But Is It Jewish? Teaching Photography in a Day School

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over a period of 13 years, I taught a class in photography to high school students, using a taxonomy I developed based on my own understanding of what makes for excellence in photography. Five of the elements of this taxonomy are explained and illustrated by photographs taken by my students; I submit these as evidence of my success in this endeavor. But since the school in which I taught is a community Jewish day school, a second goal of the course was for students to illustrate Jewish themes and explore their Jewish identities through the photographs they took. With this goal I had mixed success; over the years I received only 45 photographs (out of a total of 2,500) that were explicitly Jewish. I draw on Tali Hyman Zelkowicz’s ethnography of a similar Jewish high school and on James Fowler’s theory of faith development to consider what might have been on the minds of the students who submitted images that didn’t seem particularly Jewish. Whether or not some of the other photographs the students took might be considered Jewish is a question that will be taken up toward the end of this paper, when I explore the notion of conveying “Jewish sensibilities,” a term first introduced by Vanessa Ochs and elaborated on in several articles in this journal.