Coming Soon: The Jewish Dialogue Group’s
Guidebook for Deliberation about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
In late 2008, the Jewish Dialogue Group plans to publish a guidebook for deliberation about the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
We need your help to make this happen!
We are seeking volunteer researchers and editors to help create the materials. We are also seeking endorsements and advice from organizations that are interested to using or publicizing the guide. Click here to learn how you can help.
Jewish individuals and groups around the United States will use the guide to conduct deliberation workshops — structured conversations that offer people a systematic way to explore the choices they face when considering how to respond to a controversial problem.
The guidebook will describe four alternative responses to the question, "How can Jews in the U.S. respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" Each response will include a detailed set of actions that Jews in the U.S. can take, along with an explanation of the hopes for the future, interpretation of history, analysis of current events, ethical reasoning, judgments about which sources of information are trustworthy, and values that motivate that approach. The four responses will reflect a full range of ideas and concerns within Jewish communities. They will also represent widely divergent political perspectives.
Participants in deliberation programs will examine each of the four approaches described in the guidebook, explore their reactions, discuss the questions that each approach raises for them, and begin to figure out for themselves what actions to take and/or how they can study the issue in a way that helps them to reach clarity. Some deliberation programs will be one-time events, while others will involve multiple meetings over a period of weeks or months.
Ideally, participants will engage in multiple-session programs that involve both structured dialogue sessions as well as deliberation workshops. The deliberation guide will supplement the guidebook for facilitating dialogue that the Jewish Dialogue Group and the Public Conversations Project published in 2006.
In addition to publishing a printed deliberation guidebook, we plan to create a web-based companion guide. The website will allow users to deepen their learning by following hypertext links that lead them to articles, blogs, maps, and a variety of websites that provide more information about the topics that the guidebook addresses.
For more information, contact us at 215-266-1218 or info@jewishdialogue.org.
