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Koret Foundation Sh'ma Book Reviews

Letters to the Editor

A New Initiative: The Sh'ma Salon

Topic Discussion Guide

A new Artistic NiSh'ma

Sigi Ziering Sh'ma Ethics

Taube New Visions

The Balcony by Ruth Calderon

Torah Commentaries:
Erica Brown
Nechama Leibowitz
Mekor Chaim

Past Issues

Upcoming: Jews and Neoconservatives Ruth Wisse in conversation with Seth Lipsky, Peter Berkowitz on New York Intellectuals, Shalom Carmy on Orthodoxy, Damon Linker on Election 2008, Diana Furchtgott Roth on the Domestic Agenda and much more Sponsorship opportunities available

End World Child Hunger!
Tell your friends about Project Manna, a new multi-faith cyberactivism campaign that takes only a minute.

Teaching Israel

Lisa Grant: Even among individuals and institutions at the forefront of Jewish educational innovation, few are able to articulate a clear vision or purpose for teaching Israel that extends beyond vague and implicit expressions of Israel being a core component of Jewish identity formation.
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Kenneth Stein: The first step is gathering lay people and educators who believe the story of Israel is one worth telling. What then are the steps necessary for endowing the future of American Jewry with a compelling and germane understanding of modern Israel?
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Derek Penslar: I have a colleague at the University of Toronto who teaches a course called “How to Lie With Maps.” Supporters of Israel might well suggest as required reading for this course Palestinian maps that show a unitary Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, with no sign of Israel’s existence. Yet Israeli maps, and those produced by and for Diaspora Jews, rarely mark the Green Line that constitutes the country’s internationally recognized borders.
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Roundtable on Teaching Israel: Few recent issues touching on Jewish life have been as contentious as how to teach Israel on the American college campus. Teaching Israel touches on an array of controversial subjects — the convergence of identity issues in teaching Israel, and how to do so in a scholarly and dispassionate manner, the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians, and the impact of the Jewish communal agenda on a discipline whose faculty positions are heavily communally funded. Sh’ma asked Ilan Troen, Ronald Zweig, and Yael Zerubavel—leading scholars in the area of Israel Studies— to talk about how they’ve confronted these and other issues and what might challenge the field in the near future.
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Quote of the Month

“We will more powerfully accomplish our goals when we become comfortable with and committed to telling our students the complex reality.”

Peter Geffen


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Sh'ma serves as a gathering place for independent dialogue -- rich conversation of differing positions presented in an honest, respectful, and sacred conversation. Our readers, like our authors, are intellectually sharp, seeking, concerned and literate. Sh'ma is a publication of Jewish Family & Life! JFLMedia.com