Judaica

Jonathan Shmidt Chapman shows us how to tell Bible stories to children.

Coming for Passover 2024, a haggadah that recognizes the heroism in Jewish culture and its contribution to our world and the enduring story of freedom that began with the ancient Exodus.

Jewish tradition teaches us how to engage in constructive disagreement, where the goal is to learn and to strengthen relationships, rather than to win an argument. 

Yet when the subject is Israel, nuanced opinions are usually sidelined. Israel is turning 75 this month, amid one of the most complicted periods of its existence.  

The question for us as Jewish educators is how to how to give our students supportive spaces and freedom to grapple with the complex issues of Israeli history.

Shying away from teaching about modern Israel is not an option. It's the Jewish homeland, the realization of a 2,000-year-old dream and the base from which the story of the Jewish people unfolds. 

“It’s essential that our students gain an understanding of Israel’s place in the historic, cultural, political, and religious development of the Jewish people so th

For all of us, the past few pandemic years have been scary and disorienting. For teens in a hunkered-down society, it’s also meant losing opportunities to develop independence.  

“What our teens need in this moment is support for finding their voice and finding their autonomy. Then we’ll slowly see the pain and fear untangle,” says Michelle Shapiro-Abraham, an award-winning teen educator and director of strategic innovation and youth programs at the Union for Reform Judaism. "We need to showing them that they can claim their power.”

Dreaming Bigger: Jewish Leadership for Teens by

Why do we keep telling the story of our people from one generation to the next?

Each time we retell stories from the Bible, we learn something about ourselves and our relationships. These stories also encourage critical thinking skills in our students and help them understand important Jewish values that continue to guide us today.

There are many Bible resources that help children explore the deeper meaning and shape how they live that learning in the world.

For example, if the curriculum is focused on early Torah stories, you can use a core text such as The Explorer’s Bible or Teach Me Torah. Then engage new perspectives by layering in other elements, like a storybook

Think you know the stories of Abraham and Sarah and Eve and Moses?

The Bible only tells us part of their stories.

Imagine seeing the full picture. Maybe we’d discover that Adam and Eve were challenging the rules, growing up, or that Noah felt fearful and angry, desperate for any kind of hope. 

Or maybe we’d find out that Moses felt dread at being asked to lead the Israelites

Maybe these iconic figures of the Bible were people just like us, filled with fear and joy, jealousy and passion, mischief and love. 

Maybe It Happened this Way, by Rabbi Leah Berkowitz and Erica Wovsaniker, is a modern take on Bible stories, with relatable characters; not earnest and reverent, but not transgressive either.

It also helps students understand the difference between the biblical text and the Jewish concept of midrash - stories created to add new layers to our understanding of the Bible.

“With this book,

Can You See God in a Grapefruit?

by Aliza Abusch-Magder

from Salt & Honey: Jewish Teens on Feminism, Creativity, and Tradition

Thousands of juice packets. Sweet, tangy, sour. Packed so closely together in communities commonly called "pieces," and when you hand me a piece of your grapefruit, you hand me a little collection of individuals held together by a thin, opaque, fibrous skin.

When I passed the grapefruit tree on the way to the bank, I effortlessly plucked the ripe, perfumed, leathered teardrop slowly falling from its tired branch.

I casually held a world in my hand, a real-life Horton Hears a Who! 

Don't you see God in Dr. Seuss? Wasn't it divine?

We recently received a letter from “Concerned Citizen,” an anonymous 8^th grader from Boston, who noticed that in the Hebrew series Z’Man L’Tefilah (Time for Prayer) “every single illustration in the book depicts white people,” and urged us to do better than to present “a singular image of Jews.”

The student is right. This series, developed in the 1980s by the publishing company A.R.E., is illustrated with small line drawings that present what could be called an Ashkenazic world view, a view that North American Jews are exclusively descended from the Eastern European Jews who immigrated during the late 1800s and early 1900s as they fled pogroms and other atrocities.

Behrman House took over distribution of this series in the early 2000s, and while we regularly review already published titles, as a small independent publisher we do not often have the budget to go back and