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Letter from the Director
Jon A. Levisohn, Acting Director
Welcome to the Web site of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education. A partnership of the Mandel Foundation of Cleveland and Brandeis University, the Mandel Center was created in early 2002. Now in its ninth year, the Center is the home of six ongoing research projects and programs of professional development.
In the fall of 2009, we published our 2008-09 Annual Report [download PDF], which was organized around three themes: people, inquiry and impact. At the same time, we created our new home page to reflect the same three themes. From that page, visitors can easily navigate to pages about each theme, learning more about
- the talented and creative thinkers-and-doers who make up the Mandel Center;
- the different kinds of inquiry that are the heart of what we do as a research center; and
- the different kinds of impact that we are having on the practice of Jewish education and the field of research in Jewish education.
Our Web site is also, and especially, a way of sharing the knowledge that we generate in our work, as broadly as possible. On this Web site, you can:
- Download PDFs of published papers or of working papers produced by various Center projects.
- Learn about the Center's approach to teacher education, mentoring, and new teacher induction.
- Explore a pilot "webcase," displaying the work of a talented teacher of small children in a Jewish day school.
- Access a bibliography on the pedagogy of Jewish studies, or a short report on "the Talmudic discussions that every Jew should know."
- View videos of Center conference, lectures, and other events.
Our mission remains the same: studying teaching and learning in order to improve Jewish education. But the new academic year also brings some changes.
- We have welcomed a new postdoctoral fellow, Renee Rubin Ross, fresh from her doctoral program at NYU in Education and Jewish Studies.
- We also welcomed another new member of the staff, Cindy Shulak-Rome, who is working with alumni of the DeLeT program.
- And we offered a warm, temporary farewell to Sharon Feiman-Nemser, director of the Center, as she departed for her long-deferred sabbatical.
If you have not yet visited us in person, I warmly encourage you to be in touch. We'd be happy to show you around, and share some of the energy and excitement of our work.
Sincerely,
Jon A. Levisohn