MCSJE News & Events -I- December 2025 | | |
Meet This Year's SCRoLL Lab Student Researchers
The Student-Centered Religious Learning and Literacy Lab (SCRoLL Lab) provides opportunities for Brandeis students to develop social scientific research skills, as they participate in a range of collaborative empirical studies. This year's student researchers include: Agbarakwe Chukwuemeka MS ’26, Jacob Elstein MA ’26, Ayden Kligfeld ’26, Adina Saks ’28, Hannah Shapiro ’28, and Kenny Sicat ’26.
Under the guidance of lab director Professor Ziva Hassenfeld, Postdoctoral Fellow Michal Shapira-Junger, and Visiting Scholar Michal Bessler, the lab's research project this year explores college students' learning of Biblical Hebrew, and how their language identities, academic identities, and religious identities inform their learning.
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New Findings on Religious Pluralism in Higher Education
MCSJE Associate Director Jenny Small and Professor Ilana Horwitz, director of the Doctoral Fellows program, recently collaborated on research about higher education's role in fostering religious pluralism. Their findings have been published in The Journal of Higher Education and featured in The Conversation.
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Kibbutz in the American Jewish Imagination
In a new article in Journal of Jewish Education, Joseph Reimer, Associate Professor Emeritus of Jewish Education, argues that Bruno Bettelheim and Lawrence Kohlberg, two giants in the field of psychology, presented in their research the kibbutz as purely secular—while in fact being profoundly personally and spiritually impacted by their time in these spaces.
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Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools Book Launch
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025
Time: 1:00 - 2:15 ET via Zoom
What does the latest research in teaching and learning in Jewish day schools reveal about what’s going on in classrooms today? For this webinar, respondents Daniel Held (UJA Federation of Greater Toronto), Amanda Pogany (Luria Academy of Brooklyn), and Tali Zelkowicz (The Wexner Foundation) were asked to review Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools, a new publication focused on presenting a better understanding of how day schools are educating diverse Jewish youth in a variety of content areas. The respondents will share their feedback in a talk with editor Jonathan Krasner and moderator Ziva Hassenfeld.
Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools is available for purchase and published in the Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education by Brandeis University Press.
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Learning About Learning: Conversations with Scholars of Jewish Education
Jewish Educators' Responses to "You Never Told Me"
Dr. Benji Davis
Date: Thursday, January 15, 2026
Time: 1 - 1:30 ET via Zoom
In this session, we will explore insights into how Israel educators from Jewish high schools across the denominational spectrum approach teaching modern Israel in response to the "you never told me" phenomenon: graduates expressing disillusionment that criticisms of Israel were not covered in their high school education. Benji Davis will discuss his recent study and share how educators intentionally incorporate both Zionist and Palestinian perspectives to deepen students' Jewish identification with Israel and the Jewish people, while preparing them to engage in conversations about Israel on campus.
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Spotlight on Jewish Education Two Years After October 7
Two years after October 7, that date seems to mark a watershed in Jewish life around the world, including in North America. In this session, we explored how American Jewish educators and Jewish educational institutions have responded, how the changed environment has affected their work, and how they might need to think differently about the work of Jewish education in the days and years to come.
Panelists include Nina Bruder (Jewish New Teacher Project), Alex Pomson (Rosov Consulting), Matt Reingold (Rosov Consulting), Miriam Heller Stern (BJE: Builders of Jewish Education), with Jon Levisohn (Brandeis University).
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Learning About Learning: Conversations with Scholars of Jewish Education
How the Conflict Shapes the Israeli Classroom
Professor Ziva Hassenfeld and Dr. Hadar Fisher
In this time of continued war and exhaustion, how are teachers in Israel teaching, and what do they prioritize in their classrooms? In a longitudinal study, scholars Ziva Hassenfeld and Hadar Fisher asked these questions of 41 teachers in Israel, beginning just three weeks after October 7 and continuing with a group of 12 for another two years. In this session, they shared insights into these teachers' ethic of care and how they enact in their teaching varied ideas surrounding their diverse understandings of students' well-being.
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