Blog entries tagged: CAJE
CAJE will officially close
A month after announcing that it would not hold its annual conference, the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education announced that it would be shutting its doors for good at the end of February.
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CAJE cancels its conference and will downsize
After much speculation over its future, a major Jewish educational organization is canceling its annual conference and significantly downsizing.
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Lasday: For right now, CAJE will not close its doors
Over the past several weeks, rumors have been swirling that CAJE, the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education, could possibly close its doors.
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The problems with Jewish education
Here are the problems with Jewish education, according to Rabbi Manuel Gold, a plenary presenter at the CAJE conference.
(First, a little biographical info: Gold grew up Orthodox and graduated from Yeshiva University. But he later received Conservative rabbinical ordination and then worked as a high-level educational official in the Reform movement.)
- Congregational presidents: often don’t know how to do their jobs, are not in adequate contact with congregants or professionals working in their congregational schools.
- Rabbis: often view themselves only as teachers’ supervisors and often pull rank on their educators when a congregant has a problem with the Hebrew school.
- Parents: often don’t have a good idea about what is bothering their children about Hebrew school.
- Schools: “We believe that if a school is going to be really successful it has to take on the best of secular education,” Gold said. But Judaism doesn’t lend itself to tests, attendance requirements, report cards and homework. While certain skills, such as Hebrew, might need to be taught by standard pedagogical methods, Judaism, he said, needs to be taught through experience. “What are the SATs in Judaism?” he asked. “There is no equivalent.”
- The kids: not the problem. “The most difficult kids in your schools are going to become the teachers and the religious school directors and congregational presidents,” he said. “We have to be careful not to fail our kids because we don’t want them to fail in Judaism. We have to be able to deal with them as individuals and not kick out the problem children.”
- Bar mitzvah: For many parents, Hebrew school is only a vehicle to get a kid through the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony and is dropped as soon as the ceremony is over. Parents often only are concerned about the bar/bat mitzvah because they don’t want their kid to be embarrassed at the ceremony. Kids pick up on this, Gold says.
“They know their parents are concerned as soon as they ask the question, ‘How are you doing in your bar mitzvah studies?’” he said. When the kids answer that they are not doing well, the parents become even more nervous and often make the following deal with their kids: “If you do well, you don’t have to continue with Hebrew school after the bar mitzvah.”
- Teachers: need to validate their students. Remember, says Gold: “There is no wrong answer, every answer is on the road to being right.”
- Content: How do we teach kids that they can view Jewish content in different ways and see the different possibilities that exist?. If you don’t understand the text, read through it again and contemplate it. Learn how to deal with the substance of the matter, he said.
In the Q & A period after Gold stopped speaking, one teacher asked Gold what he thinks teachers should do about the biggest problem with Hebrew schools: the kids. They don’t care, they don’t attend school, they misbehave and they send text messages on their cell phones during class, the teacher said.
Gold’s answer? Whatever you do, don’t kick them out of class. Make them stay.
(The Fundermentalist wonders whether it’s wise to tell teachers that the worst punishment they can levy is making their students sit through their classes.)
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Quick CAJE facts and rumors
- Fact: This CAJE conference at University of Vermont cost $1.2 million to put together.
- Rumor: CAJE is moving its offices from New York to Cleveland (Jeff Lasday debunked this).
- Fact: CAJE-ians are happy with the pleasant high-70s weather here in Burlington, after a number of conference participants passed out from the heat at last year’s conference in sweltering St. Louis.
- Rumor: The Fundermentalist will be on vacation and unavailable during the week of next year’s conference… in San Antonio.
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Irony at CAJE
- This stuffed bear has easy access to many of CAJE's eco sessions
Maybe The Fundermentalist is getting a little bleary-eyed, but I chuckle every time I walk past this dead stuffed bear.
I find it ironic that, while CAJE holds many of its sessions on environmental Judaism at this large lecture hall, outside there is a fairly extensive taxidermy collection, including Whitey here (yes, I named him).
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Larry Hoffman: We need to find spirituality
- Larry Hoffman says American Jews need to find spirituality if they are to survive
The night after Joel Hoffman filled in for Dennis Ross as CAJE’s keynote speaker, Hoffman’s father, Larry Hoffman, gave the conference’s second keynote address.
The elder Hoffman, who is the author of some 30 books on Judaism and Jewish thought, proposed to the CAJE-ians that every generation of Jews has a project that it must complete to pass on Judaism to the next generation.
That project for American – non-Orthodox – Jews of this generation is to figure out how to pass on a Judaism that has moved over the last 150 years from Germany and Eastern Europe to America – and from the American city to the American suburb.
Hoffman boiled it down this way, warning that ethnic identity dies within four generations: Bubby and Zaidy are genuinely European and Jewishly ethnic. Embarrassed by ethnic identification, their kids spurn it. The grandchildren cling to the culture of Bubby and Zaidy for nostalgic reasons but have no real connection to the ethnic component. By the fourth generation, nothing’s left.
We are the fourth generation: American Jews who are no longer connected with their European identities and are in danger of becoming totally detached form their Jewish identities, Hoffman said.
Finding Judaism devoid of spirituality, some Jews found it elsewhere, Hoffman said. “During the 1960s, Americans discovered spirituality,” he said. “They traveled and found Eastern ideas about God and spirit, and we did not know from that. We had been largely socialists.”
The challenges now is to infuse Judaism with spirituality, he said.
“Ethnicity becomes nostalgia, and as they say, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be,” he said. “That is why we need to go to spirituality. We need to start talking about God.”
Hoffman got a standing ovation.
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Tuesday at CAJE: Hebrew school teachers who haven’t read the Hebrew Bible
In an interesting class at the CAJE conference about environmentalism and the Bible, a discussion about the first chapter of Genesis prompted me to ask the 40 or so Jewish educators present who had ever read the first chapter of Genesis in the original Hebrew.
About four out of every five raised their hands. That meant that 20 percent of the people in the room, who teach our kids, had not actually read the original text of the first chapter of the Bible.
After class, I caught the executive director of CAJE, Jeffrey Lasday, in the hallway and asked him if the Jewish literacy of the Jewish educators at supplementary Hebrew school and early childhood programs was adequate.
“It is a concern,” Lasday conceded.
One of the pinnacle questions CAJE faces is whether the teachers that are teaching in supplementary schools are the right people for the job – and, if not, what can be done in terms of professional training and increasing salaries and benefits to attract the right people.
The solution is twofold, he said. Teachers and educational professionals need to push their communities harder for resources. At the same time, those professionals must take it upon themselves to make sure they are knowledgeable enough to teach our kids.
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No Ross, but parables aplenty at CAJE’s opening plenary
Joel Hoffman filled in for Dennis Ross as the CAJE conference’s keynote speaker.
Dennis Ross was supposed to be the keynote speaker for CAJE’s opening plenary Sunday night. But he called in sick at the last minute, informing conference organizers Saturday night that he would not attend.
Nevertheless, CAJE-ians made out pretty well with Ross’ stand-in, Joel Hoffman.
Hoffman, an expert Hebrew translator and a professor in New York at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, was probably the more appropriate choice anyway. Ross essentially was going to give a sales pitch for his new book and to talk about his recent trip to Israel. Nice, but I don’t really think that jibes with a conference on how to teach Jewish kids.
Hoffman framed his talk – which he gave as a violent thunderstorm ripped through Burlington – with a parable.
Two people fell asleep while on a journey and both had the same dream. God came to them and told them to gather up as much sand as they could and carry it back to their town. They would be home in three days. When they got home, God told them, they would be both happy and sad.
Hoffman then condensed all of Jewish history into a half-hour snapshot and talked about how that history has been defined throughout the ages by debate between the Diaspora and Jews living in Israel. That debate almost always has been won by the Diaspora, he said.
For instance, Hoffman pointed out, there are two Talmuds – one written in Jerusalem and one written in exile in Babylonia. The one written in Babylonia is the one universally accepted and studied as the definitive Talmud.
It is important, he said, that the Jewish educators at CAJE view themselves as people who truly can and need to pass on Judaism to the next generation.
Hoffman ended his history of the Jews with the second half of his parable:
The two travelers gathered up as much sand as they could carry and continued on their journey home. When they arrived three days later, the found that the sand had turned to gold, which made them happy. But they were both saddened because they wished they had carried more.
Hoffman suggested that the CAJE-ians take home as much gold as they can.
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CAJE conf. launches, bans Agri meat and gets the Fundermentalist to meditate
Burlington in summer. Not such a bad setting for the CAJE conference.
I’ll be blogging all week from the annual conference of the Coalition for Advancement of Jewish Education, which this year has drawn some 1,500 Jewish educators from around the world to the University of Vermont at Burlington to talk about best practices and trends in Jewish education.
While CAJE is primarily geared toward professional development for supplementary school and early childhood education professionals, the conference also draws a sizable contingent from the Jewish day school world, primarily because it is the largest conference of its kind.
I’ve been here since late morning on Sunday, and I will have more in a bit about CAJE’s opening plenary and Tisha B’Av programming a little later, but I’m getting a late start because of some technical difficulties. I flew up here yesterday because Dennis Ross was supposed to be the conference’s keynote speaker, but he canceled at the last minute due to illness.
The conference features a heavy dose of environmentalism and Jewish ecology – an effort to figure out how to capture kids’ Jewish imagination by tapping into a common secular interest. Or perhaps vice versa. It’s a fitting setting as UVM is surrounded by a gorgeous landscape of lush green mountains on one side and Lake Chaplain on the other, and almost every restaurant you enter uses eco-friendly corn-made-plasticware, as does the school itself.
Conference organizers even made sure that no meat for the five-day affair came from Agriprocessors, the kosher meat plant in Postville that is under intense scrutiny for alleged immigration and worker-abuse violations. Using meat from a plant that may not be up to ethical par “was just not in the spirit of CAJE,” the organization’s executive director, Jeffrey Lasday told me Sunday afternoon. He said he made the decision not to use Agri shortly after the plant was raided in a large-scale immigration bust in May.
CAJE has enlisted some 20 experts in Jewish ecology and environmentalism to teach 60 classes in the subject between now and the conference end the afternoon of Aug. 14. Each night will feature an eco-friendly dinner discussion.
I’m actually sitting on the floor in a lecture hall listening to Nigel Savage of the eco-friendly Jewish organization Hazon explain why it is we are all here under the Judeo-green mantle (Full disclosure: I had signed on to listen to Jack Wertheimer present his latest findings about supplementary school education, but he pulled a Dennis Ross and canceled on CAJE. So I schlepped all the way across campus to get to the environmental program.)
“We want to shift the axis of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century so that it necessarily means to be involved in the larger issues that concern us. It necessarily means that we are working to create a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community,” Nigel said. “We are part of an ecosystem and we need to be interacting with one another.”
While early Judaism was gregarious in nature and was based on agriculture and shepherding, and its 40 formative years were spent communing with God in the desert after escaping Egypt, mainstream Judaism largely has lost its connection to the earth, according to Nigel.
“The Jewish people did not arise in a synagogue or a JCC or a day school,” Nigel said, “We arose with a deep connection to the outdoors.”
Despite the schlep to hear Nigel, I am in a pretty good mood. I started the day at 7 A.M. with some Jewish meditation, in lieu of shacharit – or, rather, in lieu of sleeping an extra hour.
The only thing I am concerned about is that I got a little stuck during my morning meditation session with about 30 CAJE-ians.
I relaxed my temples, my jaw, my stomach, readjusting my sit bones and concentrating on my breath, as suggested by our supremely mellow instructor, Karen Frank, a congregational nurse and meditation practitioner from New Jersey.
Then I imagined my spine as a stack of Legos and aligned my vertebrae as she asked. But when she suggested calmly that I picture my head as a ball sitting on top of that stack and I should try to balance that ball, I couldn’t get my head on straight.
See my yogi below.
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