Youth
“Tu Bishvat: Building Sustainable Communities” is a 75-minute curriculum designed by Rabbi Lily Solochek, Director of the Wenger‑Markowitz Family Education Initiative. Teach your children about community building, sustainability, and the challenges of environmental racism, and inspire them with stories of young activists fighting the climate crisis. This program is available in three versions for students of different age groups.
“The TEL Program (Teens: Experience and Learning)” is an eight-week Tikkun Olam curriculum that provides a detailed, flexible program that puts Jewish teens in charge of their own learning, planning, and acting on social justice issues that matter to them. This version of the curriculum was last updated in 2011, so feel free to change the specific research, news articles, and even the issues it suggests teens tackle with materials of the moment. The lessons’ structure and activities are more timeless and can guide a uniquely Reconstructionist, experiential course of learning and doing for the growing adults in our communities.
Adult
In 2021, the Reparations Committee of the Racial Justice Initiative of the Jewish Community of Amherst, MA published the “Stolen Beam Series: A Study of Reparations for Descendants of Enslaved Africans in the U.S.” This five-part study series curates stimulating articles and videos by contemporary thinkers and guides discussion about moral values and racism within various historical contexts. The version linked here was last updated in 2024.
- For more Jewish educational resources, programs, and commissioned artwork on reparations, check out Reconstructing Judaism’s Reparations page.
“From Tzedaka to Restorative Finance” is a Reconstructionist curriculum on economic inequality, created in 2016-17 by Rabbi Ariana Katz. It is structured as four 90-minute learning sessions for adult learners in a congregational setting. Each class can be extended with more discussion and reading or shortened by condensing the reading as indicated in the class plans.
Reconstructing Judaism’s Tikkun Olam Commission wrote this 25-page White Paper on economic inequality in 2014 as a way to educate the movement about the U.S.A.’s growing wealth and income gap, its practical and ethical implications for real people, and Reconstructionist ways to think about and act upon our Jewish obligations to address the disparity.
