Episode 46: Judaism Mediated: Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts

Hi.

Um, thank you so much, Ziva.

It's really, it's really a pleasure to be with all of you.

First and foremost, we want to just, Laura and I want to say thank you to the Mandel Center for being, uh, such supporters of this project throughout the many years we've been, uh, doing it, so thank you.

Thank you to Jon and, um, and, and all of you at the Mandel Center for your support in different ways.

So yeah, I want to talk a little bit about what this book is, and for those of you who, who might have just saw the title of the book but not have had a chance to, to look at, you know, a, a summary or, or read any of it.

And then we can talk a little bit about what motivated us or who we think this book was written for, or who we hope will pick up the book or, or some of its chapters at least.

So this is actually a project that Laura started, [laughs] uh, and so I wanna recognize that.

Uh, Laura started it in coordination with Ben Jacobs years ago, uh, I think if I'm not mistaken, in, in 2018, where they started to think about this question of, uh, surveys were showing at the time, and there was a lot of discourse at the time showing that people are doing religion not in houses of worship or in, uh, formal school-like settings, but they're turning to different kinds of cultural art experiences as a form of doing religion.

And we saw that in Pew surveys, that specifically among American Jews, that is the case, and even in more really recent surveys, that is still the case, that people are saying that they're doing religion not only, and I...

this is an important point, not only in, uh, cultural arts, but that is a form, a, a particularly important venue in which people are, are doing Jewish kinds of activities and having Jewish kinds of experiences.

Seeing that and understanding that that's a phenomenon that's happening today, we set out in this project to think, well, if this is what people are doing, if this is what adults are doing, what, what kind of Jewish learning is happening in these spaces? Because we have a good, or I would say a, a robust sense of what, what goes on in Jewish education in schools and in other kinds of formal settings, although that's also a field that Ziva and others are always working in, you know, what, what is happening in schools and, and camps and other kinds of things.

But we thought, well, this is an opportunity to look at learning that's happening in these other kind of cultural arts spaces.

So that really was the first primary motivation.

Just some things about that, that, one, we took a really capacious view.

Importantly, when we, when we think about, uh, Jewish learning, we took a really capacious view of what does it mean to learn.

You know, often that can be defined or delimited to, like, the cognitive kind of learning that happens in schools or how often things are measured and evaluated.

But we, we decided that really this is so new and there's so little written about it that we really wanted to take this very broad sense of different types of learning.

So whether it's relational, affective, associative, all different kinds.

And so we, we situated ourselves in a broad literature about learning and things in the learning sciences.

The second thing I'll just say about this is that we were really conscious and really cognizant in our own minds of differentiating between education and learning.

And while clearly they are connected [laughs] and we use these words all the time, uh, sometimes to mean the same thing, in the book, what we write about and what, you know, I wanna present here is that we really think, in this project, we're thinking education is really, you know, uh, we're gonna say that that's the kind of stuff that goes on in maybe more formal school-like settings, and we're thinking about learning that happens also clearly in those settings, but might happen in different ways or might look differently in other kinds of settings.

So those are just some basic things about the book.

I'll just say a little more about actually what's in the book, and then I'm gonna pass the, the microphone over to Laura to talk about, you know, who we hope is our reader and what they hopefully will take from this project.

So we set out, Laura started this project in, in 2019, really with an interest at looking at, uh, what's called the Weitzman Museum now in, uh, Philadelphia, and did a lovely study that is in the book.