A pervasive pattern of cultural dissonance cuts across just about every type of (especially liberal) Jewish educational setting and program. Rabbi Tali Zelkowicz, Ph.D. studies this dissonance and suggests that it can be productive when Jewish leaders are able to name it and teach about it in the open. Join Tali for an exploration of the gap inadvertently created between what Jewish professionals teach students formally and what families actually believe and do in “real life.” She will address the role and policies of Halloween to show us how this North American holiday becomes a rich microcosm for some of the most prevalent dilemmas of contemporary American and Canadian Jewish identity formation, bringing into sharp focus anxious boundary navigations and the politics of authenticity regarding Jewish identity.
Specifically, she invites you to consider that when Jewish educators render these sorts of tensions taboo or simply wall off children from perceived outside “threats,” Jewish students are left — paradoxically — ill equipped to straddle both Jewish and American (or Canadian) cultures, which is the very goal of contemporary liberal Jewish education. Without formal and explicit opportunities to explore those boundaries critically and openly in the laboratory settings of Jewish education, Jewish youth may never know how to navigate multiple and competing cultural values later in life, as college students and adults, in a fully integrated world that is absent of externally monitored Jewish boundaries.
Haunted by Halloween: How to Face (and Maybe even Embrace) Anxieties around Jewish-North American Boundaries 1-7-16 from ARJE on Vimeo.