Silver Bullet Versus Ecosystem: Unraveling the Impact of Jewish Educational Interventions on Jewish Identity
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Evaluative research in Jewish education often adopts a “silver bullet” approach, attributing identity outcomes to single programs or interventions. This article advances an ecosystem framework that situates Jewish schooling, family upbringing, and peer networks within their wider communal and societal contexts. Drawing on hierarchical regression analyses of large-scale survey data (n = 21,260) from four Jewish diaspora communities, we find that the impact of Jewish education depends on its interaction with family background, social capital, and national setting. Jewish identity thus emerges as a cumulative and relational process rather than the product of discrete experiences. These findings underscore the limitations of single-country studies, which often generalize about Jewish identity formation without considering the structural and contextual differences that shape communal life in different national settings. The findings also extend sociological theories of social capital, cultural capital, and the life course, offering new insight into how educational, familial, and communal forces together sustain Jewish identity in diaspora.
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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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50
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46
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Silver Bullet Versus Ecosystem: Unraveling the Impact of Jewish Educational Interventions on Jewish Identity. 2026: 46. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1007/s12397-026-09746-6
