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SEARCH ALL PEOPLEHOOD PAPERS

A collection of articles from a diverse group of Jewish leaders and thinkers that cover philosophical aspects of Jewish Peoplehood as well as practical implications for Jewish organizations, schools and communities. Over the years, the Papers have covered a large range of topics relating to Jewish Peoplehood.

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Introduction from the Editor

Shlomi Ravid

Ravid recalls that CJPE's 2011 Global Task Force report named the move from concept to pedagogy as a core challenge for Peoplehood education, and introduces the M² and Z3 Project fellowship, launched over a decade later, as the first fellowship created to develop such pedagogies.

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37.01

Introduction: Recurring Themes of the Peoplehood Fellows

Adam Eilath

Eilath, faculty for both fellowship cohorts, reads the essays as a shift from defining Jewish peoplehood to asking how educators cultivate it, tracing their shared concerns with memory, with keeping relationships intact through disagreement, and with making learners participants in the Jewish story.

Edition & Article #

37.03

The Story of Israel Through Hasidic Storytelling: Bridging Reality and Hope

Yakir Englander

Englander, raised in a Hasidic community in Israel, adapts the Hasidic story to Israel education, teaching participants to tell a story of Israel that holds tension without resolving it, places the teller inside it, involves the body, and ends with a question that invites the listener in.

Edition & Article #

37.05

Primary Sources as a Portal to Jewish Peoplehood

Shuvi Hoffman

Hoffman, of the National Library of Israel, applies the PaRDeS framework to authentic primary sources such as letters, manuscripts, and posters, guiding learners from close observation and historical context to personal meaning and Peoplehood significance, and finally to adding their own contribution to the Jewish story.

Edition & Article #

37.07

The Mosaic of the Jewish People: A Pedagogy of Relational Sense-Making

Mikhael Kesher

Kesher introduces The Mosaic of the Jewish People, a deck of fifty tiles each portraying a fictional Jewish child with a hometown and four core identities, which learners arrange so that shared identities touch as they work out where they themselves belong among the world's Jews.

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37.09

Drawing Out a New Torah

Jacqueline Nicholls

Nicholls pairs Torah study with drawing for adults, including those convinced they cannot draw, and closes each session by displaying everyone's drawings together, so that different readings of the same text stand side by side as distinct letters in one Torah scroll.

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37.11

The Pedagogies of Jewish Peoplehood: Cultivating Collective Consciousness With Educational Creativity

Mollie Andron

Andron recounts how M² convened twelve master Jewish educators in 2023, six months before October 7, and how two cohorts produced 24 pedagogies, ten published here, though the fellows did not always agree on what Jewish Peoplehood means, let alone how to teach it.

Edition & Article #

37.02

The Peoplehood Problem Has Changed

Amitai Fraiman

Fraiman argues that October 7 shifted the educational task from awakening Jewish belonging to helping Jews interpret and deepen a belonging already awakened, and offers the fellowship's pedagogies as practices that keep disagreement among Jews from becoming severance.

Edition & Article #

37.04

36 Questions that Lead to Peoplehood: A Practice for Increasing Empathy and Connection in a Fractured Jewish World

Jeni S. Friedman

Friedman adapts Arthur Aron's 36 questions for building closeness between strangers into a guided conversation for pairs of Jewish adults who differ in religious, political, or ideological outlook, moving them from personal Jewish stories through tensions over belonging to what Jews owe one another.

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37.06

“The World Was Created for Me” vs. “I Am But Dust and Ash”: Anava/Humility as a Pedagogy Toward Jewish Peoplehood

Aytan Kadden

Kadden proposes anava, a humility that holds one's own worth alongside recognition of the other's, as a basis for Peoplehood education, drawing on Rabbi Simcha Bunim's two slips of paper and Moses' wish that all God's people were prophets to build four classroom practices.

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37.08

The Things We Carry: A Pedagogy of Jewish Migration and Adaptation

Analucia Lopezrevoredo

Lopezrevoredo builds a multisensory session around a suitcase of objects, among them a siddur annotated in several languages, a vial of anise, and maracas, inviting learners to touch, smell, and hear Jewish migration before sharing their own family objects and writing to a future relative.

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37.1

Peoplehood Orientation: Nurturing Klal Yisrael through Torah Study

Laynie Soloman

Soloman proposes a Peoplehood Orientation to teaching rabbinic literature that treats the house of study as the place where Klal Yisrael is formed, with a practice in which learners write letters to the sages whose Torah they study and consider what questions those ancestors have for them.

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37.12

CJPE

The Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education serves as a resource and catalyst for developing the field of Jewish Peoplehood. It also serves as the central entity to address the challenges of Jewish Peoplehood education. CJPE offers institutions and individuals the resources and support to obtain professional development, content and programmatic development. It will achieve this through research, resource and content development, evaluation, convening, lectures, and mentoring and consulting.

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