Chil­dren’s

The Vet­er­ans of His­to­ry: A Young Per­son­’s His­to­ry of the Jews

Mitchell Sil­ver
  • Review
By – October 31, 2014

One of the great chal­lenges of mod­ern times is our lack of a mean­ing­ful un­derstanding of his­to­ry. Our Jew­ish youth are typ­i­cal of their gen­er­a­tion — espe­cial­ly when it comes to the his­to­ry of the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence. This vol­ume is designed to intro­duce young ado­les­cents to this his­to­ry with­out becom­ing deeply involved in the exten­sive reli­gious aspects of the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence. Rather, the author approach­es the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence more from a cul­ture and social per­spec­tive which is designed to engage many of our youth who are more involved with their Amer­i­can expe­ri­ences than their Jew­ish activities. 

As Jew­ish edu­ca­tion has tak­en a greater focus on the texts of Jew­ish life and the de­velopment of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty in recent years, this vol­ume fills an impor­tant role of pro­vid­ing an overview of the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence. On the oth­er hand, when one tries to cov­er the entire 3000-year his­to­ry of the Jew­ish peo­ple in one vol­ume, there is a strong ten­den­cy to either become too super­fi­cial or to pro­vide more depth than can pos­si­bly be cov­ered. Sil­ver has cho­sen to cov­er the his­to­ry in depth which will lim­it the use most­ly to a Jew­ish day school en­vironment where time is avail­able to prop­er­ly cov­er the entire his­to­ry in a sin­gle year.

Paul A. Flexn­er, Ed.D., is an Instruc­tor in Edu­ca­tion­al Psy­chol­o­gy at Geor­gia State Uni­ver­si­ty, a vet­er­an of 35 years as a Jew­ish edu­ca­tor and a mem­ber of the Board of Direc­tors of the Jew­ish Book Council.

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