As we become increasingly unable to see each other as connected through the paradigms of contemporary conflict, this pedagogy uses one of the most Jewish of values—situating our present in the past and using our history as a source of wisdom and identity—to support modern conceptions of peoplehood. We are not people who are acting out value conflicts that are completely divorced from our ancestors of 2000 years previously; we are not newly so ideologically split that the fault lines have become visible from space. Through embodying these Jews of the past, in their periods of greatest division, we can simultaneously learn our history and force consideration of different ideological viewpoints.
March 2026
The Practice of Embodiment of Jewish Historical Crises
To embody Jews of the past is to use our history as a source of wisdom and identity to navigate the ideological split of the present.
Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver is a Jewish educator and historian, whose focus is on improving pedagogies and curricula of the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She works across a variety of educational milieus in Canada. She has a BA from Queen's University, a double MA from Brandeis University and a PhD from the University of Toronto. She is writing a book on Jewish history through food, which she works on in between projects, reading, travelling, and feeding her husband and three children.
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