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

Goal

The goals of the Adult Jewish Learning Working Group are to develop a cohort of scholar-practitioners and to develop a knowledge base that will help to move the field of adult Jewish learning toward a greater focus on the learning trajectories of adult students.

Adult Jewish Learning Working Group is supported by funding from the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Project Leader

Tammy Jacobowitz is Tanakh department chair at SAR High School and is the founding director of Makom B'Siach at SAR, an immersive adult education program for parents. She is also an adjunct faculty member of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, where she teaches the Pedagogy of Tanakh. She is a graduate of the Drisha Institute's Scholars Circle and completed her PhD in Midrash at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 as a Wexner Graduate fellow. Dr. Jacobowitz is currently at work on a parsha book, geared towards parents reading to young children. She is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Sefaria Word-by-Word Jewish Women’s Writing Circle Fellowship.

Project Consultant

Diane Tickton Schuster is an independent scholar in Jewish education who has served as an affiliated scholar at the Mandel Center since 2016. Under her direction, the Center’s Portraits of Jewish Learning project culminated in the books, “Portraits of Jewish Learning: Viewing Contemporary Jewish Education Close-In” (2019), and “Portraits of Adult Jewish Learning: Making Meaning at Many Tables” (2022). Diane's 2003 book, “Jewish Lives, Jewish Learning: Adult Jewish Learning in Theory and Practice,” is required reading at rabbinical seminaries and adult education programs across the Jewish community. 

Participants

Leah Kahn, Vice President of Jewish Education, OOI

Leah Kahn has trained hundreds of educators and rabbis in the art of teaching. She is currently the Vice President of Education at OOI and prior to that held a 14-year career in Hillel both on campus and nationally. Leah has an MA in Jewish Studies and Experiential Education from the Spertus Institute and a certificate in Jewish Studies from Pardes. She was awarded the 2016 Pomegranate Prize (Covenant Foundation), received the 2018 Fromer Award in Arts and Education (East Bay Federation) for her choreography, and was a senior fellow in the M2 Pedagogies Research Fellowship (2020). She is a Wexner Field Fellow in Class 8. Leah is a yoga teacher, lifelong modern dancer, Shabbat enthusiast, and a mean vegan cook.

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Ladon, Director of Education, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Ladon is the Director of Education for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where he guides the content and curriculum of national and regional programs to help to ensure Hartman’s cutting-edge offerings speak to the realities of the Jewish community and the challenges of the Jewish people. He is currently at work turning his dissertation about how educators and rabbis design source sheets into a book.

Rabbi Benay Lappe, President and Rosh Yeshiva, Svara

Ordained by The Jewish Theological Seminary in 1997, Benay Lappe founded SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, in 2003. An award-winning educator specializing in the application of queer theory to Talmud study, Benay has served on the faculties of numerous universities, leadership training programs, and rabbinical schools. Benay was named to The Forward’s 2014 List of Most Inspiring Rabbis, the Forward 50 list of most influential American Jews, and in 2016 received the prestigious Covenant Award for innovative Jewish education. While learning and teaching Talmud are her greatest passions, Rabbi Lappe is also a licensed pilot, shoemaker, and patent-holding inventor.

Dr. Julie Lieber, Chief Jewish Life and Engagement Officer, JewishColorado

Dr. Julie Lieber is a Jewish educator with many years of experience in both academic and community-based settings. She serves as the Chief Jewish Life and Engagement Officer at JewishColorado, where she oversees an array of engagement and educational programs housed within our state-wide Federation. Formerly, she served as the Director of the Pardes-Kevah Teaching Fellowship as well as the Interim Executive Director and Director of Education at Kevah, a national non-profit facilitating home-based Torah study groups. After receiving her PhD in European history with a focus on Jewish women, gender and sexuality, Julie moved to Colorado, where she was a Professor of European History and Jewish Studies for many years. Julie has taught for the Wexner Heritage Program, the Melton program and is a frequent guest lecturer throughout the Colorado Jewish community and beyond.

Sara Wolkenfeld, Chief Learning Officer, Sefaria

Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld is the Chief Learning Officer at Sefaria, an online database and interface for Jewish texts. Sara is a member of Class Six of the Wexner Field Fellowship, and an alumna of the David Hartman Center at the Hartman Institute of North America. Sara also serves as Scholar-in-Residence at Ohev Sholom Congregation in Washington, DC. She writes about Jewish texts and Jewish law, and her current projects focus on applying Talmudic ideas to questions of advancements in digital technology.

Miriam Zami, PhD candidate, Yeshiva University

Miriam Zami is a PhD candidate in Talmud and Ancient Judaism at Yeshiva University, where she is writing her dissertation on humor in rabbinic literature. She teaches Jewish education widely in communal settings, with a particular focus on the Sephardic Syrian community. Miriam was named the first Emerging Scholar Fellow by Ma’ayan and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Sefaria Word-by-Word Jewish Women’s Writing Circle Fellowship.

Research Assistant

Rafael (rafa) Kern, PhD candidate, Stanford University

rafa kern (he/him, pronounced hafa, with a soft h like in human) is a Brazilian Ashkenazi Jew who aspires to live a good, meaningful life and to help others do the same. His research is an attempt to figure out how people learn to do that. At present, he is finishing his doctoral dissertation at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education about how liberal Jewish adults make meaning of religious texts and make those texts and their experiences of study meaningful. Part of what makes his life more meaningful is his study of Aikido and Yiddish dance and his work as an artist (theater, film, and fiction). He grew up in São Paulo and now lives in South Minneapolis with his partner, Sarah.

Goals

The field of teaching second/foreign languages requires language teachers to include the study of culture in their teaching goals. This requirement creates the need to train them in tools to understand all aspects of the target culture as well as the pedagogical approaches used in their classroom. This development has presented a new challenge for teacher training programs.  The goal of this working group is to unpack these challenges in the context of programs that train Hebrew educators by inviting a group of researchers and practitioners from a variety of academic disciplines to discuss the following topics:

1. Current research on best practices on how to train foreign language teachers to include the teaching of culture in their curriculum;

2. Development of Israeli culture;
3. Israeli culture through the lens of Israeli literature, visual and performing arts;
4. Hebrew language as representation of culture;
5. The role of the “other” in the development of Israeli culture;
6. New trends in pedagogical approaches in teaching culture in language classrooms.

Participants

Oz Aloni, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Hebrew University

Oz Aloni is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The topic of his research is the oral culture of the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic speaking Jewish community of Zakho, Kurdistan.

Rima Farah, Lecturer in Hebrew; Academic Fields:  Israel Studies, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Ethnic and National Identities, Northeastern University

Rima Farah’s areas of specialization are political and cultural histories of modern Israel and the contemporary Middle East. Her field of specialty also includes a study about teaching Hebrew culture in Israel and the United States. Currently, she is writing an article about the role of the “other” in the development of Israeli culture and in teaching about Hebrew culture, which will be published with a collection of articles in a book by The Consortium for the Teaching of Hebrew Language and Culture, and the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. Farah is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and she has good knowledge of French.

Yael Gaulan, Scholar of Modern Hebrew Linguistics, Hebrew University

Yael Gaulan is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is writing her dissertation about the concept of shame in contemporary Israeli discourse. Additionally, she is a Hebrew teacher for adult learners and a pedagogical advisor and curriculum developer, and works for academic institutes and educational NGOs.

Eran Kaplan, Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies, San Francisco State University

Eran Kaplan is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University. Before coming to San Francisco, he taught at Princeton, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Toronto. His latest book is: Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen, which has been translated to Chinese.

Doran Katz, Assistant Professor, Middlebury Language Schools, Middlebury School of Hebrew, Middlebury College

Dr. Doran Katz is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the Middlebury School of Hebrew where she teaches and advises Master’s and Doctoral students in Teaching Hebrew a World Language. Dr. Katz received her Doctorate from The George Washington University in Curriculum and Instruction and Post Doctoral Training at The Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Katz has significant experience in scholarship, teaching, and advising, as well as curriculum and program design. Dr. Katz is also an alumnus of Brandeis, BA ‘04, MA ‘05, and is thrilled to be affiliated back with the university in this capacity.

Tamar Meyer, Robert R. Churchill Professor of Geosciences, Middlebury College

Tamar Mayer, is the Robert R. Churchill Professor of Geosciences at Middlebury College, in VT. She is a feminist political geographer and the past director (2012-2020) of both the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs and the Program in International and Global Studies at Middlebury College, in VT. For the last decade she has also directed the Program in Modern Hebrew and Israeli Society. Her research interests lie in the interplay among nationalism, homeland, and memory, with a special focus on stateless ethnic nations, specifically Jews pre statehood, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and the Uighurs in Xinjiang, China. She is the editor or co-editor of seven books that focus on different dimensions of international and global crises, the most recent which is Displacement, Belonging and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power (Routledge 2022).

Yaron Peleg, Kennedy Leigh Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies, University of Cambridge

Yaron Peleg received his PhD in Hebrew literature from Brandeis University in 2000. Before the University of Cambridge, he taught various courses on modern Hebrew literature and Israeli film at Princeton University and later at George Washington University, where he also directed the Hebrew language program from 2002-2012. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and associate editor of Prooftexts. His research interests include language history and development, literary traditions and modern culture writ large, especially in Israel and the Middle East.

Project Leader

Vardit Ringvald, Director of The Consortium for the Teaching of Hebrew Language and Culture; Research Professor at The Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education; Expert in Second Language Acquisition, Brandeis University

Goals

The mission of the Jewish Spirituality Working Group is to chart out a possible domain in the teaching and learning of Jewish spirituality.

We hope to clarify: 

1. What this domain may look like;

2. What questions about teaching and learning are worth pursuing;

3. What methods could be employed to study these emerging questions.

Participants

Rabbi Josh Feigelson, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Rabbi Nancy Flam, Founding Teacher, Institute for Jewish Spirituality 

Elie Holzer, Associate Professor, Head of the Rabbi Dr. Ochs Chair for Teaching Jewish Religious Studies, Director of the Eliezer Stern Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Education, Bar Ilan University

Rebecca Minkus- Lieberman, Jewish educator, Orot: Center for New Jewish Learning

Jane Shapiro, Co-Founder, Orot: Center for New Jewish Learning

Project Leader

Joseph Reimer, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Education, Brandeis University

---

From April 1-3, 2025, leading practitioners and scholars gathered at Brandeis University for the Convening on Jewish Spiritual Education, to explore the teaching and learning that happen within adult Jewish spiritual education centered on engagement with Hasidic texts. Expanding the work of the Mandel Center Jewish Spirituality Working Group, participants engaged around such questions as: How do Jewish spiritual educators teach Hasidic texts? How do learners encounter these texts? What happens for teachers and learners through this process of engagement?