About the Center

The Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture (CSJEC) seeks to advance our knowledge of the interrelationship of culture, learning, and teaching and to develop new models for teachers' professional development. Combining active research projects with in-depth professional development the CSJEC aims to maintain a strong bridge between theory and practice.

The CSJEC offers rigorous courses of study including a Graduate Certificate in Jewish Education focused on developing and improving educators' pedagogical skills and the acquisition of general content knowledge of Jewish culture and history.

Over the past two decades, the CSJEC has also offered professional development seminars for teachers in North America to deepen their subject knowledge expertise and develop reflective and relational pedagogies concerning the teaching of Jewish culture. Funded by local foundations, the Ohio Humanities Council, and the Posen Foundation-US, these seminars have included over 200 teachers.

Currently, the CSJEC is engaged in two major undertakings. Under the direction of Dr. Miriam Raider-Roth, we support the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute, sponsored by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation, which provides professional development for educators who work in varied Jewish educational settings across North America. Dr. Mark Raider serves as chair of the University’s Israel Initiative Committee which seeks to advance UC’s relationship with the Israeli academy and is helping to develop generative partnerships with Oranim College, the University of Haifa, and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Hand in hand with these and other exciting and innovative projects, researchers affiliated with the CSJEC study the nature of learning that occurs therein. Findings from studies supported by the CSJEC have been presented at meetings of the Academy of Fellows for Teaching and Learning, American Educational Research Association, Association for Jewish Studies, Ethnography in Education Research Forum-University of Pennsylvania, International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Israel Association for Research in Jewish Education, and Network for Research in Jewish Education. Much of this research has been published in Journal of Educational Change, Journal of Jewish Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education.

We gratefully acknowledge the Fisher Family Foundation, the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation, the Ohio Humanities Council, and the Posen Foundation-US for supporting past and ongoing work of the CSJEC, including the many talented students who help to make the CSJEC a vibrant learning community through assistantships, research apprenticeships, and interpretive learning communities.

Contact us by calling 513-556-2150 or by emailing Mark Raider.

"The seminar was by far the most beneficial and inspiring professional development I have ever taken part in during my 12-year teaching career. The venue was spectacular, the faculty was knowledgeable, approachable and responsive, and the material was as thought-provoking as it was practically useful. I came away from the seminar with a much deeper understanding of the complexities of the Jewish community, a broader appreciation of the plethora of available primary-source materials, pedagogical concepts that inform and improve the quality of my teaching, and, on a personal level, the rekindled joy in my own learning." - Judith Neidlein-Dial, The Seven Hills School, Cincinnati, OH

"The seminar was wonderful. It provided me with a wealth of historical and philosophical information on Jewish studies that sped up my own research and study in an incalculable way. The book 'Jewish People, Jewish Thought' was just the kind of background material I was looking for and that I might not have found without out the help of the seminar. In addition, there was plenty of eye-opening material on early American Jewish life that I was also not familiar with, and was pleased to discover. My teaching of a Jewish Literature elective will be resting on a much firmer historical background thanks to the seminar." - Sandor Weiner, The Spence School, New York, NY

"The Seminar was a tremendously valuable experience for me. It seems to me to be especially important, as a person of the [majority] culture, to attend seriously to the voices of people not of the [majority] culture. Even the scheduling of the first day of workshop taking place on Sunday morning was a reminder of the cultural orientations that would be challenged in our study." - Bradley Sidle, Ramsey International Fine Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN