Jewish Teachings in the Classroom

Stand for Israel  |  October 11, 2021

Those of us who Stand for Israel know the importance of educating and caring for the next generations of the Jewish state’s people. This very focus is shared by the Israeli-American economist Joshua Angrist – this week’s Israeli You Should Know – who, The Times of Israel reports, just won the Nobel Prize for his work bringing the ancient Talmudic teachings of Maimonides into the classroom in Israel:

Joshua Angrist, part of a trio that won the economics Nobel Prize on Monday, has used, in much of his research on natural experiments, the Israeli education system’s reliance on a theory by Maimonides…

Angrist said that the research was initially born of the fact that he was living in Israel at the time.

“One thing I learned is that empiricists should work on stuff that’s nearby,” he said. “There’s a temptation to just mimic whatever the Americans and British are doing. I think a better strategy is to say, ‘Well, what’s special and interesting about where I am?’”

“It turned out that the Israeli school system had a lot of interesting things going on. One was that they had a rule about class size that can actually be dated back to the Talmud,” Angrist said, explaining that Maimonides had determined that the size of a group of students must be capped…