Building Jewish Leadership in Israel: A Preliminary Survey of the Field (original) (raw)

Jewish Leadership & Leadership Development - key themes from 50+ years of research

Jim Joseph Foundation & Center for Creative Leadership - Cross-Portfolio Research Study Literature Review, 2019

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | JEWISH LEADERSHIP | BEST PRACTICES The primary research questions guiding this study can be paraphrased as follows: 1. How have Jewish leaders developed through opportunities and learning experiences? 2. What are best practices for leadership development in the Jewish community? 3. How can understanding the learning journeys of Jewish leaders and state of the art practices in leadership development inform strategies to achieve greater impact through investment in leadership development in the Jewish community? This literature review represents our first step to exploring these complex questions by researching the distinguishing features of Jewish leadership and highlighting the current day challenges faced by Jewish leaders. * On behalf of the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Center for Creative Leadership is conducting a cross-portfolio research study of leadership development in the American Jewish community to support Jewish learning experiences. The Foundation defines Jewish learning experiences broadly as “experiences that draw upon Jewish wisdom, values, practices, culture, traditions and history to engage people in activities that guide them towards living more connected, meaningful and purpose-filled lives.”

" AAA " Guide to Developing and Using Knowledge to Drive Jewish Communal Policy

The ability of Jewish communal organizations to adapt successfully to the ever-changing landscape of Jewish life rests, in part, on their capacity to develop and use knowledge. Just as major societal institutions in the fi elds of economics, education, health care, and social welfare are increasingly knowledge-driven, so too must the organizations that serve the Jewish community develop and institu-tionalize strategies for generating and using knowledge effectively. Jewish communal decision making needs to be evidence-based, but in ways that are congruent with Jewish values. In other words, to be knowledge-driven in a Jew-ish context is not simply to use data but also to seek both the surface and the more nuanced meaning from information and, perhaps even more importantly, to collaborate in its development and interpretation. At the 1947 national conference of the Jewish Communal Service Association of North America, Kurt Lewin, a Jewish émigré from Germany and the leading social psychologist of his era (Saxe, 2010), urged the fi eld of Jewish education to " instigate a serious program of action-research " (p. 296). Lewin was calling for cooperation between practitioners and social scientists in using rigorous research design, broad data collection, and critical synthesis in the service of developing not only evidence-based best practices but also a better understanding of the process and context of Jewish education more broadly (Lewin, 1946). In the ensuing years the fi elds of secular education, public health, and medicine were transformed by this type of research program. By contrast, decision making about Jewish communal policy continues to be characterized by a process in which intuition and anecdotes are all too often privileged over systematic, high-quality information; Lewin' s concern that the Jewish community would be " the last to avail itself of this vehicle [research] " has unfortunately proved prophetic. It is not that Jewish organizations have totally ignored the uses of data. To the contrary, a plethora of evaluation studies have been conducted to assess whether specifi c programs yield desired outcomes. Evaluation studies clearly have importance for local decision making and practice, and they also have the potential to provide useful insights to the larger community.

What Research Teaches About the Possibility of Reinventing Jewish Education

Journal of Jewish Education, 2012

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