Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education

Exemplars of American Jewish Civic Education

In the fall of 2024, MCSJE director Jon A. Levisohn was invited to participate in the American Jewish Civics Seminar, a group of leading Jewish educators and activists convened under the co-sponsorship of A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy and the Shalom Hartman Institute. During the course of the 2024-25 academic year, the group explored the challenges facing American democracy and the ways that Jewish education might address those challenges. This initiative led to a number of projects, forthcoming from the participants in the seminar. For Levisohn, these projects include the following:

1. "Meeting the Challenges of the Moment: How to Think about the Purposes of American Jewish Education After October 7," a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume, Education After October 7: Teaching and Learning in the Jewish Diaspora (edited Matt Reingold, forthcoming from Academic Studies Press), in which Levisohn argues that Jewish education must address the alarming contemporary emergence of antisemitism, while also working to promote Jewish commitment to a set of Jewish democratic principles;
2. "Taking Our Students to the Window: American Jewish Civic Education in an Age of Democratic Fragility" (eJewishPhilanthropy, June 13, 2025), presenting a brief version of the same argument.

But these conceptual models lack the specificity of real-world practices. So in addition, Levisohn, together with research assistant Bryan Hanan Oren, is developing a set of brief case studies of "exemplars," i.e., Jewish educational institutions that are undertaking ambitious and creative work to promote democratic values. Each case study will describe how the exemplar initiative operates, how it strives to promote democratic values, what we can discern about its impact, what challenges it has encountered, and most importantly, what educators can learn from it.