The American Jewish Experience center

Small and larger group workshop experiences dealing with personal growth, Jewish creativity, in-service training for Jewish professionals, and non-profit strategies and management for Jewish organizations.

The American Jewish Experience Center is based on establishing strategies and techniques that are based on the best processes and techniques of experiential education and training programs, museum programs that create experience-based exhibits, and even amusement parks that evoke various experiences.

From a Jewish historical perspective, the center is guided by the teachings of Ellis Rivkin (1919-2010), professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College. Rivkin lays out the goal of programs that foster Jewish identity: an individual who “recognizes that Judaism has been the manifold expression of human beings struggling and wrestling with their human problems, and he therefore can enter into the thoughts and feelings of each historical moment and come forth enriched.”

Further, Rivkin developed the proposal that: one needs to feel free to explore Jewish history as data for decision making, not as already arrived at decisions.    One must be made to feel trusting, so that one “does not fear that he will be stripped of his emotions if he becomes Maimonides and re-experiences his Judaism: he is not concerned less he abandon rational thinking because he temporarily re-feels the mystic fervor of Isaac Luria.   He can be both the Vilna Gaon poring over the folios of the Talmud and the Ba’al Shem Tob who communed with all that is. He can do all this because he has grasped the fact that Judaism is the historical rendition of man’s groping with life and hence it has been as manifold, contradictory, and conflicting as that groping itself.”