Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on the launch of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston’s new “Face Jewish Hate” campaign. Also in this newsletter: Josh Harris, Donald Chaiken and Chaim Shmuel Schreiber. We’ll start with the launch of iCenter’s new “Conflicts of Interest” program.
Inevitably, the conversation around Israel always turns to conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel’s myriad domestic conflicts. And yet Israel educators report feeling “fear, angst and anxiety” when teaching about those conflicts and therefore try to avoid discussing them, Alex Harris of Chicago’s iCenter told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
“Educators feared they didn’t have sufficient content knowledge. They worried that they didn’t have the right emotional dispositions to deal with some of these key topics. They worried, ‘How do I, as an educator, come to the students and bring in my own perspectives, but also maintain [a] sort of political neutrality, but also work with identity formation,” Harris told eJP.
To address this, last year the iCenter launched a new initiative to develop a framework to prepare educators to teach their students about these conflicts and conflict in general. This week, the organization is rolling out this new program, which it is calling “Conflicts of Interest.”
To begin developing the Conflicts of Interest program, iCenter first spoke to some 200 educators – day school teachers, Hebrew school teachers, Israel trip organizers, youth group directors – in order to get a lay of the land and understand the educators’ needs. Harris and the other iCenter employees who worked on the project also read through the available resources, including “20 lesson plans, 23 textbooks and resource guides, 18 white papers, 66 books and articles, and 19 curriculum frameworks,” Harris wrote in an opinion piece for eJP last year.
Harris described finding a wealth of information about what to teach, but little help in how to teach it. “In our focus groups, we found that many educators are hesitant to engage with the topic altogether. Some lack the necessary background and/or pedagogical skills to teach about the conflict confidently and competently,” he wrote.
According to iCenter CEO Anne Lanski, the multitiered Conflicts of Interest program is not a specific curriculum – with specific facts, values, messages and narratives – but a broader pedagogical method that individual institutions and teachers can adapt to their own perspectives on the issues of Israel, Zionism and the Palestinians. “Content and knowledge are very important, but… it’s our educational framework that is what makes this uniquely important,” Lanski said.
Read the full story here.
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