Jewish Teachers Research Articles

L’antisémitisme au conservatoire : du recensement des élèves juifs à leur exclusion (1940-1942)

This article based mainly on two archival sources – the Archives of the Conservatory and the Archives of the Beaux-Arts – describes the chain process that brought about, firstly, the exclusion of Jewish teachers (dated December 1940) and later the exclusion of Jewish students (dated September 1942). The first statute was published on October 18th, 1940 and called for the dismissal in the coming two months of all Jewish teachers in France. On December 18th, teachers at the Conservatory were dismissed along with colleagues at other institutions. What is most striking is the fact that earlier, on October 3rd, the Board of Directors of the Conservatory bypassed the Vichy government and arranged the dismissal procedure directly with the German occupying authorities. In regard to students, the Vichy government already began to prepare a filing system with the intention of excluding Jewish students in October 1940.The expulsion of Jewish students in France was probably an inevitable result of the clash between the Vichy regime, tied to its legal statutes, and the Nazi occupying authorities who brutally interfered in the conduct of the government. The article also shows the contradictions within the Vichy government which gradually came to understand that the numerus clausus, in effect since June 1941, was not applicable to the Conservatory. In fact, this institution had the unique “privilege” of being the only public institution from which all Jewish students were expelled.In conclusion, the article also discusses a recent episode, which occurred in the spring of 2011, which displays parallels to the past events.

When Shortage Coexists With Surplus of Teachers: The Case of Arab Teachers in Israel

This article explores the nexus between pre-service teacher education polices and the supply and demand of minority teachers. It problematizes the recent reports on teacher shortages in Israel, which tend to focus on the shortage of Jewish teachers while dealing with the surplus of Arab teachers only tangentially. Specifically, this article examines how teacher education policy in Israel generates a surplus supply of Arab teachers through 3 mechanisms: (a) the disregard for the cultural needs of Arab teachers and their exclusion from policymaking circles; (b) the Ministry of Education's budgeting criteria, which entice colleges to enroll more Arab students, especially when the enrollment of Jewish students is in decline; and (c) the admission policies of teacher education colleges, which contribute to the overrepresentation of Arab students in these colleges and allow the enrollment of students above the quota approved annually by the Ministry of Education.

The Jewish teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: what earliest Christianity learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Introduction Chapter One: Recovering the Voice of Jesus Chapter Two: Recovering the Voices of James and Jude Chapter Three: In the School of Ben Sira of Jerusalem Chapter Four: The Book of Tobit: Life-Lessons From an Edifying Tale Chapter Five: The Book of Enoch Chapter Six: Military Messianism and Jesus' Mission: The Psalms of Solomon Chapter Seven: Jewish Martyrology and the Death of Jesus: 2 Maccabees and the Lives of the Prophets Chapter Eight: The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Legacy of Ethics and Eschatology for a New Generation Chapter Nine: The Testament of Job: Job Becomes An Example of Patient Endurance Conclusion: Jesus, James, and Jude among the Jewish Teachers Notes Bibliography Index

“Making Teachers . . . Who do not Treat Their Profession As an Occasional Business”: Leopold Zunz and the Modernization of the Jewish Teacher Training in Prussia

Abstract Although Leopold Zunz has spent most of his years in Berlin, he had led an active life. German-Jewish history rightly remembers him first and foremost as the iconic figure of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism) whose inspiring charisma has lasted to this day. However, Zunz has also left influential traces in the German and German-Jewish history as a preacher, pedagogue, and political contemporary. This essay ponders a facet of his biography which thus far has rather eluded further attention. When the entire educational system of German Jewry underwent a modernization process of transformation, Zunz had not only given fresh impetus for the momentary education at his Gemeinde-Knabenschule (Berlin’s former Jewish Freischule where Zunz served as principal). In addition, Zunz was among the most significant advocates of a Jewish faculty at schools. He sought their professionalization through raising the general level of qualification. Zunz’s efforts in this are the subject of the following discussion. The focal point will be set on Zunz’s years as principal of the Jewish Lehrerseminarium (Teachers’ Seminary) in Berlin which offered training to young prospective Jewish teachers between 1840 and 1850.1

„Mir verging die Sprache vor den Dingen, die ich kommen sah“ – Hermann Broch und Abraham Sonne in ihren Briefen

AbstractHermann Broch and Abraham Sonne (Avraham Ben Yitzhak) met during the second half of the 1920s in Vienna. Broch had given up his career as co-owner of a textile factory and begun to study the Neo-Positivism of the Vienna Circle and to write his novel “The Sleepwalkers.” Sonne was the director of the Jewish Teachers College in Vienna. The two men took to each other and met in Viennese cafés on a regular basis. In 1938 (after the ‘Anschluss’) Broch emigrated to the United States, and Sonne to Palestine. The letters published here span the period between 1938 and 1950, the year of Sonne’s death. They are documents of friendship and of an intellectual exchange (in particular regarding Broch’s novel “The Death of Virgil,” which appeared in 1945 in New York).

Teaching Haskalah – Haskalah and teaching: Jewish education in the Czech Lands (a power play)

The educational reforms proposed by Haskalah sought for an integration of Jewish (religious) and secular studies. The German-Jewish school system that was established in the period of Joseph II, on the other hand, deliberately excluded religious subjects from the curriculum. This paper argues that the economic independence which Jewish teachers enjoyed in the Josephine school system turned them into an alternative Jewish elite that considerably contributed to the modernization of Czech Jewry and ultimately promoted Haskalah’s agenda. The argument is illustrated by presenting three educators from the Czech Lands: Peter Beer (1758–1838), Herz Homberg (1749–1841) and Naphtali Benet (1789/94–1857), and their respective attempts to re-model Jewish education by the publication of textbooks.

Editor’s Column

Editor’s Column John Zemke May 3, 2013 marked the first anniversary of the loss of John Miles Foley and a period of mourning at the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. This issue proffers to you, the readers, additional evidence of one dimension of John’s extraordinary legacy, the establishment and nurturing for more than a quarter of a century of Oral Tradition. We open with Nina Livesey’s study of Romans 4:9–12, a dialogue between the apostle Paul and a fictitious Jewish teacher whose interpretation vexed scholarly analysis concerned with the ethnic identity of the people mentioned in Rom 4:12. At issue is the presence of a purportedly “anomalous” dative article that New Testament scholars have resolved on grammatical, ideological, or theological grounds by simple deletion. Drawing on Hellenistic authors’ attentiveness to euphony and sound mapping techniques systematized by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott, Livesey identifies six structural periods coinciding with the passage’s dialogical form and elaborates compelling analyses of them. The map of acoustic patterns identifies recurring sound groups that provide an overarching structure within which certain recurrent metonyms, particularly terms for “circumcised” and “foreskinned,” are located. The placement and prominence of the sound patterns authenticate the legitimacy of the dative article and direct attention toward the sense of the passage, rhetorically framing the apostle Paul’s assurance to the Gentiles that the uncircumcised may by faith be legitimate heirs to Abrahamic rectitude since God declared Abraham righteous before his circumcision. Next, four successive articles cluster around the theme Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities of the 2010 World Oral Literature Project workshop. Under the aegis of Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, the workshop explored professional and ethical issues entailed by the dissemination of oral arts through traditional and digital media. First in this group, Carole Pegg and Erkinova Elizaveta Yamaeva report and interpret fieldwork with Altaian speakers in their practice of Ak Jang (“White Way”) rituals. Biannual spring and fall rituals at the küree (“place of gatherings”) temple complex in a recondite locale above the village are conducted for the purpose of maintaining universal order and tranquility, clan and family harmony, and personal happiness. Led by ritual specialists who are expert in ancient Altaian epic and unfolding in pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases, the ceremonies connect participants with historico-mythical space and time while also anchoring them in the present, creating a phenomenological, topographic space; a numinous performance space, and a sense of “being-in-place.” This sense of being-in-place emanates from the worshippers’ awareness that earth, mountains, sky, ancestors, epic heroes, temple complex, gods, planets, kin, and community are all living entities that ground Altaian personhood. Participants report experiencing “the arrival of energy and good fortune encircling them with a constantly rotating belt.” An eCompanion presents photos of ritual sites and worshippers. Next, John Meza Cuero tells Margaret Field a trickster tale in the Tipaay dialect of the Kumeyaay language (and in Spanish) in Baja California, Mexico, prompting a joint reflection on ethical questions regarding a cultural group’s preferences for usage of audio or video recordings of the community’s heritage. For instance, in Mexico a prevailing “variationist” attitude that accords all dialects of Kumeyaay equal status appears to warrant the sharing of traditional verbal arts with outsiders while in the United States a “localist” language ideology keeps intangible heritage exclusively within the Kumeyaay community. Tale-telling doubly indexes group identity—the larger community by the tale and the local community by its idiom—and the authors urge researchers to maintain balance in intra-communal interests by judiciously publishing recordings from various dialect groups. Without such precautions unintended language standardization may undermine language revitalization schemes, and specific groups may perceive diminished local prestige with corrosive effects on collaboration. A video-taped performance of the Rabbit and Frog tale told by John Meza Cuero is available in an eCompanion for the viewer’s delectation. A Rajasthani folk epic, Pabuji ki par/phad (“Pabuji with the scroll”), is the focus for Elizabeth Wickett’s study of some of the consequences visited on oral tradition by the explosion in modern...

On Selecting Irving Layton’s Seductive Invective; or, an Addendum to Trehearne

I BORN ISRAEL PINKU LAZAROVITCH in Targu Neamt, Romania, then raised in Montreal, Quebec, in an immigrant Jewish household amid Catholic-inflected, European neighbourhood (with First Nations peoples on the margins), the Anglicized Irving Layton (1912-2006) recalled childhood of fisticuffs versus hostile Gentiles (1) as well as his precocious lusts for presumably Jewish teacher (Miss Benjamin (2)) and the assorted shiksas--or damsels--of his locale. (3) He learned early that life is a Dionysian cock-and-cunt affair (cp np) and also battle (cp np). (4) 1971 statements serve to underline the received wisdom that Layton iterates the teachings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) about Dionysian creative chaos versus Apollonian majesty and order, and it is practical to begin to arrange--or arraign--Layton's works just so. Yet, as scholar Brian Trehearne posits in his introduction to Layton's Fornalutx (1992), the result is that Nietzschean Layton--the Layton of the universities--is rendered philosophical poet whose anger is containable and referable to an established intellectual and poetic tradition (xviii). In sense, Apollonian sunlight dims the lustre of Dionysian fire. (5) So, Trehearne frets that, circa 1992, the rude Layton, unsuited for bourgeois approbation and assimilation, poet far more various and less decorous than the anthologies persuade us--has been disappearing from critical view of late (xviii). To remedy this perceived freezing out of the volcanic Layton from the frigid, Canadian canon, Trehearne serves readers lyrics that are passionate, uncontainable, and discomfiting (xix). Perhaps Fornalutx achieves this recherche aggression. However, much depends on its audience, as well as on the editor's acumen in making the most appealingly appalling selection. This truth puts us face-to-knife with strategic problem in Layton: How do we select from his mass--even morass--of materials those lyrics nasty and dirty, or disgusting and lecherous, or vile and venereal, enough to break the polite, academic frame encasing Layton? Trehearne's answer is to showcase Layton's war of expansive metaphor against materialist literalism (xxxi). There's something to that. It does appear that his sheer volume of publication as well as his full-volume style figure Layton's attempt to blunderbuss mortality, critics, anti-Semites, blue-pencil prudes, and even those bluestocking ladies resistant to his pugnacious tenderness. Strikingly, by the time The Collected Poems of Irving Layton appeared in 1971, Layton had already published, since 1945, about twenty-five books, including Selected Poems (1967), Collected Poems (1965), set of poems and stories (1961), tri-authored volume (1952), and two edited anthologies of Canadian (1952 and 1962). In sum, Layton released, on average, book year between 1945 and 1971. Such fertility can easily be more fecal than fecund, and when one needs forklift to move the work, one is less likely to apply to it judicious scalpel. To arrive at his own gleaning of Layton's most robust poems, Trehearne could have canvassed more than two-score Layton titles. That he chose 150 poems from some thousand-plus publicly available spells out Trehearne's passion for Layton and prudence in his pickings. (6) Given that Fornalutx has now been in print for generation, the back-cover hope that These are the poems for which Layton will be remembered cannot be counted as forlorn. Still, Trehearne's endorsement of the two-time Nobel Prize in Literature nominee as having produced a great body of poetry (xxxvi) is significant in not having been worded, more correctly, one prays, as body of great poetry. (7) Now I come to the point of this essay: we cannot hope to know the extent of Layton's greatness, if the noun is deserved, until we have learned to read him sans censorship. We need to accept, as Trehearne's weighing suggests, that much of Layton's most urgent is caustic and obscene, pungent and noxious. …

The image of the special education teacher as reflected in drawings made by teachers in training in Israel

This study, by Dr Dafna Regev of the University of Haifa and Professor Tamie Ronen of Tel Aviv University, examines the perceived image of the special education teacher as portrayed in the drawings of Jewish and Arab student teachers in Israel. Of the 187 female participants in this study, 82 were from the Jewish sector and 105 from the Arab sector; they were all at varying stages in their training. The drawings were analysed by three art therapists, and differences found between Jewish and Arab perspectives and between perspectives across the training programme are discussed. This article raises questions about the relationship between attitudes and behaviours and the perspectives of future special education teachers.

The Relationship between Teacher Self-Efficacy and Violence toward Students as Mediated by Teacher's Attitude

School violence is an issue of national and international concern, especially because of its adverse impact on students' physical and emotional well-being (Akiba, LeTendre, Baker, & Goesling, 2002). However, little attention has been paid to victimization of students by their own teachers (Hyman & Perone, 1998). Previous studies that examined this issue found that students are exposed to high levels of corporal punishment by school staff in different countries around the world, such as Australia (Delfabbro et al., 2005), Korea and China (Kim et al., 2000), and the United States (Office for Civil Rights, 2006). Khoury-Kassabri, Astor, and Benbenishty (2008), in a study of 27,316 students in grades 4 through 11 in Israel, found that almost one-third of Israeli students reported emotional maltreatment by a staff member. Close to one-fifth of all students reported being a victim of physical maltreatment. This study examined both physical and emotional maltreatment. Emotional maltreatment may be verbal or nonverbal and includes name calling, mocking the student's appearance and disabilities, humiliating the student in front of classmates, and behaving in blatantly discriminatory ways against certain students (Benbenishty, Zeira, Astor, & Khoury-Kassabri, 2002). Hyman (1990) defined corporal punishment in school as the infliction of pain or confinement as a penalty for an offense committed by a student. Some forms of physical maltreatment may be regarded as intentional and acceptable corporal punishment. In many other instances, physical maltreatment by staff in school is not part of an educational policy advocating corporal punishment. Rather, staff may react to infractions of discipline and provocation by using various degrees of force, such as pushing, shoving, slapping, pinching, punching, or kicking (Hyman & Snook, 2000). Previous studies that attempted to identify the risk factors for staff maltreatment have not examined teachers' characteristics. The aim of the current study was to examine the association between teachers' reports on use of violence toward their students and teachers' characteristics. More specifically, in this study, the contribution of teachers' self-efficacy, attitudes toward violence, and background variables (for example, gender, teaching experience) to the understanding of child maltreatment by teachers is explored. MALTREATMENT WITHIN ARAB SCHOOLS This study focused on Arab homeroom teachers in Israel. In previous works in Israel, it was found that children in Arab schools reported much more staff maltreatment than children in Jewish schools (Khoury-Kassabri, 2006), and a preliminary analysis of this study by the author (Khoury-Kassabri, 2008) found that Jewish teachers reported almost no violence toward their students. Physical violence was reported by 1.9% of teachers, and emotional maltreatment was reported by about 3%. Because of these low numbers, the current work focuses on Arab teachers. It should be noted that Arab students are being maltreated by Arab staff.' There is almost no Jewish staff in Arab schools and vice versa (Benbenishty, Zeira, & Astor, 2002). Some of these differences were attributed to the socioeconomic differences between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Arabs in Israel form a minority that is characterized by higher rates of poverty and unemployment and much lower expenditure of public funds for social services (such as education) compared with the Jewish majority (Hareven, 2002; Kop, 2004). However, previous studies found that, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, there were still clear gaps between Jewish and Arab students in reports of perpetration. The aim of the current study was to examine the contribution of the teachers' characteristics to their reports of violence toward students. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Teachers Self-Efficacy Many studies on teachers' self-efficacy were influenced by Bandura's (1977, 1982) conceptualization of self-efficacy in his cognitive social learning theory. …

Discipline Methods within the Israeli Education System: Arab and Jewish teachers’ Attitudes

Arab and Jewish teachers’ attitudes regarding punitive and non-punitive methods to correct students’ misbehaviour were examined. The study used data from 538 classroom teachers in Israel. Teachers’ attitudes are examined using the Dimensions of Discipline Inventory. The results revealed that teachers highly approve the use of non-punitive discipline methods. Still, many teachers supported the use of punitive discipline methods to correct students’ misbehaviour. Punitive discipline methods were more supported by Arab teachers compared to Jewish teachers, especially when the violence was directed toward a teacher. These results may reflect teachers’ lack of knowledge; many teachers use corporal punishment and other punitive discipline methods because they lack the alternative skills and tools to deal with students misbehaviour. Hence, it is essential to help teachers cope effectively with difficult situations without resorting to violence. Training opportunities for teachers in Israel and other countries need to be expanded.

Hyphenated Identity Development of Arab and Jewish Teachers: Within the Conflict Ridden Multicultural Setting of the University of Haifa

The theory of “Hyphenated identity” (HI) argues that people living in complex political-social contexts construct HIs with various sub-identities. The University of Haifa (UH) is a meeting space and experience for people of different nationalities and religious backgrounds. Thus they live “on the hyphen”, between identities found in contrast vs. harmony. This study was initiated and carried out as part of a Cooperative Participatory Action Research (CPAR). Nineteen graduate students, all teachers in a multicultural society ridden with conflicts, were interviewed about their life stories, their family background and the development of their identity as shaping their personal and professional lives. At the end of the interview, they were asked to draw an Identity Drawing Map (IDM) and add an explanatory text. Finding indicated that many women transferred their complex identity in order to create a balanced and a challenge in their life; they became leaders in their communities and empower other women to follow them toward self actualization. The study’s contribution is in broadening the understanding of concepts of HI development, by analyzing the similarities and differences within each ethnic/national group. Since identity development influences significantly people life, we can learn about these processes. Using the creative methods of drawing identity fabricated a deeper understanding and emotional presentation of the person.

Israeli Teachers' Perceptions of Gifted Teachers' Desired Characteristics: A Case of Cultural Orientation

The aim of this study was to assess Israeli Jewish and Arab teachers' perceptions of the desired characteristics of teachers of the gifted. The research sample comprised 217 teachers (134 Jews and 83 Arabs) representing three groups: (a) teachers entering a professional development program for teachers of gifted students; (b) teachers of gifted students teaching gifted in pull-out centers; and (c) regular teachers. Measures of perceptions were based on two instruments: (a) a questionnaire measuring level of collectivism and (b) statements about the desired cognitive, personal, and pedagogical characteristics of teachers of the gifted. Significant effects for group and culture and a lower effect for the interaction between the two were detected. Study findings suggest that teachers' perceptions cannot be discussed distinctively from their contextual and cultural background. The study proposes a new lens for examining teaching of gifted students in collectivist cultures, in particular as it relates to cultural orientations, and discusses practical implications for teacher certification programs.

Developing Ethical Knowledge in the Spirit of Judaism

This study attempts to describe Jewish teachers’ perceptions about their ethical dilemmas based on stories derived from the Bible. Sixty teachers were asked to submit descriptions of their ethical dilemmas to the study website; submissions were then discussed in focus groups. The findings were grouped by the ATLAS.ti into five categories: Telling the truth versus protecting from potential harm; egalitarian approach versus differential treatment; collective sanction versus personal sanction; fair process versus fair outcome and school standards versus family educational agenda. The findings may help to develop ethical knowledge in the spirit of Judaism in Jewish institutions.

Crucifixion of Jesus – Historical Fact, Christian Faith and Islamic Denial

There is no scientific reason to question the existence of Jesus as an authentic historical figure. It means that all the scholars who acknowledge the historicity of Jesus at least as a Jewish teacher and healer accept the fact of his death on the cross. The reasons and the details of the crucifixion given by commentators of the historical sources vary. One thing remains invariable: Jesus was sentenced to death and crucified in Jerusalem on the order of the Roman Prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, most probably on the charge of incitement to rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Mathematics and Gender Stereotypes in One Jewish and One Druze Grade 5 Classroom in Israel

We report findings from qualitative case studies of two grade 5 classrooms in Israel, one Jewish and one Druze. The aim was to identify classroom factors contributing to the differences in the gendered patterns of mathematics outcomes for Jewish and Arab Israeli students. Marked differences were found in the teachers' gender-related interactions with students, and their beliefs and expectations of boys' and girls' mathematical capabilities. The Jewish teacher held conventional gender-stereotyped beliefs of male mathematical superiority. The Druze teacher believed that girls required affirmative action to overcome implied gender biases in favour of males in the Druze community. The findings support earlier research and theoretical perspectives on gender-related issues in the mathematics classroom. In particular, when teachers hold gender-biased beliefs and expectations, students' classroom experiences and mathematics learning outcomes are impacted along gender lines.

Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (review)

Reviewed by: Canada's Jews: A People's Journey Andrew Gow Tulchinsky, Gerald — Canada's Jews: A People's Journey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 597. This one-volume condensation of Gerald Tulchinsky's magisterial Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (1992) and Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community (1998) adds some further references to scholarship and events since 1998, but fundamentally covers the same ground as the two original volumes did. Since their contents are presumably well known, I focus here on issues of emphasis, construction, and coverage in this immense 600-page compendium. As the subtitle suggests, this book is intended for a generalist audience with little or no knowledge of Jewish history in Canada. Although Tulchinsky is always advancing arguments that bear on the causes of this or that phenomenon or its origins, arguments that belong to the order of historiographical discourse, he never engages directly with the scholarship to which he is responding, which feels a bit like shadow-boxing. Historians of Canada or Jewish historians will know the debates about the origins of antisemitism in twentieth-century Canada, but general readers will have to take Tulchinsky's word that there was no real antisemitism or anti-Jewish feeling in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century "Canada" (or its predecessor polities) — rather, it appeared sometime before the end of massive Eastern European Jewish immigration to Canada in 1925 and caused the change in that policy to boot (p. 236). Furthermore, while the antisemites responsible for the end of mass immigration — just as things were getting really bad for Eastern European Jewry and not long before the Shoah — were federal civil servants and government officials (especially Frederick Blair and William Egan), Tulchinsky feels that the main nexus of Canadian antisemitism was to be found in "clerico-fascist" Catholic circles in Quebec. This is only one example of the contradictory and sometimes downright asymmetrical arguments Tulchinsky advances (while refusing to engage the specialist literature or debates explicitly). Some of these problems result from duplication, probably due to merging two previous books that somewhat overlapped into a single volume. There are two distinct and very detailed sections on the Jewish role [End Page 273] (of employers and of workers) in the Montreal and Toronto garment (shmattes) trade, overlapping around the 1910s and 1920s. Tulchinsky's work on the "rag trade" is excellent, it should be noted, and forms the core of his historical insights into the conditions of recent Jewish immigrants, their class consciousness, and their experience of life in Canada. These sections, despite the overlaps, will be of particular interest to readers of this journal for classroom use. The other notable example of this doubling is the dual coverage of the Montreal school crisis, an event that emerged with an almost rigorous logic from the provisions of the British North America Act for separate schooling for children of Protestant denominations and for Catholics. In 1867, the few German and Sephardic Jews in Montreal were no more reliant on public schools for their children than were other well-to-do urban merchants, and so there was no provision for the public education of Jewish children. In the wake of bloody pogroms in Eastern Europe, the exploding population of mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews without private resources quickly outnumbered the established, largely well-to-do German and Sephardic Jews of North America in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This led to a crisis in the funding and provision of public education for Jewish children in Montreal. Although the Protestant school board took Jewish children and exempted them from Christian religious instruction, Jews had no right to representation on the Protestant school board, and no Jewish teachers were hired in its schools. While a separate Jewish school board very nearly materialized before the Second World War, the Protestant school board and representatives of the Jewish community eventually yielded to government pressure to compromise. Tulchinsky's careful and detailed examination of this crisis is one of the great merits of his work. The school crisis deeply affected many Montreal families. In 1919, my great-grandfather Albert Freedman and his wife Mabel left Montreal with their...

Investigating Prospective Jewish Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs About Torah: Implications for Teacher Education

Teaching the Torah in liberal settings demands a set of skills and a sophisticated knowledge of the Bible. It presupposes an open approach to the text that posits multiple interpretations, and demands close reading and explication of the text as in a literary-critical approach. In this article, the author describes the knowledge and beliefs of six different cohort groups of prospective Jewish educators regarding the authorship of the Torah and their understandings of two central narratives in the book of Genesis. She explores the tenacity of their early beliefs in the face of a variety of pedagogic interventions question and speculates about the nature of that tenacity.

Role Salience, Social Support, and Work—Family Conflict Among Jewish and Arab Female Teachers in Israel

Conceptualizing career development in a cultural and contextual framework, this study examined within-gender differences in role salience and work— family conflict (WFC) among 101 Jewish and 99 Arab female teachers (aged 23-64 years) from central Israel. The contribution of social support to women’s conflict was also examined. Results highlighted various differences: in contrast to expectations, Jewish teachers demonstrated higher spouse and parent values than Arab teachers, who demonstrated higher work values and work commitment. As expected, Jewish women reported higher levels of WFC compared to their Arab colleagues. Support systems in Jewish culture were related to lower WFC but not in Arab culture. Theoretical and practical implications emphasize the need for culture-sensitive models of work—family relations and for career counseling interventions.

Fearful symmetry: Palestinian and Jewish teachers confront contested narratives in integrated bilingual education

The present paper deals with Jewish and Palestinian teachers who work in an integrated school in Israel, and shows the challenges and possibilities from examining these teachers' powerful historical narratives in the context of in-service training sessions. It is shown how these teachers essentially remain firmly rooted in the hegemonic historical narratives of their own community, even when their attitudes are challenged and clearer alternatives are considered to the reigning narratives. The findings highlight predominantly the failures in terms of the potential of educational efforts to help overcome situations of intractable conflict even within contexts specifically devised for this purpose; yet, also some openings become apparent in the process of negotiating competing narratives and inventing new dialogic possibilities. The implications of this work suggest that schools and their historical tradition are difficult places to reach change or produce it—even in integrated schools in which partial structural change takes place—and teacher training may not always be the answer for the need to bring changes. However, it is also indicated that an ongoing agonistics of raising critical issues regarding one's identifications with hegemonic narratives does offer openings to take responsibility for both the challenges and the dialogic possibilities that are created in the process.