The Mandel Jewish Culture Fellows: Reaching across Time and Place to Create a Vibrant Jewish Israeli Culture

Cover of The Liberty to Choose, an anthology with essays by the faculty and graduates of the program

Jewish culture is the focal point of myriad debates and polemics, politics and disagreements in Israel. Who is a Jew? What should Jews do – or not do? Who should make decisions for the Jewish people? Competing answers to these questions have caused cities to divide, protests to erupt, and governments to fall.

But Jewish Israeli culture is also a powerful creative force, which in the 72 short years of the State of Israel’s existence has created a unique set of holidays, rituals, institutions, and language. Despite societal and political rifts and challenges, Israeli Jewish culture is a vibrant scene – a renaissance of an ancient Jewish tradition interwoven with avant-garde modern innovations. The prominent place that Jewish art and music, television and film, and most recently cuisine now have on the scene of world culture is a testament to this vibrancy.

Can the vibrancy and creativity of Jewish Israeli culture serve as a balm and connector to heal the societal rifts of Israeli and Jewish society? This is what the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture seeks to do. It brings together 20 trailblazing cultural leaders and budding cultural innovators from across Israeli Jewish society and gives them the opportunity to deepen their knowledge, widen their perspectives and networks, professionalize their skills, and create a rich vision for their cultural leadership – and its role in improving Israeli society.

Faculty and graduates of Cohort 3 of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture

The Liberty to Choose

What Jewish culture and identity will Israelis pass on to their children? For decades, Israel has been rocked by debates about what kind of Jewish culture should be included in the education of its younger generation. In the most recent iterations of this debate, some people are concerned about the increasing insertion of Jewish content into the curriculum of non-religious schools (which is called by some Israelis “religification”), while others bemoan the lack of Jewish literacy in Israeli schools.

What kind of Jewish culture do we want to teach our children? At the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture, we seek to enrich this debate by turning to moments in Jewish history when these questions arose: from Talmudic times, to 18th century Jewish enlightenment debates, to debates about Hebrew culture in the streets of young Tel Aviv. In the classroom of Cohort 3 of our program, the study of one such debate sparked the creation of a unique online publication called The Liberty to Choose, which explores Jewish culture from Jerusalem of 2020 to Tangiers of 1916 and back again, and includes essays by the faculty and fellows of the program.

A look inside: Contributors from Cohort 3 listed in The Liberty to Choose

Among the long-forgotten pages of the French newspaper La Liberté, published in Tangiers between 1915-1922, are the textual remains of a roiling debate on the nature of Jewish culture in Jewish Moroccan schools. Over a period of a year, the newspaper was rocked by op-eds advocating a universalist view of Judaism rather than a traditionalist view, and contrasting a holistic Jewish view combining old and new, with a more reformative approach. The articles were written by writers residing in Morocco, New York, Argentina, and Israel.

The French newspaper La Liberté, published in Tangiers between 1915-1922

The essays were translated from the original French to Hebrew for the first time for a course taught by Mandel faculty member Dr. David Guedj as part of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture. The essays resonated deeply with the program’s fellows, who appreciated the contemporary challenges found in these century-old essays, which were written in a respectful debate style and set in the unique setting of North African modernity interspersed with French culture and Jewish community life. The fellows were energized by the fact that similar debates that took place in Europe, the United States, and Israel were well known, while debates that had taken place in Muslim lands had mostly been forgotten. This inspired the group to re-engage with this debate, and add their own reflections to the conversation.

Dr. David Guedj, editor of The Liberty to Choose

As a result, each Mandel Jewish Culture fellow wrote their own essay with their personal reflections on Jewish cultural education, in response to the La Liberté debate. The program’s faculty members – including Dr. Ruth Calderon, Dr. Jeremy Fogel, Malka Puterkovsky, program director Mishael Zion, and Mandel Leadership Institute director Yael Hess – as well as guest lecturers Professor David Banon and Professor Zohar Shavit, also joined the "fray," creating a rich discourse on the question of what Jewish culture should be the focus of education of our children and of our "public square."