While the number and range of international peace programmes continues to proliferate, there is a marked absence of interdisciplinary and comparative research to guide academic development and inform practice in this challenging arena. It is these deficits that the present volume aims to address. This collection of peace education efforts in conflict and post-conflict societies brings together an international group of scholars to offer the very latest theoretical and pedagogical developments for long term solutions.

Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately two thousand Jewish scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain. The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern times. Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different aims. Marc Hirshman explores the evolution and institutionalization of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At its core, he argues, the Jewish cultural thrust in the first centuries of the Common Era was a sustained effort to preserve the language of its culture in its most pristine form. Hirshman traces and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the subject in late antique rabbinic sources. The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is a pioneering attempt to characterize the unique approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late antiquity.

"Few books capture as clearly the critical place and influence of popular culture on education. Silberman-Keller, Bekerman, Giroux, and Burbules have launched a collaboration that helps educators understand the learning process outside the confines of classroom pedagogy but provides the conditions of possibility for improving schools. Its expert contributors travel through social experiences that no educator can take for granted any longer as extra-curricular. If schooling is education of the whole person then this book takes us one step closer to that transformation." —Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley

Beyond the walls of their synagogues, Jewish adults are creating religious meaning in new and diverse ways in a range of unconventional sites. In Back to School, authors Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor argue that the Jewish day school serves as one such site by bringing adults and children together for education, meeting, study, and worship-like ceremonies. Pomson and Schnoor suggest that day school functions as a locus of Jewish identity akin to the Jewish streets or neighborhoods that existed in many major North American cities in the first half of the twentieth century.

Back to School began as an ethnographic study of the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School (DJDS) in Toronto, a private, religiously pluralistic day school that balances its Jewish curriculum with general studies. Drawing on a longitudinal study at DJDS, and against the backdrop of a comparative study of two other Toronto day schools as well as four day schools from the U.S. Midwest, Pomson and Schnoor argue that when parents choose Jewish schools for their children they look for institutions that satisfy not only their children's academic and emotional needs but also their own social and personal concerns as Jewish adults. The authors found an uncommon degree of involvement and engagement on the part of the parents, as genuine friendships and camaraderie blossomed between parents, faculty, and administrators. In addition, the authors discovered that parents who considered themselves secular Jews were introduced to or reacquainted with the depth and meaning of Jewish tradition and rituals through observing or taking part in school activities.

Sitting on the cusp between the disciplines of education and the sociology of contemporary Jewish life, Back to School offers important policy implications for how Jewish day schools might begin to re-imagine their relationships with parents. Jewish parents, Jewish studies scholars, as well as researchers of educational and social trends will enjoy this evocative volume.

This volume is a path-breaking contribution to the study of efforts of diaspora, indigenous, and minority groups, broadly defined, to use education (formal and informal) to sustain cultural continuity while grappling with the influences and demands of wider globalizing, nationalizing, or other homogenizing and assimilatory forces. Particular attention is given to groups that use educational elements other than second-language teaching alone in programs to sustain their particular cultural traditions. The focus of the book on cultural sustainability changes the nature of questions posed in multicultural education from those that address the opening of boundaries to issues of preserving boundaries in an open yet sustainable way.

As forced and elective immigration trends are changing the composition of societies and the educational systems within them -- bringing a rich diversity of cultural experience to the teaching/learning process -- diaspora, indigenous, and minority groups are looking more and more for ways to sustain their cultures in the context of wider socio-political influences. This volume is a first opportunity to consider critically multicultural efforts in dialogue with educational options that are culturally particularistic but at the same time tolerant.

Academics will find this an excellent reference book. Practitioners will draw inspiration in learning of others’ efforts to sustain cultures, and will engage in critical reflection on their own work vis-à-vis that of others. Teachers will realize they do not stand alone in their educational efforts and will uncover new strategies and methodologies through which to approach their work.

Jonathan Cohen brings together the views of three of the greatest scholar-thinkers in the area of Jewish philosophy of the twentieth century, Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887-1974), Julius Guttmann (1880-1950), and Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Each thinker's construction of Jewish philosophy is presented through individual definitions of Judaism and philosophy, understandings of its historical development, and analyses of the canons used in interpretations of Jewish philosophical texts.

The volume brings together an outstanding group of international scholars from the field of peace/co-existence education and education for social cohesion to build understanding of the impact of sustained educational efforts towards peace, co-existence and reconciliation in countries emerging from protracted conflict. It explores the impact of innovative long term methods of pursuing peace and reconciliation such as the creation of integrated schools and/or policy whose central aim is the celebration of diversity and rejection of prejudice in countries where prolonged interracial or interethnic conflict has scarred society.

הספר "השפה העברית בעידן הגלובליזציה" פונה לחוקרים, למורים העוסקים בהוראת העברית בשדה ולאוהבי השפה ומאפשר עיון מקיף בסוגיות מגוונות ובהיבטים שונים הנוגעים לעברית. המאמרים הנכללים בספר מביאים אל קדמת הבמה דיון בשאלות מחקריות העוסקות בעברית בהקשריה הלשוניים, התרבותיים והחברתיים בישראל ובעולם, כמו גם הצגה וניתוח של תכניות לימודים עדכניות להוראת עברית כלשון נוספת והרהורים באשר למצבה הנוכחי של העברית ולעתידה בישראל ובתפוצות. בספר שלושה שערים. השער הראשון בוחן נושאים אלה: מרחב הקיום של העברית במציאות הנובעת מיחסי ישראל-תפוצות; העברית באוניברסיטאות באירופה ובאמריקה; הדילמה הנוגעת ללשון התפילה; קשיי הקורא המודרני הבא להתמודד עם טקסט יהודי קלסי; השינויים בשפה במישורים הלשוני והחוץ-לשוני; הישגיהם של תלמידים עולים בעברית הלימודית-אקדמית; הביסוס התיאורטי בפיתוח תכניות לימודים בעברית כשפה ראשונה ושנייה; מדיניות לשונית בישראל כחברה רב-לשונית ורב-תרבותית. השער השני מציג תכניות לימודים חדשות ללומדי עברית בגיל הרך, בבית הספר היסודי ובכיתות חטיבת הביניים והחטיבה העליונה בתפוצות, כמו גם במגזר הערבי בישראל. בשער השלישי מובעים הרהורי דאגה באשר לעתידה של העברית בישראל ובתפוצות בעידן הגלובליזציה.

ייחודו של הספר מתבטא בכמה מישורים: שילוב בין תיאוריה למעשה; טיפול בייצוגים שונים של העברית - כשפה ראשונה, כשפה שנייה וכשפת מורשת בפזורה היהודית; התייחסות ללומדי עברית בגילאים שונים; בירור סוגיית העברית במגוון אוכלוסיות שצורכיהן שונים אלה מאלה – דוברי עברית מלידה, עולים, המגזר הערבי וקהילות התפוצה.

Learning in Places is a concerted effort undertaken by an outstanding group of international researchers to create a resource book that can introduce academic, professional and lay readers to the field of informal learning/education and its potential to transform present educational thinking. The book presents a wealth of ideas from a wide variety of disciplinary fields and methodological approaches covering multiple learning landscapes—in museums, workplaces, classrooms, places of recreation—in a variety of political, social and cultural contexts around the world. Learning in Placespresents the most recent theoretical advances in the field; analyzing the social, cultural, political, historical and economical contexts within which informal learning develops and must be critiqued. It also looks into the epistemology that nourishes its development and into the practices that characterize its implementation; and finally reflects on the variety of educational contexts in which it is practiced.