Jewish Particularism and Universalism
Marc Silverman: “‘Free Jews’ and Their Views on Jewish Culture and Its Interface with Other Peoples’ Cultures”
Yossi Turner: “Jewish Learning and the Non-Jew: Toward a New Particularist-Universalist Paradigm”
Chair: Jeffrey Kress
This session was part of “Jewish Learning and the Non-Jew,” the 2017 Melton Coalition for Creative Interaction conference, hosted by JTS’s William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. The Melton Coalition for Creative Interaction is a collaboration of the three centers endowed by Samuel M. Melton z”l at JTS, the Hebrew University, and The Ohio State University.
Marc Silverman, presently retired, served as a senior lecturer in the Hebrew university’s Seymour Fox School of Education and Melton Centre for Jewish education for over thirty years. He teaches, researches, writes and publishes articles in two main interrelated educational fields: Philosophy of Education, Moral, progressive, radical and Jewish educational thought; and the intellectual history, sociology and ideologies of current Jewish cultural and educational movements and trends. His monograph on the pedagogy and philosophy of Janusz Korczak entitled A Pedagogy of Humanist Moral Education: The Educational Thought of Janusz Korczak is scheduled to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan this March 2017.
Yossi Turner is professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. His work is in the area of the philosophy of Jewish existence, education, culture and society and he his published books include The Relation to Zion and the Diaspora in 20th Century Jewish Thought (Hebrew) and Faith and Humanism: an Inquiry in Franz Rosenzweig’s Religious Philosophy (Hebrew), among others.
Jeffrey S. Kress is the Bernard Heller Associate Professor of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is also a coordinator of the Research Center at the Leadership Commons of the Davidson School. He has a degree in Clinical Psychology and has written on Jewish identity, experiential Jewish education, and social, emotional, and spiritual issues in Jewish education.
