshop has participants tell their own story of Israel, anchored in places from Jerusalem to the Israel National Trail.

Aytan Kadden

Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught that everyone should carry two slips of paper, one reading "for me the world was created" and the other "I am but dust and ash." Kadden, a Judaics teacher for more than twenty years, builds a pedagogy of humility on that pairing and on Moses' wish that all God's people were prophets, with chevruta at its center and a Mussar-based practice of listening without answering.

Jacqueline Nicholls

The adults who say they failed drawing in primary school are the ones Nicholls most wants in the room. A London artist who once drew the entire Talmud on the Daf Yomi schedule, she pairs Torah study with drawing as a way of thinking, and ends each session with every drawing displayed together, so interpretations that would compete in a text class sit side by side.

Dominika Zakrzewska

A few years of catastrophe have overshadowed a thousand years of Polish Jewish life. Zakrzewska, who teaches at M. Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, builds her pedagogy around artifacts, photographs, recordings and objects from local Jewish history, so learners in schools, community centers and conversion programs meet the achievements of earlier generations alongside their losses. The approach, she argues, fits any Jewish community that has lived through rupture.

Adam Eilath

Most of these essays never mention October 7. Eilath, who taught both fellowship cohorts, reads them as a turn from defining Peoplehood to asking how it takes hold in a learner. He traces three recurring concerns, memory as active participation, relationship that holds through disagreement, and participation over mere exposure, and locates the renewal of a people in classrooms and chevruta tables.

Jeni S. Friedman

Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews say they have a lot in common with Reform Jews, and the reverse holds too. Friedman adapts Arthur Aron's 1997 study, which used 36 questions to build closeness between strangers, into three sets of twelve that move Jewish pairs from personal memory through contested belonging to what the Jewish people owe one another. She calls it filling the cracks with gold.

Mikhael Kesher

Fifty square tiles, each a fictional Jewish child with a name, a hometown, four core identities and a short biography, together roughly represent the Jewish people today. Kesher, Director of Israel Education at The Jewish Education Project, has learners lay the tiles side by side so shared identities touch, a game with no single right answer that builds curiosity before learners are asked to argue.

Laynie Soloman

One semester, almost half of Soloman's class of future rabbis and teachers had been to Washington, some for the Israel rally and some for the Rabbis for Ceasefire action, and each week they asked simply to learn Torah. Soloman, on the faculty of SVARA, proposes the house of study as the home of Klal Yisrael, and has students write letters to the commentators and sages whose words they study.