You are invited to join a webinar, click to register Preserving Jewish Culture: Growing Spirituality in a Contemporary Jewish Agricultural Program.
Feb. 8, 2021
Speakers: Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz
Dr. Arielle Levites is the Managing Director of CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) at George Washington University. Dr. Levites’ research focuses on contemporary American Jewish education. Her manuscript, Raising Jewish Spirits: American Jews, Religious Emotion, and American Spirituality, based on an ethnographic study of contemporary American Jewish spiritual practitioners, is under advance contract with Rutgers University Press. Additionally, she has conducted a number of applied studies on behalf of American Jewish educational enterprises, with a focus on young adults and teens. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Network for Research in Jewish Education. Dr. Levites has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, a visiting assistant professor at Hebrew College in the Shoolman Graduate School, and an affiliated scholar at Brandeis University’s Mandel Center. She holds a BA from Brown University in Religious Studies, a MSEd in Religious Education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from NYU in Education and Jewish Studies. She is an aluma of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, as a Davidson Scholar.
This year’s series will be on the contemporary Jewish agricultural and farming movement. In recent years Jews have been engaged in a back to the soil movement which has been infused with Jewish spiritual renewal. The movement has resulted in goats and chickens replacing tennis courts at Jewish Community Centers, religious services held in the forest, and the creation of communal farms dedicated to everything from organic farming to revitalizing Yiddish. This series examines this emerging movement.