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March 2026

Pedagogy of Hiddush

Avidan Halivni
Associate Director
Jewish Learning Collaborative
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To practice Hiddush is to extract new meaning from ancient sources and mark one’s own place in the ongoing collective conversation.

Hiddush is a pedagogy of voice and renewal: the exercise of extracting new meaning and insight from ancient sources and, by doing so, marking one’s own place in the ongoing collective conversation of the Jewish people. It is this framework that serves as the foundation for Jewish peoplehood — not just in theory, but in practice, when substantiated in the form of the creation of one’s own hiddush.

Avidan Halivni is the associate director of Moishe House’s Jewish Learning Collaborative. He served as a Ramah Service Corps Fellow in Berlin for two years in a Hebrew-German bilingual school and on the Jewish Education team at Hillel Deutschland. Avidan was also the founding program manager of Solu, a Jewish service-learning initiative in the Chicago area. Avidan has studied at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa and Yeshivat Hadar, and was a Fellow with the Nachshon Project. He graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2019 and holds an MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the History of Judaism.
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