Pedagogies of Peoplehood. Peoplehood Papers Edition 37.

In 2011, a CJPE report summarizing the work of the Global Task Force on Peoplehood Education named a blunt gap: educators who wanted to teach belonging to the Jewish people had almost no resource books, manuals or materials to work with.

Many people speak about Jewish Peoplehood. Far fewer know how to cultivate it.

It took more than a decade, as Dr. Shlomi Ravid writes in his introduction, for a serious initiative to take up that challenge.

M², The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education, in partnership with the Z3 Project of the Oshman Family JCC, launched the Pedagogies of Peoplehood Research Fellowship. Over two cohorts, in 2023 and 2025, twelve master Jewish educators from around the world met every other week for ten months at a time to sit with the questions underneath the language of community. What does it actually mean to belong to the Jewish People? What responsibilities emerge from that belonging? Who do we mean when we say Klal Yisrael? Six months into the first cohort, October 7 happened, and the work stopped feeling conceptual and became urgent.

Each fellow composed a paper and built an educational resource that they, and others, could use to cultivate Jewish Peoplehood. This edition presents ten of the twenty-four pedagogies the two cohorts produced, chosen to show the range of what was developed, with four introductory essays that frame the collection. As Adam Eilath writes, the papers mark a shift in the conversation, from describing Peoplehood as an idea to examining the educational conditions under which it grows.

The ten pedagogies:

• Hasidic storytelling for Israel education. Telling one's own story of Israel, holding its tensions instead of resolving them.

• 36 questions. A famous psychology experiment adapted into scaffolded conversations between Jews who differ.

• Primary sources. A wine-stained Haggadah or a handwritten draft as a portal, read through the four levels of PaRDeS.

• Anava. Humility as the ground of Peoplehood, practiced through chevruta and learned from Moses.

• The Mosaic. Fifty tiles, each a fictional Jewish child, laid side by side until the global Jewish people takes shape on the table.

• The things we carry. A suitcase of objects, from a multilingual siddur to maracas, opening the Jewish story of migration.

• Drawing out a new Torah. Drawing as a way of thinking, in a beit midrash where every hand makes a different mark.

• Letters to ancestors. Learners write to the sages whose Torah they study, and listen for what comes back.

• Zakhor. Memory rather than history, mapped onto a self-portrait of each learner's Jewish life.

• Rootedness. Artifacts from local Jewish history that let a community reclaim a thousand years, not only its catastrophes.

  
  

The edition brings together Mollie Andron, Adam Eilath, Yakir Englander, Amitai Fraiman, Jeni S. Friedman, Shuvi Hoffman, Aytan Kadden, Mikhael Kesher, Analucía Lopezrevoredo, Jacqueline Nicholls, Shlomi Ravid, Laynie Soloman, Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath, and Dominika Zakrzewska.

Peoplehood Papers 37 was created in partnership with M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education and the Z3 Project of the Oshman Family JCC, and published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education. The editors are Dr. Shlomi Ravid, founding editor of the Peoplehood Papers and Director of CJPE, Clare Goldwater, and Mollie Andron, who carried the bulk of the editorial work. We thank Julie Maschler Pearl for the design of the booklet, and the Fellows themselves for their creativity and thoughtfulness. The booklet also points readers to the fourteen additional pedagogies the two cohorts created.

You can download the full edition here, and if you'd like to stay part of this conversation, subscribe to receive future updates from CJPE.