Portraits of Adult Jewish Learning: Making Meaning at Many Tables

By Jon A. Levisohn

What do we mean by "adult Jewish learning"? Where is contemporary adult Jewish learning taking place? What kinds of learning matter to adult Jewish learners in the twenty-first century? Portraits of Adult Jewish Learning boldly tackles these questions through the exploration of various learners' experiences in diverse circumstances: couples exploring a Jewish museum, actors co-creating a Jewish-themed play, social justice activists consolidating their Jewish values and identities, Jewish preschool educators visiting Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish staff at a Jewish social service agency studying traditional texts together, Latinx converts seeking to understand "how to be a good Jew," members of a Torah study group producing their own commentaries, Jewish community leaders coming to terms with the challenges of Jewish pluralism. Using the social science methodology of portraiture, the authors provide nuanced detail about the wide range of participants, settings, subject matter, and ways of meaning making that characterize adult Jewish learning today. Viewing these narratives side by side enables readers to think "outside the frame" about programming, curricula, pedagogies, and contexts that encourage meaningful adult learning. This book will capture the imagination of educational leaders, clergy, policymakers, philanthropists, teachers, and adult learners, and will spark conversation about how to enrich the field of adult Jewish learning overall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666724257

Book preview

Introduction

Diane Tickton Schuster

A classic depiction of adult Jewish learning displays a group of bearded men and young boys gathered around a table, immersed in Torah or Talmud study.¹ Such a portrait, while artful, is a product of its own time.

As such, it draws the viewer into a world dramatically different from that of Jewish education in the non-Orthodox Jewish community during the early twenty-first century. In this particular image, we witness a group of Jewish men and boys engaged in discourse about the Talmud: a time-honored tradition which earns the respect of families and communities and enacts the transmission of Jewish ideas l’dor vador (from generation to generation). Much might be made of the symbolism of this image—the centrality of study in Jewish life, the value of dialogue for sharpening understanding, the transmission of wisdom across generations, the marginalization of women in Jewish educational enterprises. However, as a portrait of adult Jewish learning, it no longer suffices as a representative image of Jewish education as we know it in the world of most North American Jewish adults today.

This book offers a different kind of portrait of learners, of a wide array of adults who sit at many different kinds of tables of learning. These accounts invite us to consider some key questions about adult Jewish learning in our time, including:

•What do we mean by Jewish learning?

•Who is present at today’s tables of Jewish learning?

•What kinds of learning matter to adult Jewish learners in the twenty-first century?

•Where is contemporary adult Jewish learning now taking place?

•Which learning activities enrich the contemporary adult Jewish learner’s educational experience?

•How do current adult learners integrate their Jewish learning into their lives?

•In what ways do adult Jewish learners transmit what they have learned to others?

In the pages that follow, as you encounter images of contemporary adults engaged in Jewish learning, you may find yourself pushing up against some assumptions underlying the usual answers to each of these questions. In these portraits, you will meet learners who do not fit within the frame of previous generations of Jews who typically met around a study table or in a lecture hall. Rather than being unified by a common purpose or a single modality of Jewish education (such as a beit midrash [study hall], a Hebrew class, or a talk by a rabbi), these learners sit at—or walk around in—or log onto—very different gathering places for study than we have seen before in research that scrutinizes Jewish education. Variety characterizes these learners. They tend to be different from earlier generations by virtue of their diverse backgrounds, complex identities, motivations for learning, learning needs, and preferred modes of study. We can imagine a complex Venn diagram in which some are novice Jewish learners, just beginning to explore Jewish life and texts and values. Others are seasoned professionals or community leaders who have their own distinctive Jewish questions and concerns. Some are not themselves Jewish but would describe themselves as Jewish adjacent or part of a Jewish+family.² Some are part of what my colleague Lisa Grant and I have labeled the committed core—adults who study Jewish content regularly, affiliate with Jewish organizations, and seek personal meaning through engagement with Jewish ideas.³

The learners in these portraits of adult Jewish learning are representative of the changing landscape of Jewish education that is occurring in the twenty-first century; their experiences highlight the complexities of defining what Jewish learning consists of and what it means to be educated as a Jew. As Jon Levisohn, director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, has pointed out, the customary standards by which past researchers have measured Jewish literacy are now obsolete and too confining. The old paradigm—which often assessed literacy primarily in terms of a learner’s competency in analyzing classical texts—grew out of Jewish mono-cultural thinking that privileged the experience of an elite male Ashenazi traditionalist culture.⁴ It placed an emphasis on learning to read and being able to discuss specific texts deemed important by particular authorities at a certain time in history. Rather than extending to all Jews across the community, this text-centered intellectual discourse was the purview of an exclusive few. This narrow model of literacy ignored the rich diversity of the Jewish people in every community, as well as the many ways that different types of Jews acquired and transmitted knowledge about Judaism and living a meaningful Jewish life.

In proposing a new paradigm of Jewish literacy, Levisohn argues that to become culturally literate and to thrive in the modern world, Jewish adults—like the people shown in the portraits here—need more than specific facts stored as information to be retrieved.⁵ Rather than passively conforming to doctrine that has been deemed important by authorities, these adults are looking for knowledge that they can use to produce their own meanings. In a discussion of the changing Jewish educational ecosystem,⁶ thought leaders Jonathan Woocher and Meredith Woocher amplify Levisohn’s point, suggesting that contemporary Jewish adults have embraced prosumerism and seek an active voice in choosing and shaping their own experiences, including Jewish experiences. Prosumerism, they explain,

refers to the growing phenomenon in which individuals act simultaneously as producers of the products and services they consume. As an example, one can think of the way in which music listeners today create personalized playlists and become their own DJs, or computer purchasers design their own computer systems. This mindset and approach to becoming a co-producer of one’s experiences has now spread to domains beyond technology, including learning experiences.⁷

The portraits in this book display numerous examples of how adult Jewish learners are now dynamically producing and consuming personalized Jewish experiences and also are seeking the kinds of educational spaces that support creativity and self-expression.

In addition to revealing shifts in thinking about learners’ Jewish literacy and prosumerist dispositions, this book offers vivid examples of the diversification of contexts of learning. In a further description of the changing world of Jewish education, Barry Chazan, Robert Chazan, and Benjamin Jacobs note:

The twenty-first century has seen a spectacular explosion of exciting Jewish educational initiatives spring up out of the creative minds and bold visions of innovative educators and communal leaders who no longer accept the proposition that Jewish learning necessarily happens in schools, classrooms, and other formal settings. . . .

The range of these activities is incredibly vast, encompassing all sorts of new ways for engaging students with Jewish-related content (culture, texts, values, rituals), and it impinges on a host of traditional and nontraditional venues for educational activity, including websites, arts spaces, media, historical sites, cultural centers, and the outdoors.⁸

In other words, not only have the settings of Jewish education changed, there are new curricula that can help learners to connect to different dimensions of Judaism and Jewish civilization through a variety of prisms—history, sociology, core texts, ritual, language, land, spirituality, and values.⁹ Examples of such holistic and interdisciplinary prisms are showcased in the portraits here; rather than being defined exclusively in terms of traditional Jewish textual learning, some curricula incorporate an eclectic mix of written materials, Jewish artifacts, hands-on encounters with real life dilemmas, and other innovative entry points for learning.

Finally, several of the portraits herein reveal how the rapid incorporation of technology and online media into Jewish learning experiences has revolutionized the interpersonal dynamics and intellectual resources of contemporary adult Jewish education. A 2019 study by Ari Kelman et al. for the Jim Joseph Foundation found that online learning has transformed our definition of learning, expanding it beyond the school day, beyond expertise, and beyond books, newspapers, and encyclopedias. Specifically, Kelman et al. note:

Online communities of critics have opened up new ways of understanding old texts. The internet has . . . expanded the depth and range of learning communities, as social media have made it possible for the formation of affinity groups around hobbies or interests no matter how esoteric, while YouTube has become the first stop for instructional videos of all kinds. Advances in digital media have made it possible to learn more things in more new ways than anyone could have imagined possible, even

25

years ago.¹⁰

Not only have online media changed the ways that we think about learning in general, but these media are also transforming how we think about the creation and delivery of Jewish learning experiences. Through these mechanisms, learners connect with others around Jewish content, access Jewish knowledge beyond conventional Jewish institutions (such as synagogues and community centers), and integrate their Jewish learning with real-life experiences. As Kelman et al. point out, Jewish learning

happens everywhere learning happens online. It happens on Wikipedia and Google, through Facebook and YouTube, through podcasts and Skype, as well as on more targeted Jewish content providers like BimBam, Sefaria, and Kveller. All of these platforms facilitate engagements with information, and, as such, they all foster emergent forms of learning.¹¹

Emergent forms of learning have become especially evident since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a burst of creativity in Jewish education by requiring both educators and learners to embrace learning virtually, through the use of electronic devices. A 2021 study by Rabbi Morey Schwartz for the Melton Adult Schools found that

between March

2020

and March

2021

, many adult learners not only replaced their hours of in-person learning with online offerings, but actually increased the number of weekly hours they dedicated to adult Jewish learning. Learners cited a need to continue their education and connect to a larger Jewish community. And when asked about their future plans, there was a clear indication that as a result of the shift to online learning during the pandemic, the majority of these learners are interested in making online learning a prominent part of their weekly adult Jewish learning.¹²

The portraits in this book reflect this reality, both in terms of who came to the table during COVID-19 and how educators were required to pivot to make their content and pedagogical approaches more relevant and more effective.

About Portraiture

As I discovered in 2016–2019, in the process of editing the volume Portraits of Jewish Learning: Viewing Contemporary Jewish Education Close-In, the social science methodology of portraiture is a dynamic and engaging way to bring the experience of Jewish learners to the attention of a community that needs to understand what happens in Jewish education; the more we get inside the Jewish learning enterprise, the better equipped we are to make informed decisions and policy to strengthen and improve the field. Ironically, even though I have spent the past quarter century studying the experiences of adult Jewish learners, the earlier volume of portraits did not include accounts of adult learners! Thus, when the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University invited me to assess whether there might also be portraits of adult Jewish learning waiting to be written by scholars and practitioners in the Jewish education community, I was delighted to explore the possibilities.

In fall 2019, I reached out to organizations known to have ongoing adult Jewish learning programs, as well as researchers about Jewish education, to discuss who already had, or might be in a position to collect, data suitable for narrative portraiture. To launch the Portraits of Adult Jewish Learning project (PAJL), I recruited research projects that could likely be completed within a twelve-month window.¹³ Eight of the projects are described in the present volume, and more data exist for additional portraits at a later time.

The authors of the chapters that follow share a commitment to portraiture, a qualitative research methodology in which the researcher combines systematic, empirical description with aesthetic expression, blending art and science, humanistic sensibilities and scientific rigor.¹⁴ Each portrait draws on data from observations, interviews, recordings, and document analysis to focus on how adult Jewish learners navigate the learning experience. The authors speak in their own voices, using the first person, showing that they, too, are part of the story of adult Jewish learning that they have observed.

These portraitists bring years of field experience to their research, which enable them to perceive the small details of educational encounters, details that show how learning—and obstacles to learning—occur. Their narratives are crafted to reveal more about the process itself than just about learning outcomes or the learners’ achievement of specific goals. In most cases, the authors have been engaged in direct, informal dialogue with the people they are studying, thereby gaining access to in-the-moment insights and personal reflections (of both the researcher and the researched) that impact how they ultimately present the story of their research. In some instances, their efforts to sustain close-in connection with their subjects were hampered by the circumstances of COVID-19; their accounts inevitably reflect the constraints on scholarship and program delivery that occurred during the pandemic.

These portraits of adult Jewish learning vary widely in style, but, in accord with Lawrence-Lightfoot’s methodology, each seeks to capture the richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural context, conveying the perspectives of the people who are negotiating those experiences.¹⁵ Building on the stories gleaned from dialogues and observations, each portrait captures a snapshot of the backdrop, the essential features, and the interpersonal experiences of participants, providing a powerful form of description and affording the picture of the participants’ ‘life world’ that is required.¹⁶ Although these narratives are snapshots, they also provide footage of the dynamic processes of learning; in this sense, portraiture not only captures particular moments of knowledge acquisition and new meaning-making, it also shows how learning occurs over time. In this sense, the learners we meet in these accounts—and at the varied tables (both real and metaphorical) around which they sit—are continually changing and adapting, as these Jewish adults move forward to new understandings of themselves and Jewish life. The learners are presented as real people who live within a complex network of personalities, social groups, structures, and cultures and who have habits, inclinations, and values with whom we can identify.¹⁷

Portraits of Adult Jewish Learning

As with the organization of any gallery of works of art, the sequencing of chapters in this book is intentional. The volume begins with two portraits of adult Jewish learning that take place in what might be considered unconventional settings: a Jewish museum and the living room of the director of a Jewish theater company. Next are three portraits of adults whose work-lives engage them in elements of Jewish learning: young adults venturing into the world of social justice work, educators who work in Jewish preschools on a trip to Israel, and staff members of a Jewish social service agency. The portrait that follows disrupts some assumptions of elite male Ashenazi traditionalist culture about who now comes to tables of Jewish learning, focusing on the experiences of Latinx¹⁸ adults who seek to convert to Judaism. The final two portraits zoom in on the learning conversations of different types of adult Jewish learners: women in a long-term Torah study class and participants in a Jewish leadership development program, who grapple with the complexities of pluralistic Jewish life in contemporary times.

In chapter 1, Laura Yares reveals the kinds of Jewish learning that can occur during episodic encounters with new Jewish content that takes place during leisure time. Drawing upon a study of young adult visitors to Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, she portrays two romantic couples as they tour the museum and comment on the exhibits. Using a framework of havruta (partner dialogue) to describe the interactions between the couples, Yares suggests that the couples’ dialogue in the museum constitutes a form of learning between two partners, in which objects within the museum function as a multidimensional text. Both couples featured in Yares’s account come from multiple-faith backgrounds, and their havruta experience provides insight into the rich and nuanced Jewish learning that can occur between interfaith interlocutors. Her analysis is informed by research about havruta learning, museum education, and interfaith relationships.

In chapter 2, Miriam Heller Stern and Tobin Belzer describe how a group of creatives came together to study various histories (Jewish, American, Western, ancient, global, art, and personal) as they developed a production at an experimental theater company in Los Angeles named theatre dybbuk. For six months, this group engaged in study activities in which they collaboratively wrote a script based on Exagoge, the work of Ezekiel the poet (second century BCE). The authors observed the group’s dynamics and interviewed members of the company to understand how their unique relationships with the historically informed content shaped their experience of developing, performing in, and producing the play. Their portrait describes a learning space that is distinct from intentional and conventional adult learning programs; it reveals adult Jewish learning that is shaped by self-guided and self-motivated thinking, group discussion, and interpretational experiences that lead to creative production. Their analysis is grounded in scholarship about creativity, learning through the arts, adult learning, and project-based learning,

In chapter 3, Sarra Alpert and Abigail Uhrman showcase the learning experiences of three young adults who participated in the Avodah Jewish Service Corps, an immersive year-long program in which recent college graduates (ages twenty-one to twenty-six) hold full-time volunteer positions in social service agencies. Their portrait shows how the corps members’ learning about Judaism and social justice is aligned with Avodah’s clearly stated program outcome goals. During the year, the corps members live together in a group residence and participate in a rich array of programming, mentoring, and leadership development activities. These young adults are helped to explore their own social justice values and strengthen their Jewish identities. Alpert and Urhman’s analysis builds on theories about social learning, Jewish identity, and emerging adulthood.

In chapter 4, Lauren Applebaum recounts the experience of a group of early childhood educators who work in Jewish preschools during a study trip to Israel. Based on data she gathered while accompanying the trip participants, Applebaum considers the ways in which a thoughtfully planned travel experience can provide an occasion for both meaningful Jewish adult learning and professional growth. The five-day learning experience was intentionally planned to help the participants to retreat from their home lives and then later to integrate their experiences back into those lives. Drawing on research about experiential education, Israel education, adult development, and play, Applebaum describes the value of incorporating elements of play into meaningful and relevant adult Jewish learning activities.

In chapter 5, Joshua Ladon explains how text learning and case studies help staff members at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco (JFCS) explore the meaning of Jewish peoplehood in the context of their work. Through participating in a study program designed by the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, both Jewish and non-Jewish members of JFCS’s professional staff probed such issues as what it means to work for a Jewish organization, how Jewish-ness is understood in the Bay Area, and how the agency sustains its identity as a Jewish organization. Using data from observations, recorded text study dialogues, and follow-up interviews, Ladon shows how adult Jewish learning leads to shifting perceptions of the staff members’ social service work and their sense of shared values across the organization. Looking at these developments from the perspective of organizational development theory, Ladon zeroes in on how relationships and dedicated time for reflection contribute to a sense of Jewish peoplehood in a work environment.

In chapter 6, Lourdes Arguelles and Anne Rivero offer a group portrait based on their study of seventy-nine recent and mostly undocumented and monolingual Spanish-speaking Latinx migrants to Southern California. These individuals each sought to convert to Judaism between 2017 and 2020. Many of these seekers come from crypto-Jewish (i.e., secretly Jewish) family backgrounds and strive to return to the faith of their ancestors; others feel a call to formally convert to Judaism under the often-traumatic circumstances of undocumented migration. This portrait highlights the many barriers these conversos perceive as preventing them from feeling accepted or learning "cómo ser verdaderamente un Judío/a" (how to be an authentic Jew). Based on their interactions with this population, the authors offer suggestions about what Jewish educational leaders need to do to meet the social, emotional, spiritual, and learning needs of these newcomers to Judaism. Their analysis builds on scholarship about conversos and their migrant experiences, informal education, and critical pedagogy.

In chapter 7, Jane Sherwin Shapiro provides an in-depth look at a group—that is, one particular class—of adult Jewish learners that has been meeting for over a dozen years. Drawing on observations and interviews, she shows how learning occurs among a group of women who are dedicated to studying a variety of Jewish texts (ranging from the Bible and its classical commentaries, to Hasidic and contemporary Jewish thought, to poetry, both historical and modern). Shapiro’s research shows that long-term adult Jewish learning yields measurable impacts on learners’ identities as Jewish adults, as well as their spiritual lives and overall engagement with Jewish life and learning. In her role as the group’s teacher, Shapiro also provides a self-portrait that captures her perspectives as an educator, program director, curriculum developer, and researcher about adult Jewish learning. Her analysis is informed by studies of adult cognitive development, transformative learning, flow, and reader-response theory.

In chapter 8, Yaffa Epstein and Tali Zelkowicz introduce the experience of adult learners in the Wexner Heritage Program, in which they encounter a curricular unit called Applied Jewish Pluralism. The participants, referred to as Heritage Members, are up-and-coming volunteer leaders in the Jewish community, ages thirty to fifty, who span a wide spectrum of Jewish life and who represent different political, religious, ethnic, professional, socioeconomic, and volunteer backgrounds. The six-hour pluralism curriculum was designed to help the Heritage Members to increase their awareness of and confidence in their own Jewish choices and to learn and practice strategies for dialoguing with others about their respective choices. The participants met virtually for three sessions during September–October 2020. The portrait draws on observations, recordings of course sessions, chat transcripts, artifacts that the learners produced during the course, and participant evaluation forms. The analysis is supported by research about cultural studies and pluralism.

Taking a Broader View

In the final chapter of this book, I take a step back from the individual portraits and identify six common factors that emerge in a cross-case analysis of the narratives. These themes speak directly to the changing world of Jewish education and to the need for educators and community leaders to think outside the frame about what contemporary adult Jewish learning looks like now and where it may head in the future. As a collection, the portraits reveal the many tables where a diverse range of adults in a diverse range of settings find meaningful opportunities to engage in Judaism, Jewish life, and Jewish learning. Unfortunately, the findings implicit in these portraits are not grounded in a robust empirical research literature about adult Jewish learning programs, learners, teachers, or venues. It is my hope that this book will spark conversation and exchanges of information that will contribute to the growth and further development of adult Jewish learning as a field of dynamic inquiry and of even more innovative practice.

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