You’ll see two important new books in this catalog with compasses on the cover—The History of the Jewish People and The Explorer’s Bible. It wasn’t planned that way, but it isn’t a coincidence either. It reflects our insistence that our books not only teach content knowledge and critical thinking, but that they also help teachers, students, and families to navigate the world of Jewish thought and tradition—to probe and reflect on the meaning of what they’re studying, and the impact it can have on their lives and identities. This thinking permeates our whole approach to the development of educational materials for your classroom.

We create materials that speak to the lives people actually live. Lives that include computers but not always nuclear families. Lives that include students who learn at different paces and thrive on different modalities. Secular lives with unprecedented demands on students’ time that require us to help them understand that they are Jews every day, not just at certain times of the day or week or month, and that it is a Jewish thing, and a good thing, to integrate their secular and Jewish lives.

We create visually compelling materials for a generation that is visually more sophisticated than ever. Just take a look in this catalog at our new Bible booklets called Manga Midrash and you’ll see what I mean. We provide diverse curricular approaches, because, in order to find their way to meaningful Jewish identities, students must explore Judaism in diverse ways. We work in a variety of media and a variety of styles to capture students’ attention and to keep them engaged. We build in flexibility, reinforcement, assessment, and choices for the educator.

Every day we are reminded of the importance of providing you with a wide array of choices. We know you need customized solutions to answer the specific educational needs of your school, your students, your parents. And we give you those choices. You have the choice of prayer Hebrew, or modern Hebrew, or prayerbook Hebrew with a taste of modern language. You have access to appropriate holiday materials—from kindergarten to high school. You can teach history as early as children can absorb the concepts, and Bible from kindergarten up, dealing with ideas and values of increasing complexity as the children become older and can absorb more sophisticated material.

And once in a while we bring you something like Hebrew playing cards, which we also introduced this year and are described in this catalog. Because, while they navigate their way through the Jewish tradition, students (and educators, too) should also have fun.

Sincerely,   David E. Behrman