MyBatMitzvahStory and Living the Legacy

We have recently launched a new site called MyBatMitzvahStory.org which is part of the Jewish Women’s Archive education program. The site targets girls who are of bat mitzvah age (11-13) and helps them explore and express their emerging identities as Jewish women. We are particularly excited about the interactive features of the site, such as quizzes that help related girls to other “Cool Jewish Women,” a journal to record their thoughts and feelings, and sections for describing their personal heroes and imagining what their future life as a Jewish woman will be. The site also includes a presentation tool which allows users to create slideshows using media either provided by JWA, available on YouTube, or uploaded by the user herself. MyBatMitzvahStory is a way to expand JWA’s audience to a new age group and provides an avenue for these girls to connect to the Jewish community, their heritage, and the women they are becoming. It also is a step towards thinking of our website not as solely content to be delivered to the user, but a way for the user to deliver and create her own content and story.

In conjunction with MyBatMitzvahStory, we would also like to demonstrate a section of jwa.org called “Living the Legacy” (http://jwa.org/livingthelegacy), which is targeted towards Jewish Educators. It is a new online curriculum that uses primary sources to explore the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights and Labor Movements. Educators working in both formal and informal settings can use the materials in their entirety or choose individual lessons to teach.

Living the Legacy pushes the envelope in terms of providing teachers with an intuitive set of tools to explore, edit, and build lesson plans incorporating some, or all, of the JWA-provided materials, while also including the teacher’s own materials. The goal was to create a media-rich website with a wealth of primary sources from the archive that works with the teacher, while also suggesting a variety of ways to approach each section, rather than force the teacher to use our materials our way, and rather than limit the teacher to materials from our site only.

Like “MyBatMitzvahStory.org,” the “Living the Legacy” curriculum emphasizes providing core tools and primary resources without limiting teachers or students to what happens to be available from our site only. It is our first step into a broader semantic web.

We are very excited about both of these new programs at JWA, and believe they are a step forward for JWA, Jewish education, and online archives in general.