Jewish Teachers Research Articles

Strategisches Erzählen und Strategiewechsel im Umfeld neutestamentlicher Erzähltexte. Das lukanische Gleichnis vom barmherzigen Samariter als Anschauungsbeispiel

Modern biblical scholarship (of the post-war era) has shown that the narrative traditions that underlie the canonical gospels are very adaptive as they have been tailored to suit different communicative situations. In this context Luke’s The Good Samaritan represents an object case for study. Luke has clearly revised and strategically reworked the parable by inserting it into a narrative frame that features a dialogue between Jesus and a Jewish teacher of the law. While the parable (inserted narrative) questions Jewish resentments and prejudices against the Samaritans through confronting the Jewish scholar with the exemplary behaviour of the foreigner, the frame narrative serves to warn Christian recipients against being too hasty in looking down on Jewish authorities. This corresponds to Luke’s oeuvre as a whole (gospel and book of acts), which is characterized by a remarkably nuanced and realistic representation of the Jewish authorities of his time.

Yom Kippur’s Call for Environmental Repentance

Yom Kippur’s Call for Environmental Repentance

School principals’ leadership skills: measurement equivalence across cultures

Despite substantial interest and research in measuring leader’s skills, little is known about the measurement equivalence and mean differences in the scores measuring principals’ skills (cognitive, interpersonal, strategic) across cultures (collectivism versus individualism). The aim of the present study was to assess measurement equivalence – configural, metric and scalar – on leaders’ skills across Arab and Jewish teachers in the Israeli educational system. A total of 1388 teachers from 210 elementary schools responded to a skills questionnaire. Results indicated that the configural model is equivalent across samples. The test for metric equivalence, showed that the construct holds the same psychological meaning across the two samples, with the exception of two items. The intercept latent test means (i.e., scalar) showed unequal intercepts among the Arab and Jewish samples, in the strategic and cognitive skills scale. The results have implications for cross-ethnic research and, more broadly, for the assessment of principals’ skills.

“Don’t Sell Me the Enemy’s Literature”: A Self-Study of Teaching Literature in Politically Fraught Contexts

This article describes a self-study pursuant to a clash between a lecturer and a student concerning the teaching of literature in a politically fraught context. The learning group is composed of Arab and Jewish teachers at a college in northern Israel. The work read by the group expresses a Palestinian perspective. The incident, discussed with reference to the concepts of ethical reading and in-between space, is explained against the background of the lecturer’s professional views and the complexity of teaching literature in a polarized and conflicted society. Analysis of the incident, accompanied by a look at the professional literature, reveals the lecturer’s blind spots as well as the complexity of the situation in which she was acting. Details of the case and the process of its interpretation may serve to enrich the perspectives of literature teacher educators who believe in ethical reading and in constructing an in-between space in their lessons, providing them with insights regarding teaching in contexts fraught with cultural tensions.

Teachers' capital and relations with parents: A comparison between Israeli Jewish and Arab teachers

Under neo-liberal policies, parents gain influence in schools. Following Bourdieu's notion of field, we examined teachers' views toward parents and their possession of feminine, social, and cultural capital in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel. Teachers (n = 959) from 51 randomly selected schools filled out a questionnaire. Findings revealed that Jewish and Arab teachers maintain differing relations with parents that include disengagement, threat and collaboration. Jewish teachers' perceptions of parents relate to their possession of divers types of capital, whereas Arab teachers count on their social capital. The findings fit the dimensions of individualism-collectivism and teachers' social position.

Book Review: Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero. By Dennis R. MacDonald

Book Review: Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero. By Dennis R. MacDonald

Re-Introducing the Melamed to his Community Jewish Teacher Personnel Practices in European Countries 16-18th Centuries

Re-Introducing the Melamed to his Community Jewish Teacher Personnel Practices in European Countries 16-18th Centuries

Design Principles for Promoting Intergroup Empathy in Online Environments

This study examined a professional development program designed to support Civics teachers in their efforts to promote empathy among Israeli Jewish students towards Israeli Arabs. The design rationale for the program is that teachers should experience empathic processes themselves before supporting their students in such an endeavor and that meaningful empathic processes can occur online if activities are properly designed. All phases of the program were designed to support teachers to participate as part of an online community of practice. Sixty Jewish teachers participated in two iterations of the design study. Refinements were made in the second iteration to provide teachers with explicit definitions of empathy and specific instructions for reflection. Findings indicate that these changes were reflected in higher degrees of empathic responses among teachers. Teachers also indicated that being a part of an online learning community contributed to the learning process they experienced during the program. We interpret this as a first step in enabling teachers to assist their students to develop a more empathetic approach toward the minority group and conclude with a discussion of recommended design principles for promoting such an approach.

Jesus as a Jewish Teacher

Jesus as a Jewish Teacher

The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Managing stress in schools: teachers coping with special education children

AbstractTeaching is one of the most stressful professions worldwide. This study aimed to explore how teachers cope with teaching – in regular classes – special education children who get some assistance through special integration programs in their schools but no additional assistance in their regular classes. More specifically, I examined coping strategies in two cultural groups of teachers – Jews and Arabs. Furthermore, I investigated how the different coping strategies explain stress reactions of state anxiety and state anger in the two cultures in the background of this special situation. Six hundred and thirty-four Jewish and Arab teachers (80% Jews) completed self-report questionnaires, including Cope, state anxiety and state anger in their free time during the period of November 2010 to January 2011. Significant differences were revealed among Jewish and Arab teachers in usage of coping strategies. Although both Jews and Arabs used mostly “problem solving” strategies, Jewish teachers used these strategies more compared to their Jewish counter-parts, while Arab teachers used more “emotional coping” and “disengagement” strategies. The relationships between the different coping strategies and stress reactions were mostly in the same direction for both groups. However, the strengths of the relationships were significantly different. The obtained variance of anxiety and anger by coping strategies was greater among Jewish teachers than among their Arabs counterparts. The results are discussed in relationship to the Stress and Coping Theory of Lazarus and Folkman. Emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of each culture and how each culture translates interaction with stressful situations into coping strategies.

One country, two cultures – a multi-perspective view on Israeli chemistry teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning

This paper presents a study focusing on differences in Israeli Jewish and Arab chemistry teachers’ beliefs regarding teaching and learning of chemistry in the upper secondary schools. Israel is a country experiencing the problems of diverse cultural orientation of its inhabitants but applying the same educational system to its diverse cultural sectors. Education includes the same curriculum in chemistry for both the Israeli Jewish and Arab cultural sectors as well as final examinations (matriculation) set centrally by the Ministry of Education. Thus, this study can serve as a striking case for other countries facing similar cultural diversity. The study is based on two different instruments that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The qualitative data stem from chemistry teachers’ drawings of themselves as teachers in a typical classroom situation accompanied by four open questions. The data analysis follows three qualitative scales: beliefs about classroom organization, beliefs about teaching objectives and epistemological beliefs. A quantitative study gives insights into teachers’ beliefs about what characterizes good education. The main goal of the present paper is to determine whether both groups of chemistry teachers with different sociocultural background in Israel hold different views about education in general and chemistry education in particular. The findings provide evidence that in Israeli chemistry classrooms, the beliefs of Arabic teachers differ from those of the Jewish teachers, although both groups live in the same country and operate the same educational system.

What I am Reading

Over the past few years I have been engaged in a collaborative project, with Matthew McLean of the University of St Andrews, investigating Protestant translations of the Bible into Latin. As early modernists and teachers, we are familiar with the importance of the work of Luther, Tyndale, Zwingli and others who brought scripture into the languages of the people. Indeed, one of the most astonishing experiences I have had recently was to speak about a Tyndale Pentateuch and New Testament recently acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Such emphasis on the vernacular, however, has overlooked the reality that for most sixteenthcentury Protestant churchmen Latin remained a sacred language and the common tongue of the educated. Erasmus’s New Testament of 1516 and his later Latin translation were an inspiration to a generation of humanists who endeavored to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to render the Word of God into Latin, the language of the church and its theology. Our project examines the evolution of Protestant Latin Bible scholarship over the sixteenth century, considering issues of translation, page and text, doctrine, and readership. We focus on four Bibles: Sebastian Munster’s Old Testament of 1534/ 5; the 1543 Biblia Sacrosancta from Zurich; Sebastian Castellio’s Biblia Latina; and the several editions of the Testamenti veteris of Franciscus Junius and Immanuel Tremellius. In addition to these Bibles there were numerous translations of individual books of the Bible. The challenges facing the translators were legion. To begin, knowledge of Hebrew in the early and mid-sixteenth century was limited to a small group of men dependent on their Jewish teachers. There was little agreement on how Hebrew should be turned into Latin. Jerome was regarded as the model to be emulated, but the needs of the sixteenth century were different. Munster intentionally translated the Old Testament into literal, ugly Latin not because he was a poor stylist. His intention was to provide a tool for Christian scholars to learn the ancient language. Ten years later the scholars in Zurich eschewed the literal approach to produce a translation of Hebrew into Latin that was pleasing to the eye. Although they held Munster in high regard they cast his literal renderings into the marginalia. The most radical approach came from Sebastian Castellio, who argued that Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, should be treated as a Greek orator. The Hebrew of the Old Testament was, therefore, to be put into the very best Ciceronian Latin to the extent that the traditional Latin vocabulary for God, angels, and the church was abandoned for more elegant classical words. Finally, the most influential Bible was prepared by reformation, Vol. 20 No. 2, November, 2015, 151–153

Positive weighing of the other's collective narrative among Jewish and Bedouin-Palestinian teachers in Israel and its correlates.

Teachers play a pivotal role in the educational discourse around collective narratives, and especially the other's narrative. The study assumed that members of groups entangled in a conflict approach the different modules of the other's narrative distinctively. Jewish and Palestinian teachers, Israeli citizens, answered questionnaires dealing with the narrative of the other, readiness for interethnic contact, negative between-group emotions and preferences for resolutions of the Israeli-Palestinian (I-P) conflict. Positive weighing of the other's narrative among Jewish teachers correlated with high levels of readiness for interethnic contact and low levels of negative between-group emotions, across the various modules of the Palestinian narrative. Preferences for a peaceful resolution of the I-P conflict and rejection of a violent one were noted in two of the modules. Among Palestinian teachers, positive weighing of the other's collective narrative was exclusively noted for the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust, and this stance negatively related to negative between-group emotions and preference for a violent solution of the I-P conflict, and positively related to readiness for interethnic contact and preference of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Practical implications of these findings for peace education are discussed.

Theater Games in the Service of Peace

39 1 Theatre of the Negev, Eshkol Regional Council, Israel. Correspondence should be addressed to Ofra Faiman, MA, P.O. Box 29, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, 8499000 Israel. E-mail: ofaiman@gmail. com. The article starts with an example, from the author’s experience, of how the combined techniques of the theater director and the group conductor enabled the actors of a theater on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip to function as creative artists under the stress of a war situation. It then discusses how these techniques were broadened for use with Arab and Jewish teachers at an Israeli dual-culture school during a psychologically stressful time of the year. It concludes that similar techniques could be employed in a wide variety of conflict situations.

Preparing Jewish Educators: The Research We Have, the Research We Need

This article discusses the research we have and the research we need in both general and Jewish teacher education. First, I discuss three recent efforts to synthesize and assess existing research in teacher education and to identify needed research. Next I review a handful of recent studies in Jewish teacher education which illustrate various research genres and provide a taste of what more coordinated studies could generate in the way of usable knowledge. I conclude by proposing three programs of research on the education of Jewish educators.

Gloria in Profundis: Comparing the Glory of Moses in Sirach to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel

Abstract The glory of Jesus is a leitmotif of the Fourth Gospel and probably reflects both the Shekinah “glory” of Israel’s God revealed in Jesus as well as honor attributed to Jesus by John. The Jewish wisdom teacher Ben Sira also employs glorification language frequently and carefully in Sirach. Bringing these two texts into conversation illuminates the peculiar and unique ways in which John portrayed the identity of Jesus. In Sirach 45:1-5, in particular, Ben Sira praised the glory of Moses—a man beloved of God, made equal to the angels, great before his enemies, powerful in word, intrepid before kings, sanctified in faithfulness, party to the holy presence of God, and privy to the secret things of God. Given that John also had much interest in Moses comparison and typology, setting these texts side-by-side brings to the forefront the double-nature of the Fourth Gospel’s glory-Christology. On the one hand, the Johannine Jesus offered great demonstrations of power and authoritative teaching. On the other hand, he fared quite the opposite as Ben Sira’s vision of the exalted Moses, especially in John’s passion narrative where Jesus appears frail, weak, shamed, and defeated. Comparing the Moses of Sirach to the Jesus of John’s Gospel especially reveals the Evangelist’s paradoxical theology of gloria in profundis—the humble glory of God demonstrated in Jesus.

Muslim and Jewish Teachers’ Conceptions of the Male School Principal’s Masculinity

This qualitative research examined perceptions of Muslim and Jewish teachers in Israel concerning the masculinity of male school principals, and the way in which these perceptions affect principal–teacher relationships. Muslim and Jewish teachers studying for master of arts’ degrees in a university and a teacher-education college in Israel completed open questionnaires and participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings indicated similarities and differences between the perceptions of the two different cultural groups, highlighting reciprocal principal–teacher influences and elucidating a cultural discourse concerning a principal’s perceived masculinity and femininity. It is concluded that the concept of the school principal’s masculinity is a fluid social construct, varying according to cultural–ideological perceptions that affect the principal’s own preferred communication patterns in the school. Since both masculine and feminine qualities are needed for effective education leadership, a policy advocating employment of female mentors for newly appointed principals, in order to give voice to female qualities in principalship, is strongly recommended.

Cristianesimo e cultura classica. Modalità retoriche in alcuni testi cristiani (I ex.-II in.)

Like the good Jewish teacher he was, Jesus taught in words, especially in parable. Within the first decades after his death came that sophisticated instrument, Pauline rhetoric, and only after it came the Gospels –rewritings, or recreations, of the text of the life of Jesus. At no point that we can now recapture was there a first Christianity distinct from his verbal expression [...]. Early Christianity was not purely a matter of ritual or ethical behaviour, or of miracles cures done by a wonder-worker and his successors; it was always a matter of teaching, of interpretation, and of definition. As Christ was the Word, so Christianity was its discourse or discourses. It is the relation of those discourses to their wider cultural context in the Roman Empire that needs to be explored again.

Excuse Me… When Will I Hear a Good Word about My Work?: The Principal''s Role in First Year Teachers'' Success Stories

This article is based on qualitative research intended to discover the attributes of novice teachers' success stories of their subjective experiences during this year. The research literature mainly emphasizes the many difficulties encountered by the new teachers at the start of their careers, and diminishes reference to their success stories. Data collection was based on in-depth interviews with Arab and Jewish novice teachers from a teacher training college in Jerusalem during their first year of work. The research findings show their unique way of coping vis-a-vis the school principal. In an attempt to influence or change his attitude and behavior towards them, some of them employed daring and conflict and some used maneuvering and diplomacy. They thus also managed to integrate in the school system, and even initiate change and realize impressive results at diverse levels. These findings illustrate the principal's dominance and importance in their professional development as perceived by the novice teachers.