Activating Prior Knowledge in Biblical Hebrew Comprehension: How Day School Students Understand Biblical Hebrew

Using an original data set of task-based interviews, this paper presents findings on how Jewish day school students make sense of Biblical Hebrew verses in Biblical Hebrew. This paper pushes back against the convention in Jewish communal discourse to evaluate and label knowledge, shifting the focus instead to understanding how knowledge is activated. In doing so it joins a small but growing body of research in Jewish education that looks at language and learning identities from an asset-based perspective instead of the traditional deficit perspective.