Introduction to Our Special Issue Change and Challenge: Jewish Education in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

In December 2019 a new coronavirus, known as COVID-19 was discovered in the city of Wuhan, China (Huang et al., 2020). This deadly virus quickly spread across the globe causing the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) to declare COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. Since this virus spreads through person-to-person transmission, pandemic responses have included the forced closures of public and community spaces including schools (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020). As a result and over a very short period of time, a huge range of institutions had to adapt to the new conditions of work, shopping, communing, and learning at a distance. While communications technologies (email, videoconferencing platforms, and so on) have long been available, and although the drumbeat of “online learning” has been heard in educational circles for years, most institutions were forced to go fully online before they had appropriate procedures in place, and then they had to master this new situation quickly (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020). For schools, social distancing and concerns about transmission meant rapidly pivoting away from classroom models and toward modes of instruction or interaction that were exclusively online (Dhawan, 2020). Some, of course, had greater success than others. Jewish schools, synagogues, summer camps, and other settings experienced the same shifts in remote learning and social interaction. Jewish communal organizations figured out how to continue their work holding services, celebrating life-cycle events, and learning under these new conditions. But even if you can have a Torah study group meet online, it is qualitatively not the same as meeting in a living room or around a seminar table. Therefore, it is important to ask what or how such changes impacted Jewish education and what these circumstances can teach us about online Jewish learning more broadly.