“With all that’s going on in Israel and in the world in general,” Lanski said, “to be able to come together and double down, with great minds and a commitment to Israel education, now seems like it’s as important as ever, if not more important than ever.” While there are dozens of sessions on a wide variety of topics, the organizers of iCON said the time spent between the formal aspects of the gathering – the sideline conversations, the chats by the coffee urn – are in many ways more important as they provide an opportunity for participants to interact with people they would never otherwise meet. The content of some of the presentations gets adjusted, but that is true anytime.” “The approach, the educational approach and framework, the language, the commitment, those things don’t change. “Educational frameworks that have to be changed every single time something happens are not fundamentally solid foundations,” Goodman said. It can’t be ignored, obviously, but it shouldn’t dominate the conversation either. Now, she said, it’s “Israelis and North Americans, frontline educators and engagement professionals, all the way to CEOs, funders, lay leaders, and everything in the middle across geographies, across denominations, across politics, across everything that normally divides us.”įor the iCenter, which seeks to infuse Israel into all aspects of Jewish education, the situation in the country today presents a particular challenge for iCON and Israel education in general, according to its organizers. When the group held its first iCON, just 50 people attended, all of them teachers in American Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools. The gathering is made up of dozens of sessions on topics like Israeli television, Jewish-Arab relationships, the Hebrew language, Israeli comics, poetry, and music.Īnne Lanski, who founded the iCenter in 2008, reflected on how dramatically both her organization and the field of Israel education have expanded over the past 15 years. The iCON gathering, which began in 2009, focuses less on teaching facts and figures and more on broader concepts and ways of thinking about Israel. “For us, this is a real opportunity to be back, to be back in person, to gather the field, to see how much it has grown despite COVID,” Aliza Goodman, one of iCON’s organizers, told eJewishPhilanthropy.
Meant to be a biennial gathering, this will be the first iCON in nearly five years because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Hundreds of Jewish educators of all types, ages and denominations will gather in Chicago beginning today for iCenter’s three-day iCON, where they will discuss and learn how to teach the complicated and now thornier-than-usual topic of Israel. We’ll start with a preview of the upcoming iCON confab in Chicago. Also in today’s newsletter: Dan Libenson, Rabbi Liz P.G. In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on David Rubenstein’s philanthropic strategy and spotlight Alpha Epsilon Pi’s collaboration with Gift of Life, and feature op-eds from Elana Wien, Dan Elbaum and Steven Windmueller.
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