How Can You Keep Your Teen Jewishly Engaged?

To counter the trend of Jewish teens dropping out of organized Jewish life, The Jewish Education Project works with individuals, institutions, and communities to find innovative and meaningful ways to engage Jewish teens in today’s ever changing world.

Learn more about our work in teen engagement:

• Operation Game Changer
• The Westchester Jewish Teen Learning Initiative
• JewFoodie
• Webinars
• New Research Study: Engaging Jewish Teens
• Long Island Jewish Teen Directors Network
• Professional Development
• Community Events
• Project InCiTE
• Press

Operation Game Changer

The Jewish Education Project launched Operation Game Changer to address the challenge of increasing post Bnei Mitzvah youth participation in Jewish education and communal life. Our expert coaches guide teams of youth professionals, educators, clergy and lay leaders to develop and implement new approaches to Jewish education and engagement for teens.

To join the 2013 cohort of Operation Game Changer, contact Jill Minkoff at jminkoff@jewishedproject.org. 

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The Path of Names

A New Novel Brings Ghosts, Geeks, and Golems to Sleepover Camp

First-time novelist Ari Goelman faces tough questions from an 11-year-old fantasy fiction aficionado and summer-camp devotee
In his debut novel, The Path of Names, Vancouver-based writer Ari Goelman conjures Dahlia, an intrepid 13-year-old who we meet as she begrudgingly attends her first summer at Camp Arava, the Jewish overnight camp where her brother is a beloved counselor. Ever interested in figuring out sleights of hand, she’d rather spend her time learning magic. Then strange things start to happen. Dahlia spots two apparitions—little girls dressed for the 1940s who beckon to her in her bunk. Suddenly she has memories and dreams of yeshiva life and understands Hebrew words she has never before known. Unruffled by the increasingly intense fantastical phenomena around her, Dahlia forges on, keen to figure out what’s happening to her and to the sweet ghosts who keep reappearing.

Ari Goelman talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the fantasy novels that accompanied his childhood, how he came up with the idea for Dahlia and her story, and why he set the action at a Jewish overnight camp. Joining the conversation is Josie Ingall, herself a lover of fantasy fiction, who, at 11 years old, fits right in to Goelman’s target demographic and has some questions of her own to put to the author. (Josie is also the daughter of Tablet Magazine columnist Marjorie Ingall.)

Though the school year is ending, there’s no reason for you or your child to stop reading! Enter our sweepstakes to be one of 10 lucky people selected at random to win a copy of The Path of Names.

Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine's Weekly Podcast  

Shiva: The Video Game

If we had a shekel for every time we've paid a shiva call and wanted to make a game of it…we'd be broke. But that hasn't been Dave Gilbert's experience.

Gilbert's brainchild, "The Shivah," is a murder mystery game in which the user follows a rabbi as he uncovers the truth behind a recent and generous donation to his ailing synagogue. What starts as a shiva call to the widow of a murdered man turns into a full-blown investigation.

Reviews of this award-winning game have been mixed but generally positive. The Onion's A.V. Club, for example, noted that the game is short, but "sticks with its players—not for its touchy puzzles, nor for its 'retro' graphics, which hearken back to the earliest adventure games, but for its content."

If nothing else, traveling through Manhattan as a rabbi and uncovering multiple murders—at one point with the opportunity to engage in a sword fight—is a solid break from work. Not to mention from sitting shiva.

American teens' materialism makes sense

By Dale McFeatters


We are as willing as anybody to step on the fingers of younger generations trying to climb the ladder of success behind us and to believe that -- with their different tastes in dress, music and jargon -- they represent a pause in evolutionary progress.

But sometimes one feels called on to defend the unfairly maligned.

Two psychology professors -- Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Tim Kasser of Knox College in Illinois -- reviewed results from a national survey and write this month in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that today's young adults want nice things but are less willing than their predecessors to work hard for them.

And how does this make them different from most other Americans?

"Compared to previous generations," Twenge writes, "recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they're willing to work hard to earn them."

Twenge, author of the book "Generation Me," went on, "That type of 'fantasy gap' is consistent with other studies showing a generational increase in narcissism and entitlement."

This would seem more of an economic than a social problem. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, largely driven by materialism. If our young people think a new car, bigger TV and the latest in handheld devices are not worth the extra effort, we're in economic trouble.
The sense of narcissism and entitlement sounds like standard adolescence. Real life will grinds it out of youths in a process called maturity.

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