But Is It Jewish? Teaching Photography in a Day School

ABSTRACT

Over a period of 13 years, I taught a class in photography to high school students, using a taxonomy I developed based on my own understanding of what makes for excellence in photography. Five of the elements of this taxonomy are explained and illustrated by photographs taken by my students; I submit these as evidence of my success in this endeavor. But since the school in which I taught is a community Jewish day school, a second goal of the course was for students to illustrate Jewish themes and explore their Jewish identities through the photographs they took. With this goal I had mixed success; over the years I received only 45 photographs (out of a total of 2,500) that were explicitly Jewish. I draw on Tali Hyman Zelkowicz’s ethnography of a similar Jewish high school and on James Fowler’s theory of faith development to consider what might have been on the minds of the students who submitted images that didn’t seem particularly Jewish. Whether or not some of the other photographs the students took might be considered Jewish is a question that will be taken up toward the end of this paper, when I explore the notion of conveying “Jewish sensibilities,” a term first introduced by Vanessa Ochs and elaborated on in several articles in this journal.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching photography
• Jewish sensibilities
• teaching Jewish adolescents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ My thanks to Isa Aron for her invaluable help and guidance on the theoretical section of this paper, and for her feedback on an earlier draft.

² This quote appears in Diamonstein (1981), p. 18.

³ Two of the students had apparently moved out of the area and could not be reacch. Their names are pseudonyms.

⁴ This is an approximation, based on the following calculation: 11 years in which the students took digital photographs times an average of 15 students/year times 5 photographs per assignment times at least 24 weekly assignments (it is difficult to calculate how many weeks the class met, because of various holidays and because some students spent 6 weeks in Israel) = 19,000. All of these photographs were saved on the author’s hard drive.

⁵ The number of weeks varied from year to year, because in some years students had the opportunity to spend several weeks in Israel during the spring semester; those students were not required to submit photographs.

⁶ This is an estimate, arrived at by multiplying 5 images per week by at least 3 weeks in class by an average of 15 students by 11 years of teaching. Students who did not spend time in Israel had more weeks in class, so this estimate is probably a bit low.

⁷ 17.3% of the respondents were over 60 years old; 13.6 were ages 41 to 60 years; 40.7% were ages 21–40 years; 15.6% were ages 13–20 yeark; 8.1% were ages 7–12 years; and 7% were under age 6 years. He attributed the total of 102.3% to rounding errors. (p. 316)

⁸ We would like to thank the artist Ruth Weisberg for introducing us to the notion of Jewish sensibilities as a way of thinking about Jewish art.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bill Aron

Throughout Bill Aron’s 45+year career, he has authored three books and his photographs have been exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout the United States, Israel, and Europe. His website is www.billaron.com. Email: [email protected]