Diversity: Chinuch’s Majesty
June 26, 2025
Seeing the Child: The Imperative of Diversity in Jewish Education
June 26, 2025
by Rona Milch Novick, PhD
Morah Jacobs, who leads davening for the third and fourth graders, complains to you that Esti insists on using a Sephardi siddur and does not follow the class davening.
Moshe, the eldest son of ba’al teshuvah parents, struggles in Rabbi David’s shiur. “He can’t keep up with the class,” the rebbi reports, “and he probably will never be able to; his family doesn’t have the background to help him.” Rabbi David says Moshe is welcome to stay in the class, but it will be unproductive.
The 10th graders are known as a very chessed-minded class. They rose to the occasion when their classmate Yossi suffered an injury and shifted their recess activities to ensure he could take part. Recently, however, they have been quite uninviting to Motty, a new student who joined the class and has weak social skills and a temper.
Imagine if Morah Jacobs not only allowed Esti to daven with a Sephardi siddur but had her share it and teach classmates about her traditions. Consider the potential risk in limiting Moshe’s participation in shiur versus the reward of not only finding a way for him to succeed academically but also feeling proud of his family and their journey. What incredible, teachable moments Motty’s social challenges would provide for his classmates and teachers.
Inclusion across cultures, backgrounds, learning types and levels, varied abilities, and personalities is critical for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it is a Torah mandate. If we do not teach it and live it in our schools, we cannot expect our students to become full b’nei and bnot Torah.
Beyond this, one of the core missions of Jewish education is solidifying Jewish identity for the individual and supporting continuity for the Jewish community. It is crucial to ensure that every student feels comfortable and proud of their Jewish identity. Faranak Margolese, in her 2005 book Off the Derech, argues that “most formerly observant Jews today seem to have left, not because the outside world pulled them in, but, rather, because the observant one pushed them out.” Validating this view, the Pew study found that 7% of American Jews are not attending synagogue because they “don’t feel welcome” and another 4% respond, “people treat me like I don’t really belong.”
Eytan Saenger, a Binghamton University student and podcaster on Jewish communal issues, in his blog in the Times of Israel quotes Daniel Lubetsky, founder of the Kind snack company: “People confuse kindness with being nice. Now, you can be nice and be passive, but if you’re kind, it requires an enormous amount of strength.” Saenger explains: “Nice would be saying yes if someone asks if they can join you; being kind is to reach out first and seek out those who may not even feel comfortable asking. A community of mostly nice people will likely survive, but a community of mostly kind people has the ability for everyone to thrive.”
While none of the opening vignettes demonstrate outright rejection or cruelty, they suggest subtle attitudes that can impede inclusion and, at best, a limited willingness to tolerate students who present with a difference. Tolerating differences will not be sufficient if we wish to avoid the risk of alienation that exclusion or half-hearted inclusion incurs. We tolerate a bum knee. We tolerate uncomfortable heat or cold. How healthy will our students’ Jewish identity be if their school experience consists of being merely tolerated? If we want our students to grow, flourish, and feel amazing about themselves and their Jewishness, we need to go beyond tolerance and celebrate difference.
Jewish educators, rebbeim and morot have numerous opportunities to communicate their appreciation and celebration of all students, including those who are different. Whether rebbeim and morot prioritize this as central to their mission and how they live it in their curricula and classrooms is significantly influenced by school leadership. School leadership has an additional influence on attitudes and actions that go beyond tolerance in their broad role in directing what happens in the total school environment, beyond what happens within classrooms. The physical space, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, communication, and policies, all the purview of leadership, can send powerful messages of inclusion. The following paragraphs offer specific suggestions for school leadership to create a culture that celebrates difference.
Physical Plant – Universal Design to Benefit All
Rick Lavoie, a well-known educator, tells the story of a school in the Northeast digging out after several snow days. The school janitor busily shovels and scrapes the front stairs to allow for safe entry for the students. At the side, a student in a wheelchair called politely to the janitor, “When will you clear the ramp?” Tired and overwhelmed, the janitor answered, “I have to get these steps cleared so that all the children can get into the school. You will have to wait until I take care of all of them.” The boy in the wheelchair answered with wisdom and innocence. “But if you clear the ramp, we can all go in.”
This is the epitome of the Universal Design movement – creating spaces that will adapt to meet the unique needs of some and benefit all. Ramps and wider doorways may be expensive, but government and societal mandates have made them acceptable. More challenging is to consider how to create welcoming spaces that are accessible to those with less obvious or more challenging differences. Creating multiple spaces for tefillot to accommodate different traditions is one example and may require greater creativity and flexibility than constructing a ramp.
Critical for school leaders to consider is how their school setting looks and is experienced by different individuals. A thought exercise I highly recommend is to take a virtual tour of your building. Close your eyes and think of what you will see on arrival and as you walk through the halls. What will you observe at recess, in the lunchroom, and in classrooms? Repeat the exercise, but assume the persona of a particular student, family, teacher, staff member, or group. Imagine you are an academically challenged student, a gifted artist, a recent immigrant, or an Israeli shaliach. Do the bulletin boards exclusively celebrate academic excellence? Is a particular culture prominent to the exclusion of others? Following a series of such virtual tours, leaders can consider which changes would contribute to a more inclusive feel.
Debunking the Fairness Myth
At some point in teachers’ or school leaders’ journeys towards celebrating difference, someone—a student, family, or colleague—will raise the fairness issue. How is it fair that the majority of students have to accommodate the one or two who are different? Why are struggling students allowed to complete easier work or different assignments while more capable and accomplished students are required to work harder?
School leaders need to debunk this fairness myth, perhaps with an idea alternately attributed to Plato, Aristotle, or Thomas Jefferson: that the greatest inequality is to treat different people precisely the same. How absurd would it be to insist that all students wear the same size shoe or that 2nd and 5th graders learn the same material? That is neither fair nor equitable. Fairness comes not from identical treatment but from treating each person in the way they deserve or need. The Jewish educational precept, chanoch l’naar al pi darcho, states clearly that every student is not identical, and our approach to students must, by definition, vary and meet their unique needs.
Related to the fairness myth is the notion that we should erase, ignore, or hide differences so as not to embarrass students. This is both ineffective and impossible. Ask any class of students at any grade level K-12 who is the best speller in the class, the best reader, the fastest runner, or the most talented artist. Students know that they have differing abilities. By not discussing them, we contribute to students’ feelings that such differences are embarrassing and best hidden. (One second-grade teacher’s masterful way to address this issue is offered below.)
Debunking the fairness myth and providing each student with what they need does not mean that everyone wins the trophy in all instances. We can create schools that welcome and celebrate difference and simultaneously recognize and reward excellence. By broadening the areas where excellence is valued, all students see their potential to reach the finish line in their area of strength.
Empowering Teachers to Celebrate Difference
Teachers have myriad opportunities to celebrate difference, but they may need the empowerment of leadership to do so. If teachers feel that school leadership prioritizes the completion of learning units more than anything else, then they will feel pressured to invest in the content of their teaching, perhaps at the expense of the process of what is occurring in their classroom. Creating welcoming environments for all takes time and energy, and teachers benefit from encouragement and support in doing so. School leaders can be a fresh set of eyes during routine classroom observations. They can notice teachers who routinely and almost exclusively call on those students who excel, or who preference one gender over another, and those who react with delight rather than dismay when cultural, learning, and personal differences emerge in the classroom.
Leaders can also empower teachers by brainstorming and sharing approaches that others have successfully used. I had the opportunity to observe the classroom of a second-grade teacher who was skilled at celebrating diversity. Every year, she posted a large graphic of a brain on a prominent classroom bulletin board, under the heading “We have all kinds of brains in room 201.” After the first spelling quiz, she held up the papers of three students who did very well. She explained that Shira, Devorah, and Miriam have brains that are particularly good at spelling and pinned their names on the bulletin board brain in the area of the visual cortex. “As we learn together this year”, she explained, “we will learn about all the kinds of brains we have in room 201. None of us have brains that are good at everything, but we all have brains that are good at some things. Each time we find what our brain is good at, we will put a pin in the map.” By the end of the year, not only had students learned about their personal strengths, but they would also routinely “nominate” a classmate to receive a pin on the class brain for their creativity, writing skill, athletic ability, or more.
Communications: The Language of Inclusion and Celebration of Difference
School leaders and teachers, in their communications with students and families, can use the language of inclusion or, often unwittingly, signal their biases or limited awareness of those who are different. I altered my practice of addressing notes to parents or using the term “parents” in my writing. To ensure families headed by grandparents, foster parents, or others feel included, I use “family” instead. Similarly, I have heard from families how alienating and sometimes insulting communications can be that ignore their reality. A ba’al teshuvah family whose children were asked to have their grandparents sign that they collaboratively read the students’ Haggadah shared how this further highlighted their isolation, with no extended family to share their holiday. Much as the virtual tour exercise described above, when completed through the view of varied constituents, school leaders can pre-read their communication with an eye towards how they will be read by all types of teachers and family members.
Actual Celebrations: Opportunities to Showcase Difference
The typical school calendar includes multiple celebratory events, such as siddur plays, graduations, holiday events, fairs to display student work, etc. Teachers and school leaders can use these events to showcase and celebrate differences. Holiday celebrations offer an opportunity to learn the traditions of different families and cultural groups rather than limit the learning to what the majority do. Celebrations of student work can be differentiated to allow multiple types of accomplishment to be shared, sending a powerful message that everyone’s contributions have value.
Celebrations can also be a time of vulnerability, stress, and isolation for diverse students and families. Yom Ha’atzmaut may be experienced differently by Israeli families in the community. Family-child learning events may be intimidating to those with limited backgrounds. One school leader addressed the diversity of his middle school population by offering families a pre-bar/bat mitzvah learning program. The initiative allowed those unfamiliar with the liturgy or unable to support their child’s learning to develop skills and content knowledge that allowed them to participate fully in the celebration.
Conclusion: Kol Yisrael Areivim
Our Jewish day schools are a powerful vehicle for all kinds of learning. We boost that power when we partner the classroom curriculum with a school culture and lived experience of Torah values. When our schools become places that celebrate diversity, the diverse learners, the culturally different, and any student who does not fit the norm will benefit. I believe the benefits for the “normative” students are just as powerful and perhaps even more important. As adults, professional educators and educational leaders model inclusion and celebration, we become living exemplars of kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh. We demonstrate to our students what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called “unity without uniformity”: “We are not only a religious community with all the divisions that exist within us on religious matters. We’re also a people, or to put it more simply, a single extended family. And we are joined by bonds of responsibility, kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh.” This attitude is the greatest gift we can offer to all our students, as we do more than tolerate difference and we celebrate both our non-uniformity and our welcoming unity.
Rona Novick, PhD, is the Dean Emerita of the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University and held the Raine and Stanley Silverstein Chair in Professional Ethics and Values. She serves as the Co-Educational Director of the Hidden Sparks program, which provides consultation and professional development to day schools and Yeshivas. Her children’s books, Mommy, Can You Stop the Rain, and Daddy, Can You Make Me Tall, are published by Behrmann House and Apples and Honey Press. Dr. Novick divides her time between homes in Jerusalem and the US and is available for leadership coaching, professional development, consultation, and serving as a scholar in residence. She can be reached at rona.novick@yu.edu.