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Rabbi Shmuel Hain
Authored Work
Podcast Episodes
- Lifnai V’Lifnim/Vaad with Rabbanit Lisa Schlaff & Ms. Shira Schiowitz
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In this episode of the Grand Conversation, Rabbi Shmuel Hain discusses SAR High School’s Vaad program with Rabbanit Lisa Schlaff and Ms. Shira Schiowitz. Vaad enhances the spiritual growth and meaning making of our faculty and students by devoting one period a week to their inner world. Listen to find out how SAR HS teachers and students develop the skills and dispositions to support one another in their religious and emotional journeys. SAR High School’s Vaad program was developed in partnership with Lifnai V’lifnim, an organization dedicated to deepening connections and transforming relationships with oneself, with others, with community and with Torah and God.
- Election Season at SAR High School – A conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Kroll, Principal and Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz, Associate Principal
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“On this special episode of the Grand Conversation, Rabbi Shmuel Hain hosts a discussion with Rabbi Jonathan Kroll and Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the upcoming presidential election. In this polarized moment, how has SAR High School tried to foster an environment where all members of our community, staff and students, can engage in political discussion with civility and respect?
Transcript Notes: Election Education: A Presidential election provides an opportunity for our students to explore important issues that affect the future of our country. While the political theater is often full of divisiveness we believe that our students can engage issues civilly and with deep respect for each other. A committee of staff members is coordinating educational programming for our students over the course of the next few months. During in-service we shared this draft of an affirmative set of principles that guide the way we as a community approach the election.”
- American Jews and Higher Education: Past is Prologue
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“American Jews and Higher Education:
This series will explore the experience of American Jews in higher education, and consider some of the challenges raised in recent years by shifting campus culture and changes in law and policies around admissions, discrimination, and free speech on campus. As a school committed to the “”grand conversation between Torah and the world””, the majority of whose graduates continue on to secular college, how are we thinking about some of these issues, and what work do we need to do to prepare our graduates to engage them?Past is Prologue
In this episode, Rabbi Shmuel Hain interviews Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the history of Jews’ experiences on American college campuses, from the arrival of waves of Eastern European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, through decades of exclusions and quotas through greater acceptance on campuses after World War II. How was higher education once seen as an essential component of American Jews’ “”making it””? And how has shifting campus culture, and shifting cultural and educational norms, in the last part of the 20th and early 21st century, affected that acceptance, and Jewish students’ comfort on campuses? “ - Israel @75: Israel Education at SAR HS
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This episode of the Grand Conversation Podcast, Israel @ 75, is devoted to a wide-ranging discussion of Israel education at SAR HS, featuring: Rabbi Tully Harcsztark, Principal of SAR HS and Dean Of Machon Siach; Ms. Rebecca Wolf, Coordinator of Israel Education and History faculty at SAR HS; and Mr. Yossi Ben-Harush, an Israeli educator who has been at SAR HS for the past two years teaching gemara, ivrit and Modern Israel. Our guests discuss several important questions about Israel Education at SAR HS, including: How has our approach to teaching Modern Israel evolved over the years? How do we navigate critical discussions of Israel current events in our history classrooms? How do we educate our students to participate in difficult discussions about Israel as insiders? What role does advocacy play in Israel education?
- Gemara Education: The High School Classroom and Beyond
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In this episode of the Grand Conversation Podcast, Rabbanit Schlaff joins Rabbi Shmuel Hain to discuss the goals of high school gemara education, recent trends in gemara education in post high school yeshivot and midrashot, and how teaching Torah Shebe’al Peh at SAR High School has changed since the school’s founding twenty years ago.
- Making Sense of Gemara in the High School Classroom
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This issue of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION features a conversation between Rabbi Harcsztark and Talmud professor Dr. Jeffrey Rubenstein about teaching gemara to high school students. This podcast offer an inside look at the important work of the Machon Siach Gemara Faculty Beit Midrash.
- Spirituality and the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva Part II
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This issue of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION is the second in our series on Spirituality and the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva High School. How can we help students create and deepen their inner spiritual lives? How can we utilize research on spiritual development in adolescents to encourage Jewish practice that is imbued with meaning?
- Between School & Home: What Covid-19 Taught Us About Policy
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This edition of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION reflects on the feedback of a small focus group of teachers, parents and alumni organized by Dr. Tammy Jacobowitz and Ms. Shira Schiowitz. In response to the disruption caused by Covid-19, they wanted to think more deeply about the intersections between school, home and community and wondered what they could learn from this unusual moment in history about areas of potential alignment and tension between the values of school and home.
- Israel Education: Teaching The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
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This edition of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION shares some of the important work of Machon Siach on the subject of Israel Education: Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Teaching about this conflict presents a unique challenge for yeshiva high school educators: How to simultaneously instill within students a strong connection to Israel and pride in the Zionist enterprise whiley laying bare the complex historical realities of Israel’s past and present? At its inception Machon Siach established a research cohort comprised of SAR High School administration and faculty and outside experts to explore this question in-depth. More recently, Machon Siach has partnered with the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace on a program for yeshiva high school principals and educators to engage with each other and with experts to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and share best practices for teaching.
- Theological Perspectives: Homosexuality in Contemporary Orthodox Thought
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This edition of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION examines the question of Orthodoxy and Homosexuality from a theological perspective. While much discussion has been devoted to policy questions about inclusion in the Orthodox community, less attention has been paid to the deeper theological questions raised by the remarkable shifts in American society on gay marriage and related issues.
Rabbi Nati Helfgot surveys the range of theological perspectives on this issue in an important research paper and in a podcast with Rabbi Shmuel Hain.
- Israel Education at SAR: Teaching of Israeli History at a Modern Orthodox Day School
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This edition of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION focuses on the critical work of our Israel Education faculty research group. How do we foster strong identification with Medinat Yisrael while simultaneously teaching history critically and comprehensively? Ms. Adina Shoulson, SAR High School History Department Chair, and Dr. Laura Shaw Frank, AJC Director of Contemporary Jewish Life and former Director of Israel Guidance at SAR High School, explore this question from a number of perspectives.
- Educational Deliberations: On Teaching the Concept of Shevut
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Machon Siach at SAR High School’s Gemara Education Cohort bridges together the theory and practice of teaching Torah Sheb’al Peh in a Modern Orthodox Yeshiva High School. In this second edition of INSIDE THE CONVERSATION examines the impact of our unique milieu on the way we teach challenging topics like the rabbinic prohibitions of Shabbat. Rabbi Tully Harcsztark‘s insightful paper explores the different methodologies to be employed in order to have these prohibitions “make sense” to teachers and students. The paper presents a model for how to learn, teach and discuss Torah in-depth in our schools and communities.
