Zehavit Gross – författare

This book brings together new thinking and research on religious education’s complex and evolving role in the multicultural, diverse postmodern era. It facilitates new realism and understanding of the current situation from empirical and reflective accounts relating to a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as providing innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and religion.

In different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical lenses, religious education occupies a contested space. The ongoing, changing nature of the world due to increasing secularization, rapid technological change, mass immigration, globalization processes, conflict and challenging security issues, from inter to intra state levels, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, generates the need to reconceptualize where religious education is positioned. It claims that religious education on its own can be an agent of moral, social and spiritual transformation are disputed. There is significant controversy about whether special religious education, that is in-faith education, still has a role within the post-modern world.

This volume represents the most comprehensive collection ever produced of empirical research on Holocaust education around the world. It comes at a critical time, as the world observes the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

We are now at a turning point, as the generations that witnessed and survived the Shoah are slowly passing on. Governments are charged with ensuring that this defining event of the 20th century takes its rightful place in the schooling and the historical consciousness of their peoples.

The policies and practices of Holocaust education around the world are as diverse as the countries that grapple with its history and its meaning. Educators around the globe struggle to reconcile national histories and memories with the international realities of the Holocaust and its implications for the present. These efforts take place at a time when scholarship about the Holocaust itself has made great strides.

In this book, these issues are framed by some of the leading voices in the field, including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer, and then explored by many distinguished scholars who represent a wide range of expertise.

Holocaust education is of such significance, so rich in meaning, so powerful in content, and so diverse in practice that the need for extensive, high-quality empirical research is critical. Th is book provides exactly that.

The immense changes that the world is undergoing in terms of globalization and migration of peoples have had a profound effect on cultures and identities. The question is whether this means shifts in religious identities for women and men in different contexts, whether such shifts are seen as beneficial, negative or insufficient, or whether social change actually means new conservatisms or even fundamentalisms. Surrounding these questions is the role of education is in any change or new contradiction. This unique book enhances an interdisciplinary discourse about the complex intersections between gender, religion and education in the contemporary world. 

Literature in the social sciences and humanities have expanded our understanding of women’s involvement in almost every aspect of life, yet the combined religious/educational aspect is still an under-studied and often under-theorized field of research. How people experience their religious identity in a new context or country is also a theme now needing more complex attention. Questions of the body, visibility and invisibility are receiving new treatments. This book fills these gaps.   

The book provides a strong comparative perspective, with 15 countries or contexts represented. The context of education and learning covers schools, higher education, non-formal education, religious institutions, adult literacy, curriculum and textbooks. 

Overall, the book reveals a great complexity and often contradiction in modern negotiations of religion and secularism by girls and boys, women and men, and a range of possibilities for change. It provides a theoretical and practical resource for researchers, religious and educational institutions, policy makers and teachers.