Abstract:

The Master's degree program in Jewish Studies at Ono Academic College is a framework in which students are invited to participate in redefining the boundaries and areas of the discipline itself. The spirit in which the program was established and in which it operates over the past eight years, is a multicultural spirit that sees its main task as an expansive and inviting definition of what comes under the broad heading "Judaism". The program's students are encouraged to manifest the heritage from which they came, bring stories, customs, legacies and practices and examine them in light of the research tools they receive in the various courses.
The highlight of this program is the "Narrative Seminar" held at its' penuckle. In this framework, the students of the program are invited to formulate a personal narrative, their own original identity story, describing a whole or a detail of their Israeli and Jewish identity. During this seminar, the students of the program receive observation and analysis tools, research, anthropological, sociological, literary and qualitative language. The students apply the tools they acquired as part of the program for the purpose of analyzing the stories they wrote, extracting insights from these stories, and linking them to research moves that appear in the relevant professional literature.
During the academic year 2022-2023, after several years in development and research, seven parallel seminars of this kind were taught within the department. They were led by seven different lecturers, themselves graduates of an internal preparatory seminar. Originally all lecturers are researchers from different disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences.
In this paper, we would like to present the framework of the seminar, its course, a demonstration regarding processes and insights that developed within it among the students and the teachers of the seminar, talk about the obstacles and pushback we encountered. We will emphasis its' importance as a model of teaching and discourse, beyond the boundaries of the seminar and the specific class. We will present some elements of variation between the lecturers and the way the seminar is delivered, and we will focus on the common core, which is the nucleus of the identity of the entire program.

Keywords:

Self-narrative, Jewish studies, graduate students, discourse, interpretation, analysis, identity.