If the disease of prejudice, including anti-Semitism, is largely caused by ignorance, it follows that education is, if not the cure, at least one important medicine for treating it.
That principle provides the foundation for a new educational partnership between the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council and the Wisconsin Society of Jewish Learning, Inc.
The purpose of this Public Education Partnership (PEP), said Elana Kahn-Oren, executive director of the JCRC, “is to provide accurate and well-rounded information about Jews, Judaism, and Israel in public schools.”
Kahn-Oren said project participants plan to attend the 2012 Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies annual conference next spring, where PEP will have a booth in the exhibitor area.
Lynne Kleinman, Ph.D., and Sherry Blumberg, Ph.D., PEP’s teacher-trainers and WSJL board members, are planning to present there a workshop about Jews and Judaism.
Blumberg, the WSJL’s recording secretary, has 40 years of experience as a Jewish educator and currently teaches at Cardinal Stritch University and Sacred Heart Seminary. In a recent interview, she described some of the challenges teachers face in talking about the Middle East and Jews.
In many Wisconsin districts, students and teachers may never have met a Jewish person. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is complex and easily misunderstood even by well-educated adults.
Given those realities, Blumberg said, PEP’s mission is simple.
“We want to give public school teachers accurate and complete academic information that they can give to their students about Jews and Judaism and about Israel and Palestinians,” she said. “We do not want to be advocates for Israel or Jews, but be educators who can give teachers the kind of information that is accurate and that they can use in their classrooms.”
A head start
Approximately 900,000 students in Wisconsin attend public schools. Located in 72 districts across the state, the schools can be startlingly different in size, setting, and demographic makeup.
The subjects they are mandated to teach are not so different because they are determined by state and national standards. So, too, are the grade levels at which those subjects are taught, along with directives about what students are expected to know upon completion of a particular subject.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic get most attention in news stories about education. But teachers are charged with making sure their students are also literate about history, geography, and social studies.
And while state standards direct educators about what to teach, school districts and teachers are responsible for finding and choosing the materials they use in their classrooms.
Moreover, according to the Institute for Curriculum Services, more than half of all Jewish students learn about Jews, Judaism, and Israel through the public schools they attend, rather from any form of formal Jewish education.
PEP is working with the ICS, a San Francisco-based collaboration of that city’s Jewish Community Relations Council and the national Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
That initiative, begun in 1987, was designed to ensure the accuracy of Jewish content in California’s schools. It now works with national textbook publishers, and has produced more than 5,000 changes to social studies textbooks used by approximately 4 million students in public and private schools, including Jewish day schools.
Kahn-Oren and Blumberg on Aug. 7-8 attended a teacher-trainer workshop in California hosted by the group, which also produces instructional materials to be used as supplements or freestanding units.
Getting this material into the hands of educators is vital, as even a careful teacher, if not familiar with Judaism and Israel, may unintentionally pass misinformation to students.
Wisconsin fourth graders spend that year learning about the history, geography, and people of their home state. Because of an in-process project of the WSJL, PEP has a head start on providing its own materials for these students about the history of Wisconsin Jewry.
That project is called “Jewish Neighbors in Wisconsin.” It is a free, web-based curriculum being produced by educators, historians, and a librarian.
It includes an introduction to Judaism and immigration in Wisconsin, the Holocaust and World War II, Jewish businesses, artists, philanthropists, athletes, and politicians. The curriculum includes a teacher’s guide and links to web resources.
Kleinman and Blumberg are among the committee members working on this curriculum, which is expected to be ready in time for the WCSS Conference. (Full disclosure: Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle editor Leon Cohen is also a member of this committee in his capacity as director of the WSJL’s Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project.)
PEP is just getting off the ground. On Aug. 25, Kahn-Oren convened a meeting to discuss the project with staff members of Milwaukee Jewish organizations that are involved in community education.
The participants included Blumberg; WSJL executive director Kathleen R. Jendusa; Bonnie Shafrin, director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation; and Ellie Gettinger, educator at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee.
Kahn-Oren said she was excited about two aspects of the project, “the opportunities for collaboration among the Jewish community organizations that focus on enriching education about Jews, Judaism, and Israel;” and how it “has the ability to provide accurate information and to touch so many children.”
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at the Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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