About

The EdJS is an intellectual catalyst for students and scholars working at the intersection of education, Jewish Studies, and religion broadly considered. Established in 2012 at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, our work explores how people learn to develop religious, ethnic, and ideological commitments, and how organizations and institutions can facilitate that learning.

Jewish communal life in America is built and sustained by congregations, camps, media outlets, cultural institutions, non-profits, advocacy organizations, and social service efforts. Learning happens across all of it, rarely where you expect and almost never on a syllabus. Studying this community requires flexible and rigorous methods. We are proud of our creative and dynamic approach to the work.

When EdJS began, serious research on Jewish education had few institutional homes, and most of what existed sat inside consultancies or centers attached to a broader mission. Today other entities do evaluation and applied work, and the field has its own methods, its own arguments, and its own venues. That shift frees EdJS to ask the questions few others will.

EdJS has been integral to the shaping and staffing of this growing field. Our graduates and fellows are the people who now hold research chairs, lead research teams, and run evaluation practices across that landscape.

We Prepare Great Researchers

Students in the EdJS enroll in the Graduate School of Education, where they take a full and diverse range of courses, and where they have access to the world's best researchers and teachers across a range of subjects, disciplines, fields, and methodological approaches. Students develop content-area expertise in Jewish education alongside fluency in leading-edge research methods. Structured like a research lab, the EdJS engages students in ongoing research projects from the moment they arrive, working collaboratively with faculty and other students on all phases of the research and publishing process. Students and partners of the EdJS also meet regularly to workshop projects, discuss pressing issues, partner on writing, and explore frontiers of research in Jewish education.

Doctoral students leave able to hold their own in education research, Jewish Studies, and religious studies at once. That is a harder combination than it sounds, and it is the whole point: the questions this field asks do not sit inside any one discipline. Nine students have earned their PhDs since 2017, and they now hold chairs and lead research teams across the field. See where our graduates went.

Every doctoral student is fully funded through an endowed fellowship: five years of tuition plus a stipend. Three Jim Joseph Fellows are in residence now.

We Ask Big Questions

The questions are the whole megillah, and they are larger than any single dissertation. What is the future of Jewish education? How do people learn to be Jewish? How do Jewish communities help people learn what they need to? What is the role of emotion in Jewish learning? Questions like these are how a community comes to understand itself, and the research that works to answer them is slower and less certain than anyone would prefer.

Active projects run from multi-year studies to focused inquiries. Smaller projects run alongside the large ones, close to the ground and often faster: how student journalists covered the Israel-Gaza war during the 2023-2024 school year, how the concept of assimilation entered Jewish communal research, how families learn together at Tot Shabbat, how ritual works as an educational occasion.

Some of that work becomes books. Ari Y. Kelman's Jewish Education (Rutgers University Press, 2024) sets aside the two questions the field has always asked, what ought to be taught and how best to teach it, and asks instead how people learn to engage in Jewish life at all.

Our mandate is to use the full range of methodological and conceptual tools to ask questions few others will. So, what do you want to discover? See the research.

We Promote Informed Practice

Rigorous research is only useful if it reaches the communal and educational professionals doing the work. We hold two commitments in tension on purpose: methodological rigor and theoretical creativity on one side, knowledge that Jewish professionals can actually use on the other.

That means building things, not just publishing. We preserve the documents of more than a century of American Jewish institutional productivity and change by hosting the Berman Archive, the largest freely available archive of its kind. We connect that past with contemporary discourse and the massive body of research by and about American Jews by publishing the Documensch Newsletter and the Documensch Daily. And we do the long, slow, essential work of scholarship by editing a book series on Jewish and religious education at NYU Press and chairing the Network for Research in Jewish Education.

Contact

Stanford Graduate School of Education
485 Lasuen Mall, Cubberley Building
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

650-723-0792
aykelman@stanford.edu

None of this would exist without the Jim Joseph Foundation, whose gift established the concentration and endows the fellowship that funds every doctoral student.