Dance, sing and spread out the colors of memory, all washed down with a sweet cup of tea! Pound out the rhythms of a Sephardi melody, reclaim a few words and ideas in Yiddish, nourish your heart, soul, and stomach with the folklore and fine points of Jewish cuisine…
Yes, school is in session, but the subject here is the joy and spirit of our creative Jewish culture. This unique initiative at New Community Jewish High School in Los Angeles is designed to provide our incoming ninth-grade students with an introduction to the diversity of the Jewish tradition in the arts. As such, we are not merely an arts department, dedicated to excellence in the various arts disciplines, but an integral part of the overall Jewish studies program. Our formal Jewish studies program is made up of three parts: Hebrew, Jewish Law and Ethics, and Jewish Civilization (known as J-Civ), which includes the arts. The goals of the J-Civ program are historical and cultural as well as textual—in other words, the lived life of the Jewish people through time, space, and spirit.
Over one hundred ninth graders rotate through these Jewish art classes seven times each year. Each rotation comprises 14 classes over 5 weeks. This program fulfills their ninth grade J-Civ requirement; this exposure also enables students to make more informed choices for their yearlong arts electives in the tenth grade (which continue to fulfill the J-Civ requirement as they are infused with Jewish content). Our arts rotation offers the following classes:
- Instrumental Music—Showing the connection between popular music of today and the Jewish music of the past two centuries.
- Israeli Dance—Understanding and learning the steps of Israeli dance and its relationship to Jewish cultural history.
- Singing—Exposure to Jewish vocal/choral music, and its historical or cultural context from different parts of the world, by singing in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino.
- Visual Arts—Exploring Jewish traditions in art through folk art, ceremonial art, art as ideas, art as political and social narrative and individual expression.
- Media Arts—Exploring the fundamentals of digital media and animation through a Jewish lens, including Jewish media arts history.
- Yiddish—Discovering the rich traditions of Eastern European Jewry through written and spoken Yiddish as presented through art, media, and music.
- Jewish Foods and Culture—Exploring the relationship between food, Jewish culture, and the environment through cooking, eating, discussion, film, reading, and creative writing.
In these classes, our arts faculty employ teaching styles that are experiential and multi-sensorial. They engage and surprise students with the rich artistic diversity that is our cultural legacy, and encourage students to take “ownership” of it. In order to have maximum impact as educators and artists, the arts faculty continually expand their base of Jewish knowledge to provide students with a broad, meaningful, and joyful experience.
To help guide our diverse and wide-ranging curriculum, our faculty strive to address the following content areas:
- Historical—Students should have a sense of artistic continuity over time.
- Cultural—Students should have an understanding of the cultural influences and the evolution of our folk arts and folkways.
- Narrative—Students should have opportunities to reference, interpret, analyze and finally make art that takes influence from a variety of Jewish source materials, including folktales, poetry, song lyrics, liturgy, Tanakh and other sacred texts and stories.
- Intercultural—Students should understand our cultural experience in relation to other cultures.
- Master Practitioners and Techniques—Students should become familiar with Jewish artists, as well as techniques, styles, and methods that are traditionally Jewish artistic forms.
- Religious Practice—Students should understand the role of art in Jewish ritualistic settings.
This innovative approach evolved out of the original vision of our school that recognized the central role of the arts in a well rounded general and Jewish education program. The Jewish Arts and Culture Rotation began in our second year as a school. Now, as we complete our sixth year, it continues to grow and develop. The strength of our pluralistic school is that we have many lenses through which to encounter, learn about, and create broad Jewish knowledge and experience. ♦
Benny Ferdman is the Artistic Director at the New Community Jewish High School in West Hills, California. He can be reached at bferdman@ncjhs.org.
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