Jon A. Levisohn
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought
Degrees
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Stanford University, PhD
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Stanford University, MA
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Stanford University, MA
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Harvard University, BA
Profile
Jon A. Levisohn is Associate Professor and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Chair in Jewish Educational Thought at Brandeis University, and directs the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education. Professor Levisohn's areas of specialization include philosophy of education, Jewish education, hermeneutics and the epistemology of the humanities, and scholarship of teaching classical Jewish texts. His most recent courses taught include Philosophy of Jewish Education, Tikkun Olam/Repairing the World: Service and Social Justice in Theory and Practice, A Philosophical Introduction to Judaism, and Studying Sacred Texts.
Selected Publications
Professor Levisohn's recent volumes include Advancing the Learning Agenda in Jewish Education (2018, with Jeffrey Kress) and Beyond Jewish Identity (2019, with Ari Y. Kelman). Recent articles and book chapters include "Theories of Transformative Learning in Jewish Education: Three Cases" (Journal of Jewish Education 83:3, 2017); "'This is One of the Commandments that Devolve upon the Community': Hovot ha-Tzibbur (Communal Obligation) as Resources for Imagining Jewish Community" (Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought 6, 2018, with Marc Herman); "The Challenge of Professional Development in Jewish Studies: Why the Conventional Wisdom May Not Be Enough" (Journal of Jewish Education 85:1, 2019, with Ziva Reimer Hassenfeld), and "Learning to Take Ownership and Learning to Reflect with Equanimity: Two Portraits of Jewish Learning in College” (in Portraits of Jewish Learning, edited by Diane T. Schuster, 2019). He is currently co-editing a volume on teaching and learning in Jewish day schools, with Jonathan Krasner and Susanne Shavelson. Other recent papers and presentations are pieces of two ongoing projects: "Jewish Education in Pursuit of Virtue," an effort to reconceptualize the learning goals of Jewish education in terms of the moral and intellectual dispositions that we aspire and intend for students to develop; and “Jewish Literacy and Illiteracy,” which critiques common understandings and usages of those terms and proposes new ways of thinking about them.